Myths and Metawhores

Are you there God?
It’s me, Magdelena.

Thank you for calling God’s answering service. Prayers may be recorded for training and legal purposes. We are currenty experiencing a high demand on our service but please hold and an angel will answer as soon as they become available. Your prayer is in a queue……

***

For all it’s religious connotations, it has always amused me that the term ‘faithful’ is usually applied to lovers and/or spouses. I suppose on a gradation of intimacy, our partner is or should be our most trusted friend, our confidante, our strong shoulder of support and warm embrace. We expect a tremendous amount from those around us and sometimes, frankly our expectations are unrealistic. I think by extension we expect too much from our conceptions of the sacred. Faith becomes a passive gesture, a given, not something we work on, are challenged by, struggle with and finally surrender to.

There’s a peculiar misconception surrounding surrender, in both its spiritual and sexual contexts (although I think this division arbitrary; in my mind they are sacred, one and the same). Surrender is viewed as a passive, last ditch, feeble collapse to the will and whim of another. It’s not this at all, in truth it’s a very active, questioning and demanding journey characterised as much by dark nights as ecstatic highs, but mostly it occupies a finely balanced middle ground.

Faith is a rare and beautiful thing.
I have faith.
I know there is more, and beyond this I see how faith aligns us to qualities that expand and elevate the human experience.

Recent events have given me cause for self reflection. I think this natural for having invested so much time in this space and these writings, sensing their loss brought issues into sharp focus. I reached the point where I was prepared to let it all go, by this I mean in my heart I stopped fighting and stopped hurting. Yes, I was melancholic for a time but that dark energy has a gentle depth and within those inky folds I reconnected to humility, kindness and compassion.

I think it is literally virtually impossible to spend hours online and come away feeling good. In a very real sense computers strangle the life from us, and to quote Dr. Ali

“Computers will become a noose around the neck of human kind - literally”.

Allow me to quote from his ‘Ultimate Back Book’:

The damage it causes to the neck and the complications that arise out of that are unbelievable…..Staring at a screen in a fixed position contradicts the very principle of the existance of the neck. Nature has given the neck the extraordinary function to move in all directions and that is why it is structured differently from the rest of the body. The neck is meant to move and not be fixed.”

People are meant to move and not be fixed but I think every one of us can observe how cold, closed down and quite simply inept our people are becoming due to their reliance on technology. It isn’t flexible enough and its remote nature means we never see/hear/feel the consequences of our actions. Put your hand up if you’ve had a bad experience with a call centre or online customer care division this week. It’s become a fact of modern life and more than I hate the cost cutting principles it’s based upon, I am seriously vexed by the piss poor excuses these drones offer. ‘I’m only doing my job’ is an appauling defence not the least because of the rank incompetancy displayed. Tick box mentality meets the cold heart of technology: welcome to hell.

Dr. Ali is something of an advocate of doing the opposite. I met him once and asked what belly dancers should do for the low back ache that can accompany early or vigourous training. He advised massaging the pelvis. It’s a principle he carries into many healing areas and so I thought it interesting to apply this to neck problems. On the other side, the soft side we have the throat. An area of acute vulnerabilty and tenderness, the place where our lifeblood pulses.

In mystical terms it is the fifth chakra and stored within this wheel is the energy of Will, quite literally willpower. The Sacrament of Confession is allied with this chakra and when plotted on the Tree of Life, it is aligned with the Sefirot of Gevurah and Hesed representing the qualities of judgement and mercy. Please don’t labour over these mystical aspects because the interesting thing is that the fifth chakra is the bridge between the fourth and sixth chakras, namely the heart and the mind. Too often these two are seperate and isolated yet they are united by the power of will.

The question is, where do we invest our will power?
When we are not strong enough to think wisely and act with love, our will is susceptible to hijacking and we will invest it foolishly. There are so many addictions yet perhaps one of the most intriguing is the contemporary addiction to cyberlife. It seduces us, sucks us in and before we know it hours have slipped by. It’s quite a terrifying thought but dare you even admit how much time you spend online? I’m not pointing fingers, I’m really not the smart arse in the room because I’m writing this with a neck problem. But the antidote is in the venom and pain is true and our finest teacher. For me the lesson is to spend less time sitting before the screen and spend more time moving, living and loving.

I’m not by any means suggesting that the community we have created and spend time in is in any way wrong, not at all. I am simply saying that we should treat time as the precious commodity it is and time spent online should be judicious. We should spend it wisely in the company of friends and use it for the good.

