Life is too short for the good girl. Also, for the “good boy.” Like it or not, as adults we emulate our parents’ behavior with each other, which we saw as children, including their sexuality. If we did not see even the insinuation of healthy, passionate sexuality between them, when we step into adulthood, sexuality is also not included for us. We were not trained that being sexual was bad; being sexual was simply not included in the models we saw for being good. The “badness” of being sexual may only be reflected through its not having been explicitly included in the demonstration of “goodness.” But the evil insinuation can still influence us powerfully, until we specifically unravel our mental wiring, slip on our respective masculine and feminine gorilla suits and start humping.
It is important to note that the clothing industry promotes fashions that push the line. By now, fashions are so close to the line that they are often more tantalizing than no clothes at all. Without knowing it, women dress themselves in the latest styles thinking that the styles are normal, standard, even neutral. But they are not neutral. They are hypersexual, developed over years by masters of erotic insinuation. These clothes well draped over breasts and thighs can drive gorillas completely into a slobbering sexual frenzy. As a way of torturing the masculine, these fashions can satisfy Feminine Shadow Principles. But more often than you might suspect, such fashions attract only gorillas who are uncontrollably attracted by superficialities. If you, as a woman, want to attract something more than a dumb gorilla who only wants to consume you, then do not go around dressed like a banana.
There are levels of intimacy that your mother never told you about, that the movies never show, that books cannot convey, and that we never believed could be true. You can only discover these treasures for yourself if you keep taking the risk to do experiments that cause you to become capable of greater and greater intimacy.
Let yourself be adored. When your Man places his attention on you, let that Archetypal force call through you to the Goddess. Let the Goddess come and bloom. She is subtle, delicate, fragile, and radiant. When the Goddess arrives, you will feel it in every cell in your body. Your psychology will at first freak-out. What is this sensation? What is happening to me? Your Box’s automatic Goddess-shutoff-mechanism operates below your normal level of awareness. You may not even recognize that you are clamping down to prevent the possibility of the Goddess from showing up in your body, until you have already shut down. Discover the cramping mechanism, and consciously block it from being engaged. Let her come. Keep breathing. Keep letting the Goddess grow inside of you in your Man’s eyes. Let her come forth fully. Let the Goddess, so intimate, so revealed, be recognized and admired by your Man. This is Manmaking: letting the Goddess be adored. Adoring the Goddess makes the man a Man. Let your Man adore the pure radiant beauty of the Goddess through you. Stand still and let the presence and sensation of the Goddess grow, until you think that you cannot stand it any more, and then let her get even bigger. Let him see her in you. Let him experience her in you. Let him be in her presence through you. There is “no top end.”
MAP OF DOUBLE SPACE-HOLDING
Distinguishing and holding more than one space at the same time is done through clarity, not through force. Begin by distinguishing the sensations of ordinary, extraordinary and Archetypal spaces so that you can detect where you are and what is possible for you there. Then, practice consciously splitting your attention three ways at the same time: noticing the ordinary while declaring both the extraordinary and Archetypal into coexistence. Continue holding these spaces distinctly. You will not already know how to do this. Just keep trying and learn how through practicing. You can wash the dishes, or walk down the street, holding double space, and be in Archetypal intimacy with your partner.
CHAPTER 11
The Pirate Magician King Spiritual Warrior Man
As we noted in the previous chapter, for the purposes of entering the kingdom of radiant joy and brilliant Love both men and women will get to try on some new roles, on purpose, by practicing a few simple new behaviors. Recall the experiment we proposed in Chapter 10, that from now on, until such time as you decide to change your mind, whenever answering the question “Who are you?” from yourself or others, use the following answer: For men, “I am a Pirate Magician King Spiritual Warrior Man.” For women, “I am a Pirate Sorceress Warrioress Queen Goddess Woman.” As we previously suggested, memorize this answer. Each morning or evening when you brush your teeth and look in the mirror, repeat the declaration to yourself. During the day, add in more and more behavior details. These next sections contain starter experiments for men. Experiments for women are found in the previous chapter.
