More Sort Of Poems

The Battlefield


you are on the battlefield


watching your comrades blowing up

losing limbs, hearing their screams

thinking, how did i get here?

still thinking about what's on the other side

of the battlefield

that there's a reason you are fighting

there is no reason

seeing another man go down

you have to believe

they died for something

but they didn't

except maybe to see

what they wouldn't see while alive

and then they see

that they didn't have to die

to see it



you are only fighting

to re-own your reality

watch out for that

when you do re-own it

you may find yourself alone

re-owning your reality means opposing

those who tried to take it from you

by imposing their version

your family

secondly

if no one else is willing or able to see

and own that reality with you

then you are going to be alone in it

as you choose reality

over the comfort of illusion

and enmeshment



The Hole


i am learning to listen more and talk less

even talking is

or can be

listening

finding whatever it is

that i need to hear

that is what i get to say

it's not about the other person

the desire to touch, somehow denied,

becomes the desire to grab

denied becomes the desire to fuck

denied becomes the desire to hurt and kill

"I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch"

if we knew how alone we were

we would crawl up into a hole

and die



The Father

it doesn't matter how down i am

i have to go to work

and no matter how down i am

to some people

it still looks like up

perhaps because honesty

is the only measure of where we are at

being honest about our insistence and indulgence

soon curtails it

if you find yourself dishonest

then own up

instead of adding to it

by covering it up

even if you have to go back and re-open

a 10 yr old case

and say, "I did it"

right now i wish i knew

it's dishonest of me to feel sorry for myself

because i know that's not true

so half my family died

so what?

that's the true of it

it happens to everyone

one way or another

we think we are especially burdened

and in that belief

we start to believe the lie

that we matter

truth is, none of us cracks easily

then knowing that it doesn't matter

if i indulge in thinking i matter

that makes it *really hard

i keep making it about others

i ought to keep it together for others

then i know that's BS

so i think, fuck it

i'll come apart

but what about me?

why not do it for me?

live?

the answer is:

self loathing

I couldn't hate my father

so i had to hate my self

punish my self to get back at him

and now i am crippled like he was

so now i feel for him, a little bit

that is a hell of a loop

now I am feeling for him!

what he couldn't own

his hatred for life

for doing this to him

casting him out and down

luciferian

when my father died

i felt no connection to him at all

it was like he never existed

i just didn't believe that any of him

survived death

because he never really existed in life

for me

i wonder if he's been in bardo all that time

some souls take longer to process...

he was so deeply entrenched in denial

and so fervent in his disbelief

he may have gone into black out

he believed there was nothing after

so that was what he got?

until now...

Settle for Less

as persons, we equate intimacy with the personal


the reverse is really the case

only the impersonal can really allow for intimacy

most couples "put out" to keep the agreement of enmeshment intact

it's scary to let that "meshing" come apart

but there are times

when you love the other to the core

without wanting or needing anything from them

a moment, here & there

a moment is enough to know

that that deeper connection is there

letting the moment be enough is hard

settling for less

always a little bit less

when we're programmed to always want more

is hard

we want to bring the deep into the shallow

to make what's fine coarse

in order to secure it

instead of dropping down to meet it

just drop through the thoughts and feelings

into what you know is true

settle for less

The Alchemy of Marriage

(the missing 82nd chapter of the Tao Teh Ching):

The Cunt that stays closed

When it is time

Is every bit as insistent

As the Cock that stays hard

When it's not

If as the one softens

The other opens

Then there is true flow

and everything comes into balance

Morality

Morality is the invention of people who are triggered, as the means to avoid being triggered again. “Thou shalt not trigger me.” Jehovah acts in the same way: he gets triggered, his wrath descends on humanity, and he sends Moses to lay down the law. Man then agrees to follow the commandments in order never to trigger God again. Enmeshment on a cosmic scale.

And what was Jehovah most afraid of? The Goddess.

Morality is the root of all evil, because the root of all morality is fear of the female.


I do have a deep fear of female sexuality in me, and it does come out in rage and intolerance.

I was thinking this morning that the Nazis were sweethearts compared to the Inquisition. That’s the real naked face of distorted masculine energy, directed wholly at the female. I think I have an Inquisitor inside me. It just wants to snuff out female power, female sexuality, at the first sign of it. Because of how terrifying it was to me, as an infant.