In a beautiful demonstration of this I have to say thank you to my Yakuza bitch. This site is here, hale and hearty because two blog angels heard my prayers and came to my rescue. Nina and Jeff devoted the morning on the eve of their Honeymoon to helping me. Yes, you read that right. When they could be forgiven for wanting to attend to the necessaries of packing and preparing, they devoted their time to me and to making sure all was well before they left. Kindness like that makes me catch my breath, it’s so rare. Thank you nina and Jeff for taking such good care of my baby metawhore. She’s as cute as a button now.

Warm hugs and thanks to

Vanessa for her help and sensual inspiration. Vanessa, your podcasts are orgasmically electric. Is there anything more exquisite than hearing a woman come?

Thanks also to Kochanie who held my hand and offered soothing words.
To Beau for braving the darkness to carry me out, and to all of you for your comments and mail, for your love and tender thoughts when I was decidedly down. You held my faith for me and for that I am grateful.

I’d like to especially thank N who may blush at seeing herself mentioned here but whose mail was exquisite. She reminded me that Muslims are currently celebrating Ramadan and that this is a time to connect with Divinity. It’s a time of cleansing, of purification and of connecting to the sacred self. The energy in her mail was magnificent and it inspired a soft devotion in me, a turn back to contemplation, to silence and simply being.

After reading her mail, I turned off the computer and made to leave. As I walked passed the mirror my eyes were drawn to the beads of a broken rosary looped across the top. It was a gift from the daughter of a former lover and it means a lot to me. I don’t actually know how one prays with a rosary but I’d like to.

I think whatever your faith, knowing that someone cares enough to pray for you is a blessing and a gift and unlike calls to carelines, they truly are answered. Not always in the way we expect but music, laughter and love are the backbone of the universe and God is nothing if not a cosmic joker.

(Or how I am currently justifying sluttishness.)

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet” - Niels Bohr.

Rest assured, this isn’t going to be a heavy post for I have neither the mind nor inclination, it’s more an idle Friday musing. And for fuck’s sake don’t write and point out the gaping holes in my theory UNLESS your mails are interspersed with smut. Clever word play is welcomed especially of the meta (gaping) black hole and how I’d probe you with my luminous jet variety. Anyone who uses ‘big bang’ in the subject line will be flogged to death with a coin belt. There are limits to my genorosity. These caveats aside let’s rock.

I really enjoy kicking around in my sexual umwelt. Umwelt, a term borrowed from ethnology that essentially means world-field or reality tunnel, for example snakes reside in a world of heat waves and cats in a world of contrariness (Heinlein’s Law: “No way has ever been found to out stubborn a cat.”) Metawhores live in a world of lust, a different reality to the regular world and one entirely of their own sense making. Literally sensually created as opposed to considered, codified and clarified, a soft state where neurons and networks fire in a constantly unfolding dialogue of bliss and exploration.

There’s this lovely zen philosophy that encourages one to merge with the action, to fully immerse oneself in the moment. This is extracted from a technique to promote attentiveness:

Suck something and become the sucking.

Yeah, now we’re cooking. Welcome to the world of my embodied spirituality and the sucking sutra. Let’s decipher some meaning. No trying to suck, no mulling over of techniques, no points to be scored, just the sweet surrender of sucking. The sublime joy of becoming one with the cock your lips are wrapped around, as our molecules overlap and entangle in a unification of pleasure.
That connection, the experience of unity, feeling so at home and one with another is fundamental. Hell, without some sense of unity and cohesion, we’d wander around for hours saying ‘who the fuck am I?’. It’s bad enough that the world feels so cold and lonely sometimes, without us compounding it with our existential bullshit. Given a straight choice between seperateness and angst or the great vast heart of ‘all is one’, I’ll take the latter. Not that I’m looking for God in physics you understand, more that if there is a vacuum to be filled with meaning, I’m pouring my sexual consciousness there in evanescent waves.

Whether we interpret the wave-particle theory as metaphor or truth, it’s a tender and malleable way to dissolve the boundaries between you and I. Quantum psychology is a discipline for the future, a place where regular psychology and quantum physics relate and dance, perhaps awkwardly at first but they soon find their groove. As more scientists subscribe to the holographic nature of the universe and reality, an increasing number of psychologists are doing the same. Waves represent our fluid potential, cruising gently into the body of mysticism. Particles stand for our more solid and defined personas, all that we think we are and try to convince others that we are more than.

In contemplating such expansion, I savour the fine words of Danah Zohar:

“There’s a huge moral latent in what I’m saying. If you and I overlap, if you are a possibility sleeping within me…then you and I are one in some very real sense. So I am not my brother’s keeper, I’m my brother. So my moral attitude towards you is one of treating you as I treat myself. And in the same way, the whole ethic of protecting the environment is there because the environment again is an expression of me, of my potentiality - it’s the stuff of the same substance, tissue of my being. So I would treat the environment with great reverance.”

Danah calls us ‘midwives to reality’, building bridges between potentiality and actuality.

I like this chick, I especially like how she blends aspects of ourselves with notions of fidelity. In her world, the heady experience of lust with another spins us out of routine and into another aspect of what we may be. She’s open to the erotic truth that with our lovers we are someone else. Even if just for a day we make another’s body a shrine to pleasure, it’s cool. Such encounters are compelling because they allow us to elude the rational and structured world in wild and beautiful ways.

I’m not advocating quantum consciousness as a justification for infidelity, I’m simply saying that in a different world, in the lush world of the lover, other ‘rules’ apply. Other aspects of ourselves emerge, we collapse from particle to wave. I think it’s an exquisite celebration of the diversity of all we are, of all we can be.

Perhaps within hotel rooms the ultimate model of the universe is made manageable, the torus tangible through the fractured reality of orgasm. Orgasm - the zero point. No wonder my favourite sexual toy is called a cosmic egg.

Sex sexblogs Erotica Erotic

By way of a gentle introduction I’d like to say this piece explores the assumed polarities of vanilla and dark sexuality, so it is inevitable that I embrace a metaphorical language of opposites. In doing so, I acknowledge one of the oldest ideas on the planet, the fundamental principle that the universe is the result of an interplay between primordial differences - such as good and bad, male and female, black and white, positive and negative, yin and yang. And yes, the taoist flavour is intentional because it invokes an elementary lesson in relativity. Duality rests upon mutuality - in creating one thing, we also create the other. Where we create beauty, we also create ugliness, where we create good, we also create evil, where there is self, there is other. There is a centre point, a place we can rest in union with another where such differences dissolve, where we are equal and not opposite.

A few days ago, Keziah posted her musings on how a documentary featuring Dominique Aury had provoked a new understanding for her regarding the relationship between spirituality and BDSM. I was touched that Keziah carried these thoughts into a consideration of my writings. In a comment on her site, I promised that I would elaborate on what that relationship means to me. This is in no way a full or definitive explanation, for to truly convey this demands experience. It would be my pleasure to take your hand and lead you into the inner sanctum but sadly the distance between us means that I cannot act as your fleshy priestess so instead I offer these words. I hope that this glimpse gifts you with some insight, that you may stand on the threshold of a new perspective, so that you may understand a little more.

Let me begin by expressing here my words on embodied spirituality (see Sexual Homoeopathy.)

‘I espouse an embodied spirituality, an intimate and empathic connection with life where our tender flesh makes spiritual experience passionate. Every mystical tradition in the world embraces sex, dance, art, music and food into their ritual practice with the knowledge that without such pleasures, spirituality is bland. Spirituality is made passionate and fleshy through metaphor. Through metaphor we connect with symbolic truth and are thus liberated from literal interpretations and dogma. With this freedom we can approach, love and surrender to God. Our sense fed neural pathways recruit our ability to feel, to move, to breathe through form, and at the stillpoint to know the formless. This is embodied spirituality.’

We are flesh, feeling, intellect and that elusive energy we call spirit, but could simply name life. We don’t know what it is, but we know when it’s there (life) and when it’s not (death). Indeed spirituality and religion may only be an overcomplicated way of dealing with the ultimate truth- that we will all die. If it informs us to live well, then so be it. For me, it gifts me with that sense of awe you can only get at dawn, or sunset, during an eclipse or on a night when the stars shine so bright you can almost touch venus. There is something bigger than us and given that we are all literally composed of stardust, we have access to that vastness. We’ve just forgotten and are frankly too busy to care. We have allowed our mind, our egoic consciousness to have apparent dominion over all that we are. However this is not the whole story. Practically every human alive uses only 10% of their brain/mind consciously, which leaves 90% untapped and unconscious.

Roughly 90% of your mind resides in oblivion, available only to you in dreams, creative insights, trance states (such as meditation, ‘automatic pilot’, hypnosis and subspace) and sleep. This unsettling truth reveals that we are exceptionally ignorant of ourselves, an unawareness that rests at odds with our need to explain, understand and comprehend. Throughout history, we have concocted various explanations embracing gods, supernatural forces, faeries, archetypes, the devil and more recently neurotransmitters and the nervous system. Be they metaphorical or literal, none of the explanations make an intimate knowledge easier or bring it closer. The unconscious mind is wayward and mysterious and cultural narratives born from myths and metaphors have always attempted to make sense of the confusion and mystery. In so doing they give meaning and provide comfort but they are symbolic representations of something our rational mind cannot grasp.