Lion & the Lamb

I finally watched the JDR video, the one with me in it. (See here. Or see Transcript of our dialogue here.) It was uncomfortable seeing myself. I look like a frightened rabbit in the first part; funny, because I wasn't aware of it at the time. I was only aware of trying to be as open as I could. I guess my body was experiencing fright, and being open meant I wasn't doing anything to disguise that fact. But compared to all the perception management I do with my videos and podcast, it was quite painfully exposing. It's the first time I have felt distaste seeing/hearing myself in a long time. Mild distaste, but distaste nonetheless.

There’s a moment in the video in which John is looking at me and his eyes tear up and I felt this fatherly love emanating from him. I hadn’t consciously experienced it at the time, but it was there in the video. Watching the whole thing back was a strange experience. I wondered afterwards, why they picked this particular one, and whether it was John who chose it. It doesn’t seem to be the most accessible talk he gave during that trip. I also thought how, if someone were skeptical of John, they would think I was such a putz, with my eyelids flittering away like a little bird. They’d think I was faking it, a New Age sucker.

So be it. If this “historical” event ~ a public transmission of my encounter with JDR ~ wasn't undermining for my person, I’d know something wasn't right.

Two days later, today.

I thought about John, the words he'd said to me. That was the thing I didn't mention above: I wrote about what my person thought about the whole thing, but not the effect hearing his words had on me. They are powerful words, and since this is John, I know they are true, because John can't lie. When I was hearing the words at the time, a big part of my reaction was to do with my person feeling special, happy that John recognized me and what was happening in my life. But hearing them again without that element of “me” (in fact, I felt anything but special seeing myself looking so timid and goofy), it drove home the meaning of the words: that I am in the midst of a huge shift in orientation, a shift that is going to happen no matter what I do.

I remembered then that John tears up right after I say to him, “I couldn’t have done it without you, John.” My Wife laughed at that bit, watching the video, and I didn't know why at the time. Now I’d guess it was because it’s true, what I said. It took some presence of mind to say those words, and afterwards, I wished I hadn’t said them. I’d had to close a little, and come out of that unfocused/surrendered space, in order to assert myself to the degree of saying something like that. As a result, it seemed a bit forced. But then, when I watched the video, it appeared as if somehow, if not the words then the truth behind them, seemed to move John. I felt this fatherly love coming out of him. And now I wondered if maybe it wasn’t fatherly, so much as male motherly? If when I said those words, John recognized that one of his chicks was about to hatch, that his attention and nurture had caused another being to come forth. So his love “shone” through for a moment, seeing that and knowing that.

That is the truth: I couldn’t have done it without him, not the way it turned out anyway. And so John was getting to see how the fruit of his being had seeded the fruit of another’s being.

Recently, my Wife told me that I am exuding gangly teenage energy. Apparently, it has to do with how my individuation process has finally begun again, having been hijacked/arrested in adolescence. Joseph Chilton Pearce writes about how, in adolescence, we are readying for a huge shift in consciousness which entails a whole new area of the brain being activated, and which probably has to do with the heart opening also. A natural enlightenment. But because this never happens, that sense of a big event being on the horizon is never satisfied. We are left incomplete, unformed, dormant.

What John told me was that I was about to experience “a massive, clean, clear growing up.”

Remembering all this on the rock, seeing all this, I opened and tears came. I was careful not to try and make it into anything. The closer I get to this, the bigger it seems, and the more I see just how ordinary it is.

John wasn't seeing my person heading for some great apotheosis. He was simply seeing another being coming forth into its fullness. It didn’t matter in the least bit “who” I was. All that mattered was that another flower was opening in the great cosmic garden of being.

It is massive; and yet it is nothing at all. Just in the natural way of things.

I thought about how everything we fear is in the past: the supreme terror is a memory of the distant past. So although we live in dread for the future, what we fear is actually in the past. What is in the future that gives rise to fear is a time when we get to let that terror-trauma all the way back into consciousness. So then, we live in fear of that fear.

I know that I need never fear anything outside of me again, because I have identified the great fear within me. And nothing external could ever amount to more than a trifle, compared to that vast, nameless (because it's pre-verbal) internal terror.

Weeding the Garden

Really all we need to 'do' to allow a deeper knowing, and a deeper seeing, to begin to inform our lives, is to clear up enough space for our unconscious beings to begin to emerge into and express through. That comes down to de-cluttering our lives, our heads, hearts, and bodies, weeding the garden, as it were, so that the flowers and fruit of truth can begin to grow there.