The unconscious is what it is. It doesn’t judge, label, define, seek understanding or clarification, it simply is. Consciousness evolved from this place (see Julian Jaynes ). The most pristine and exquisitely beautiful manifestation of unconsciousness is nature. Nature simply is. We all know well the sublime bliss of escaping the sophistication of the city for the instinctive wildness of nature; it makes sense in a way that defies explanation. It feels so right. In many ways we have evolved away from this place in (un)consciousness at our peril. Haverlock Ellis noted that societies most favourable to women are primitive, whereas highly militarised and cultured ones are hostile. Ellis observed that the masculine cultures of Greece and Rome degraded women and suppressed natural emotion. Such civilisations faltered and collapsed because of the inferior role they inflicted on woman, on nature and on natural feelings. Sound familiar?

An expansion on the quote lying beneath the Myths and Metawhores title reads -

“Don’t go away, come near. Don’t be faithless, be faithful. Find the antidote in the venom. Come to the root of the root of yourself.” Rumi.

These beautiful words are an invitation to transcend the unknown, to liberate ourselves from the gilded cages of fears and absolutes. Fear closes us down, rendering us tiny and mean and yet like a seed or a bud we can flower. The allure of dark sexuality is its open gesture to challenge taboos and boundaries, to cross lines, to explore the darkness within yourself. Fear is a curtain, a veil shrouding our fragility. As a teacher it possesses a rare integrity, bypassing your brain to speak directly to your gut. This primal, instinctive experience is the venom; it hurts and we don’t like it and yet to writhe, run or hide negates the coherance.

To cope with and then transcend fear we must learn to breathe deeply into our belly. This same principle applies in any D/s encounter and I am confident any one with submissive experiences will have some understanding of this connection. So long as we struggle and fight, it hurts. Breathing is the bridge to surrender, and once we yield we are able to look our fears directly in the eye. It is curious that fear creates courage but this is dark sexual homoeopathy and the healing power of embracing our total being. Too much emphasis is placed upon the light, on the good, the safe, the known and socially approved aspects of our character. Moral responsibility vs. desire, and the thrill of the senses.

“The eternal battle between God and the devil finds agonized expression in the struggle of her tensing limbs against the importunate arms of her illicit lover, arms which form a playful chain around her trembling loins” – Bram Dijkstra

Virtue pitted against slow and eroding dishonour. Above all we must fight the temptations of the flesh, resist surrendering to the caress. The implication, time and again, is that the devil plays with us and has no serious intent (other than for our soul, of course). It’s an insidious and manipulative discourse snaking around the apparent virtue of the ‘nice, safe’ vanilla relationship. This forces all other kinds of loving, relating and sexuality into the shadows. “Out of sight, out of mind”, labelling them nasty, horrible and degrading. Such activities are the source of moral decay and urban decline, symbolic of all things bad.

It’s only our judgement of these things as ‘wrong’ that makes them ‘wrong’. We are blindly conditioned to accept particular ways of relating, to accept them as good. So we repress our urges and they become a part of our shadow. A powerful way to understand our shadow is to examine our sexual desires and feelings, to tear apart our accepted standard and examine our hankering for forbidden fruit. This is a progressively degenerate path which takes us from the domesticated safeness of the home, out into nature and the wildness and from here, we are but a short fall from grace into the devils arms.

I grow weary of the misunderstandings that surround dark sexuality. I cannot speak for other people but for me, sexuality, dark or otherwise is about connection with another soul. I can forge and nurture that connection over a lifetime or blaze with you for one day in a hotel room. The duration in no way diminishes the intimacy and the intensity. There is a mystical quality to such soul mergings that takes us beyond who we are and what we know. I think you have to be pretty sexually unsophisticated not to realise that dark sexuality is as much about loving, cherishing and adoring your partner as vanilla sex is. There is no greater sexual pleasure than being with someone you deeply love, with whom you are sexually suited. Deep spiritual love is enriched by sexual love.

Dark sexuality takes us to and beyond our sexual limits, deep into taboos and often to the edge of our humanity, to the fleshy borders of our bodies. Sexual union (penetrative or otherwise) takes us into the heart of the other, of the lover. Indulging in our natural desires satisfies us, leaving us free from frustrations that only harm ourselves and those around us. Anton LaVey once said that “the highest plateau of human development is the awareness of the flesh”. This strikes me as some wonderful form of somatic psychology, where increased awareness expands into new ways of moving and being. From my dark explorations I have experienced an increase in sensitivity and sensuality, and also in compassion. I’ve learned that we can change reality, that we program our body with the quality of our thoughts. Naturally these questions follow: how do we access that infinite intelligence within us? How do we experience that gap? How do we connect to our shadow/unconscious with grace?

Anyone engaged in dark sexual play knows well the conversations and discussions prior to any meeting, to any scene with someone new or when trying something new. Here, the mind and emotions are fully engaged. However, once done the mind must be relinquished for it is a barrier to bliss. In the same way that it intrudes on the silence of meditation, it violates the sanctity of the body’s temple. Discussions serve to set the structures in place, they act as invisible walls. When you meet with your lover in this most private and sacred of ceremonies, you step into an intellectual decompression chamber (LaVey) consciously and by choice. In doing so, you allow your sacred and primal being expression. This is bliss, ecstasy and pleasure beyond the like you have ever known. It is in this space that a submissive may enter ‘subspace’. Like many others, I am not entirely happy with this description and prefer to think of it along the lines of other experiences I have had, namely dancing. There is state of consciousness where I am totally free, totally connected.

Lorca calls this moment El Duende; the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than ones own spirit.”The duende works over the body of the dancer just as a gust of wind hits and blows over the sand”. The Mevlein Sufi call this ‘hadrah’ or ‘the presence’, each step moving us towards a new freedom of spirit, of ecstasy.

In so many ways, defining sexuality according to whether it is BDSM or vanilla is redundant and stupid. I think we are better served by determining, or rather feeling whether there is love. And not mawkish, sentimental love – I mean love for humanity, that unconditional respect, connection and beautiful knowing where we truly honour one another. There is a powerful integrity to such relationships.

The essential way that dark sexuality differs from vanilla sex for me, is that there is much, much more communication. There is a rare and radical honesty, an uncommon courage to allow oneself to be vulnerable, to stand naked – physically, psychologically and spiritually. There is a maturity in such relationships that too often eludes the more conventional ones for the intensity demands such connections. Here pleasure and pain are exquisite dance partners to chaos and clarity.

I don’t believe enlightenment necessitates wearing white and sitting on a rock somewhere while people kiss your toe and tell you how great you are. Fuck that spiritually egoic bullshit.

Enlightenment simply means you’ve gone into yourself and rendered that 90% of unconcious mind, fully conscious. You are 100% conscious and ironically, in this state you reclaim the unconsciousness of nature - conscious unconsciousness if you will. There is no language for that transformation, there is only metaphor. It’s still so rare that we only have mythological figures as examples of what we could be. The religious and spiritual packaging doesn’t help but for now, it’s the main highway to ‘heaven’ and the ‘light’. I’m more of a saint who sins because I know that dark sexuality takes me to “the root of the root of myself”. And because it brings me pleasure, so much pleasure and so much love.

So this path demands the courage and integrity to explore yourself and to accept all that you find, all that you are without judgement. From here we can learn to let go and relax into deeper intimacy and can allow our partner(s) that same respect and space for their shadow searchings. When you are together, it‘s a beautiful magical process that will scare, challenge and test you, and it certainly carries a risk. Your life will change but that is preferable to living a lie, and to being complicit to those ideas you are sold as being true.

People who relish dark sexuality are mad, bad and dangerous to know because they fight demons, they slay illusions and they tug themselves out of their familiar psychological habitats. So please, don’t be seduced by the secular, slanted depictions. As with all things, there is infinite variation here too. Some of us are keepers of faith and, like the devil, are arriving late to God’s party.

Darkness has become less and less an aspect of our daily lives. In the past, the literal natural nocturnal energies of the night supported the presence and enhanced the mystery of the unconscious. In the half-light, the soft light, the moonlight, magic can caress our imaginations, allowing our conscious minds quiet time in which to succumb to the subtle enchantments of the unconscious. Perhaps this is why we associate candlelight with romance.

Nowadays we are seldom truly in the dark. Nor are we quiet. Noise and light, the boisterous overspill of the conscious mind, stifle our soul. Natural rhythms and the ebbs and flows they bring are inconvenient to modern life.

So we pledge allegiance to the clock, the nine to five slave god and wonder where our lives went. ‘Man created the clock, woman created the moon’ so the saying goes, but rather the misappropriation of masculine energies created a prison in which the feminine has become enmeshed, literally crucified in space and time. If you’re not invested in the past or in the future, you can play the hand you’re dealt and with a heart full of passion, you’ll dare to manifest your dreams. But our concept of time controls us as long as we believe we will one day be rewarded or vindicated. As long as we endure, we will be oppressed and controlled by our own false perceptions and our fears. Time is precise and exacting yet nature isn’t perfect, nature simply is.

When we are truly alive, we are soft like a sapling bending with the wind, as a child is supple, sensitive and responsive. What is soft and vulnerable, like cream should rise to the top, producing rare flowers. But at the top of our society are the hard ones – the institutions and the corporations, be they financial, religious or political. They squash the soft and the yielding, our artists and mystics. Society is becoming hard like a corpse calcified by frozen hearts and cold technology. Death is hard and unyielding. Our society has no flowers.