Overly intellectual, analytical types continue to try and 'figure out' the riddle of our despair. Trying to find the answer that will 'fix' the problem. But the distortions of our mind and heart (and body) are precisely reflecting the ways in which we have distorted yourself as consciousness. Then, as consciousness, all we need to do is really see those distortions, and by seeing, be fully present inside them, without trying to fix, change, or use them for our person. Then we-as-consciousness will begin to return to our true, original form.

Naturally, this takes time, and the process of being more and more fully in those patterns as a means to see them, this means that we are likely to feel worse, overall, rather than better, during the first part of this process. So our tendency is to keep seeking ways to feel better, ways to come out of your patterns and find some relief, whether through a candy fix or a video game, getting to be 'the man' at our job, a sexual high, or whatever it is (or getting to feel like we have a handle on the process and are making progress!).

Asking the right questions is a start, provided we don't require answers, because the right questions are those that only we can answer: not so much by thinking about them, but through new forms of action which being in a questioning frame of mind allow.

The first obvious step is to change our habits and free up some space, so that we can start to generate some self-worth that actually comes from an inner sense of knowing, and not from surface achievements in the external world ~ all of which are really of no value at all, unless they stem from an inner knowing.

Advice on Parenting From a Childless Sorcerer

If a parent comforts a child from a place of excess personal involvement ~ feels pity, anxiety, and such, because his or her own wounds are being stirred up ~ then this increases the enmeshment. Although the child is ostensibly being "comforted," what's really happening is that their own patterns are being confirmed and consolidated by the parents' patterns. When a child falls over, it looks to the parent for a cue as to how to react; when the parent shows fear and concern, the child then begins to cry. The parent has taken the child's feelings seriously, so now the child knows it is supposed to do the same (or that s/he can get away with it!).

Enmeshment, all down the line.

The alternative (stand back for the wisdom of a guy who never had a kid advising fathers!) is to hold a neutral, impersonal space for the child, one that is constant. This way, the child knows that, when it really needs protecting or soothing, the parent is there. The rest of the time, it is on its own. The space is always available to the child, but because there is no enmeshment, there's no pull for the child to go into the space simply for comfort, only for real nurture and support when needed.

That "pull" is the result of the parent wanting the child to need him or her, in order to feel especially loved themselves.

***

What it comes down to is that, as long as we raise our kids from a personal space, no matter how functioning and "happy" they may turn out, they are still going to be living from a place of personal sovereignty, hence, in a way of being that's untrue based on the way of being taught them by their parents. So they are basically in Hell.

Perhaps this is why sorcerers don't generally have kids. They know they'd be raising livestock, food for entities. Knowing that, but not having the ability to change it, could make for an insufferable tension.

As for the kids-in-bed thing, it's not true that children naturally grow out of wanting that sort of proximity and comfort from the parents. Again, this would depend on whether the parent is enmeshing, using the child for its own comfort. A close relative allowed her daughter to sleep in her bed until she was 12 (for all I know she still does), largely because the child was so insistent. She was unable to sleep alone and her mother didn't have the necessary ruthlessness, or neutrality, to be detached about her child suffering. De-enmeshment is always painful for both parties.

Clearly, a case can always be made for both sides of the argument, or any argument. Too much love and not enough discipline spoils the child; the reverse, and the child grows up damaged in other ways. No parent could ever get the balance right through conscious will alone; the only way is not to be personally involved with one's children. I would guess that even sorcerers find that nigh-impossible.

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Spelled out very simply: when a child doesn't receive enough of a clean, loving physical connection to its mother, it is imprinted with that lack and seeks it elsewhere, into adulthood and sometimes unto death. This wound is further compounded if, during later infancy (from about 2), when the child begins to individuate and wants to bond with the father, the father is also lacking, absent, or physically distant or disconnected. Then the child grows up with a double wound that comes down to a sort of emotional hunger for touch, for "validation" (for an infant, physical touch can be necessary not just to well-being but to survival).

As adults, we are unlikely to find ways of bonding with men to meet this hunger (though lots of guys get into sports and join the army just to rough-house with guys); so then almost 100% of that emotionally-patterned neediness is going to be directed toward women. What guys consider horniness is usually nothing of the kind, because their physiological responses are hooked into those emotional/psychological patterns, and when they think they are looking to get laid, they are really looking for mommy's (or even daddy's!) love and attention.

If a child was really cut off from the father, and maybe overly smothered by the mother (as well as sometimes neglected by her ~ which was my case), they often wind up homosexual, or, as in my case, rather waif-like, ephemeral, romantic types with low libidos. (My Wife might disagree on the last point!)

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