Simultaneously we deny our roots their richness. Almost 90% of our minds reside in darkness, the verdant soil of the unconscious and we fertilise it with junk. Woman next to man, the fruit on the vine, the budding phallus of springtime, everywhere softness cuddles into hardness in a natural response of yielding and support. In the dance of life, where polarities melt and merge, each energy alchemically nurtures the other revealing true unity, and in that a beauty.

True beauty hints at the majesty of mystery, rather than the commodity of the cultivated and cosmopolitan. Everything is upside down in our topsy-turvy world, where the primal energy, the feminine and the unconscious are forced underground, like flowers blooming in the sewers. This is a transgression of our primal nature.

Poets, artists, painters, dancers, singers, writers and natural mystics are our flowers. But they are choked by the hardened ambitions of the insatiable ego, the trade off of truth against the promise of fortune and glory.

Nature is the living present, the living planet, Gaia, the pagan and the primal. Our concept of time will lead us to either accept the moment, the now, nature, art and the full embodied and visceral human experience, or we will disregard the present in favour of a sterile past, dry cleaned to tell the story that suits our purpose in unholy union with the ultimate in delayed gratification – the future and the afterlife. As energy cannot by definition perish, it must transform. Your solidified persona and identity and the fleshy chariot that holds them safe will dance one last time with Death, before nature reclaims all that you are. An organic understanding of reincarnation suggests what this may truly mean: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Time denies life and time creates heaven and hell. Hell is our past, heaven is our future. Free from the manmade shackles of these self-fulfilling prophesies we see the irony of fate, the future that is history.

And in that moment of epiphany, we embrace the immediacy of darkness as a constant companion in the ever-unfolding moment that is our life.

‘Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes’

Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

Part One or The Science
(with a nice shamanic interlude)

When we fall in love, we let ourselves go completely and merge with our beloved for love liberates us from familiar boundaries. When such intimate relationships breakdown, we withdraw back into ourselves, away from the other, flinching from the hurt. No matter how ‘thick-skinned’ we may be, it’s apparent that we are not bound by our skins. Our personal boundaries expand and contract, they can be permeated by others and we in turn can extend into theirs. Our language betrays how emotions interact with our boundaries - we may be out of our minds with worry, head over heels in love, beside ourselves with rage and we let people in.

A flush of love can turn us outside in and inside out, dissolving our rigid ego and allowing us to melt into the sublime presence of the other. We feel at one and no more so than during the bliss of making love, of surrendering to wave after wave of powerful orgasm with our beloved. Our skin, our very body is not solid but rather a collection of particles and waves; in fact even the particles are waves. We are nothing but vibrating empty space, a sea of probability, of possibility.

David Bohm describes us as non-local beings, describing time as an artificial construct of past and future, when in truth maybe we reside in parallel concurrent nows. Holographic multiverses perhaps? This sea of energy is the holomovement, a pulsing ocean of intelligent energy. Bohm calls this the implicate order because it cannot be seen or measured, only inferred. P.D. Ouspensky calls this the numenon.

Behind this is the superimplicate order, which surrounds, drowns, penetrates, underlies the implicate. If I close my eyes for one moment, I hear Joseph Campbell recite The Navoho’s pollen path-

Oh, beauty before me,
beauty behind me,
beauty to the right of me,
beauty to the left of me,
beauty above me,
beauty below me,
I’m on the pollen path

The superimplicate order directs it’s unfolding into the stuff of the world, the world we perceive, the world we think is real. Bohm calls this the explicate order. For Ouspensky it was the phenomenon. The explicate order, the ‘real’ world, is 3-dimensional and so time and space are key properties of this level of reality. All manifestations within our reality (the explicate) are conscious and so are embedded within the superimplicate order. Energy is alive and conscious. It vibrates, throbs, pulses and moves with pure potentiality. Remember an essential feature of this energy is non-locality so while the universe pulses as a conscious whole, there is no space and no time. Everything, everypoint is interpenetrated by every other thing. There is no them, no us, no here, no now. Seperation is an illusion. All is one - the first spiritual law we learn. We throb in time, in bliss, as one, in resonance. Such sensitive perceptions remind me of the descriptions of God.

Part Two or the Yoga

I am a huge admirer of the work of Itzhak Bentov. He was a natural mystic and his book ‘Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness’ is in my all time top ten.

Bentov describes the body as a pendulum, explaining how these vibrations swing us between movement and rest. As the pendulum stops to change direction, it traverses a zero point where “all bets are off regarding the relationship between time and space”- Bellaruth Naparstek.

Basically this means that at the stillpoint, we have access to other dimensions. We pulse into the protointelligence, swing between implicate and explicate, from phenomenon to neumenon. Bentov believed that meditation and the like helped the body synchronize and thereby extend ‘time’ out in these alternate realities, suggesting that conscious evolution involved the natural refinement of the nervous system, drawing heart and mind (or literally brain) closer. So we think and act as a conscious being; we walk the talk. For Bentov, the key to evolution was love; not soppy romantic conditional love, but a highly conscious, aware and alive, unconditional, universal love. At this level, love is “an energy and not an emotion….therefore what we call ‘love’ is an energy or radiation that pervades the whole cosmos”. He went on to speculate that love “is possibly the basis of what we know as the phenomenom of gravitation”.

Let me bring it in tight - love expands, even eclipses boundaries most especially those of the ego. We live in a universe with no boundaries, a universe that throbs and vibrates with conscious energy, our bodies vibrate, and when this oscillation is harmonised on the cellular level we may conciously connect with the nonlocal, infinite intelligence of the universe the very energy of which is love.

**Replace the word God with whatever works for you - love, energy, cosmic consciousness, juice, Goddess, life - you get the idea.**

I made the mistake of watching the news yesterday and once again realising that the world is going to hell in a handbasket woven by fools gearing up for the rapture.

These people genuinely scare me demonstrating that vehement belief in the literal word of God seems to create huge blindspots and total hated. I thought Christ preached words of Love and er, forgiveness. But ok, maybe they are right and the Bible speaks the truth. I have a copy of the King James Version to hand, so let’s start at the beginning. Genesis- I always liked all that talk of nekkidness and snakes.

If the Bible is the literal word of God, then we have to accept the truth from Genesis that the Earth was made in five days. A point amusingly tackled by David Hawkins:

“the whole thing is ridiculous, he did it in five days or something. A day is the rotation of the earth, if the earth didn’t exist yet how you going to do it in five days? There ain’t no earth to rotate to give you five days”

So you see, if this is literal, I’m lost from the getgo. From a metaphorical perspective however, Genesis not only makes some sense but resonates with an aura of truth. What Genesis says on this symbolic level is that out of the unmanifest came the manifest. It’s a METAPHORICAL, story not literal.

Let’s define our terms:

Literal: 1. In exact accordance with or limited to the primary or explicit meaning of a word or text. 2. Word for word. 3. dull, factual, or prosaic 4. true, actual.

Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action that it does not literally denote in order to imply a resemblance, for example, he is a lion in battle.

To quote Bill Hicks: ” Turn your phazer to your own head and press stun”

I’m not questionning the existance of God (form or formless), or the miraculous nature of God, or the Love of God. I am questionning the claims made by fundamentalists that this is the exact and literal word of God.

Back to Bill:“You see the Bible may be the ‘literal’ word of God, but apparently it’s not the complete word of God”

And y’know maybe it’s me but if you’re going to base your entire life on a philosophy, well shouldn’t it be a touch more robust? And this cuts across all faiths from the formality of religion through to the feyness of the new age, I’m not just gunning for the Christians. Blind faith is no faith at all. Look at this sobering link on the nature of brainwashing. My point is we seem to have a tendency to interpret literally, something I suspect accompanies a very childish level of engagement with divinity and life. When we become more intimate with God, the symbolic breathes through us and deep understanding activates knowledge, that at this level will change our life, our world. At these deep levels, the words dissolve and the truth appears. Not everyone can or wants to handle the immense transformative power and potential of this and so they need to slow down the speed at which the message can be delivered. Reading something literally ensures that the truth will be downloaded slowly; it keeps life safe and the same. It requires no change, no trust, no wisdom. It also allows the individual to abdicate personal responsibility and remain a pack animal. Prepackaged, predigested pockets of ‘truth’ for tribal minds, ruled by fear over love.

Embracing the metaphorical level takes us deeper into the mysteries and simultaneously gifts us with a higher perspective.

In dedication to the memory of Bill, I’ll close this post with a final quote by him (emphasis is his):

“I believe that God is love, and he created us, and that we are his children. I believe his love is unconditional and that there’s nothing we could do to ever change that. I believe it is our misperception of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you’ll find in this world. I also believe forgiveness is the key to healing our perceptions and allowing us to remember God and his ever-lasting love for us….I for one am going to take what Terence McKenna refers to an ‘herioc dose’ of psylocybin ‘MAGIC’ mushrooms with my friends and head for the woods, where the word of God can be heard quite effortlessly and quite clear without the ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s”.

I’m so with you. Oh but wait, I forgot. It’s against the law to change your consciousness because then people may start to see through all this horseradish.

My tabula rasa. This feels like a first date in that I’m nervous about saying certain things that may put you off but refreshingly, I also don’t care. Paradox and contradiction are the story of my life and like all stories they require a craftsman and a teller.

Myths and Metawhores is my way of accessing, living and breathing the archetypal realm. Carl Jung emphasized that his work was only the beginning and he encouraged others to continue with his work. And so my alchemical dance begins…

These are just some musings to help me find my feet:
Stanislov Grof (Beyond the Brain) suggests that there is a deep link between the holographic processes and the way that archetypes are produced. So is it the case that when we enter a non-ordinary state of consciousness, a previously hidden domain opens, and that this domain is holographic in nature? And what are these non-ordinary states of consciousness? Can we assume that these aspects of ‘reality’, which are not available under ‘ordinary’ circumstances require a non-ordinary state of consciousness to access them. Terence McKenna (Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival) would certainly concur.

What is the nature of this holographic domain?
Could it take the form of a labyrinth as suggested by Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe), and if so, does this resonate with Stuie Wilde’s notion that the etheric world consists of tubes everywhere and endless doorways (The Sixth Sense and God’s Gladiators). Assuming that the holographic labyrinth is all around us, albeit co-existing within different dimensions, it therefore must connect us to all aspects of existence.

Holotrophic consciousness can certainly be accessed by plant medicines. It can also be entered via non-drug/plant/food means – primary among these are movement (dancing, trance dancing, love making), music (rhythm, beat), controlled breathing and bodywork. All these serve to reduce the barriers we impose between what we perceive of as ourselves and the rest of existence. It awakens us to the possibility that there may be more, so much more than where we find ourselves and who we consider ourselves to be. We are blocked and disconnected drones barely existing in a constipated culture.

Identity

To maintain a sense of identity, we have to erect barriers. There is no other way – its primary function is to discriminate between ‘you’ and ‘them’. It solidifies the persona and makes real the roles and functions of life. You are the mother, the wife, the occupation, the hobbies and the physical characteristics. More than that, you are your status, your income and possessions.
Pay attention to the way you speak. Examine both your internal dialogue and the conversations you have with people – in both circumstances you will find that you constantly justify your identity. You justify your actions. You frame everything within a context, which for you makes sense.

This process of parsing up the world and then categorising it makes it real for you. In point of fact, it makes it solid. Solidity is the defining constant of our world. If you can kick it, it’s real. Emotion and thought, although not concrete are also apparently real as demonstrated by our psychologists. But experimental findings are simply artefacts. spun into tangibility by our ability to communicate them. Statistics substantiate them and suddenly they are real.

We accept that there are different forms of consciousness – if nothing else we can accept sleep, wakefulness, dreaming, daydreaming, hypnosis and coma as states. We are all familiar with their existence if not experientially, then at least anecdotally. Again our mistake is in defining so tightly for in between and beyond these very typical states are other, more fargile dimensions of consciousness. Consciousness embraces a spectrum of states, a gentle continuum curving back into itself. Most simply, our scientists can understand these as brain waves – alpha, beta, theta and delta. Meditators and travellers into altered states will be able to describe them first hand, in very non-scientific personal detail. Poetry being the language of workers in this field.

We divide consciousness up in order to make sense of it. However synchronicity suggests that the apparent seperateness of consciousness is an illusion. An artefact. From implicate to explicate.
According to David Bohm, consciousness and the body respond to meaning. Meaning becomes a link or bridge and theories are but metaphors, a way of understanding the mystery and of bridging ‘here’ and ‘there’.

“The deeper and more emotionally charged our beliefs, the greater the changes we can make in both our bodies and in reality itself”, Talbot, I think.

Therefore, can certain rules (apparent) be suspended?
Are potential realities chosen by consciousness?
Is the universe all thought? Literally ALL thought, every single thought?
Is reality only what we think?
Is the universe essentially passive?
What parameters exist in regard to the choice?

“More than doers we are deciders” Ralph Blum tells us – so do we decide; do we think and then make real? Do we take the passive and through thought and then language (action) make it real?
Is this what Castenada means by separate realities? Are there an infinite number of possibilities endlessly turning inside and out, folding and unfolding within the implicate?

The brain constructs reality
The brain constructs dreams
The brain constructs altered states of consciousness
The brain constructs……
What is occurring at the synaptic level beyond the neuro-chemical transmission?
What is happening in that gap?

The brain constructs, initially through the 5 senses, which is then subject to the different detection cells, processed through the various physiological and psychological filters (eg. memory) and presented as reality.
Telepathy: essentially perception through the senses of other people, places etc. Thus displaying an interconnection, such as remote viewing demonstrates via information from the living holographic universe. A shared reality – a reality field? Extrasensory interconnectedness.

Have we actually created a reality and made it solid through emotional belief and invested meaning? And if so, should we dare to dream, could we create Utopia?