SECTION 11-A
Pirate King
Writing to empower a modern man to become a Pirate King scares me. The patriarchy already produces irresponsible rascal pirate kings who break the rules to take all they can. What I want to empower are responsible noble Pirate Kings who break the rules to give all they can. How will a man raised in a modern patriarchy learn to tell the difference? Where will a human male, babied by the entrenched patriarchy, get the courage or stamina to escape from his golden cage? Why should the “favored one” exchange his culturally-established and technologically-protected highchair-tyrant pseudo-powers for the personally-earned and fully-consequent powers of the wild pain-and-ecstasy-initiated Archetypal Man? The transformation from irresponsible to responsible is uncommon in an irresponsibly-contexted environment such as the patriarchy.
Trying to reveal the necessity for a modern man to shatter his comfortable dreamworld, throw back his warm covers and step naked into a cold shower is like trying to convince a thief to stop spending his stolen money because the money is counterfeit. As soon as the thief learns that the money is counterfeit, he will just try to spend it faster! There is no reason strong enough or incontrovertible enough to convince an adolescent to enter the process of authentically growing up. He has too much to lose.
But if we, as individual men, do not wake ourselves up to the consequences of rampantly using irresponsible power, and swiftly do something radically different, the forces of nature will wake us up to those consequences through the likes of so-called “climate change,” a euphemism for human suffering beyond any previously known measure of pain. Choosing to change before we are absolutely forced to change means consciously choosing to suffer – a highly unusual choice. The choice belongs to each of us, and we make that choice with every gesture and each creation. If we do not make the choice to be a conscious servant of responsible Bright Principles, then the choice is automatically made for us to be an unconscious slave of irresponsible Shadow Principles. As Pirate Lee Lozowick says, “If the higher don’t get you, then the lower must.”
Nobody directly teaches us about the dangers of being enslaved by Shadow Principles. And, culturally embraced ignorance is no protection. We are answerable to the consequences of irresponsibility, just as surely as a rock thrown straight up in the air will fall straight back down on your head.
It is easy to find examples of irresponsible Archetypal characters. We have a whole catalog of names for rascal pirate kings, like: thief, murderer, gangster, mercenary, drug dealer, gang leader, criminal, scam artist, mobster, assassin, pimp, terrorist, thug, robber, religious fanatic, rapist, crook, or embezzler. But where can we imprint ourselves with dignified, responsible masculine qualities that include broadbased compassionate intelligence? If we look to business directors, clergymen, movie stars, doctors, teachers, spiritual leaders, rock singers, politicians, professors, and so on, the qualities of these characters are completely ambiguous, until we put the qualifier “responsible” in front of each of them, such as responsible businessman or responsible clergyman. These days, terms of leadership alone do not automatically imply responsibility.
To prepare ourselves for Archetypal Edgework experiments, it would be helpful to have role models for a self-aware responsible character. It would be helpful to emulate a fiercely vigilant, ruthlessly self-honest,
radiantly joyous, and creatively-exploring hero practitioner. This is the potential Pirate King Archetype that is already designed into our four masculine bodies, and is inherently ours to step into. This is what our women hunger to love. Since there are so few living examples for us to imitate, we will just have to do the best that we can.
SECTION 11-B
Spiritual Warrior
If it were not beaten out of us through the modern-day socialization process, we men would have direct and instantaneous access to maximum Archetypal anger. The only problem is that we would not know what to do with it. Our education about anger teaches us that it is dangerous and can easily destroy things. The embodiment of anger looks like war. The mental equation, that anger is bad, dangerous, ignorant and uncivilized, runs deep in the grooves of our mind.
Changing our relationship to anger (as well as to the other feelings), so that we contain the anger and the anger does not contain us, involves a significant initiatory process. It can include months of actual rage work, and perhaps years of recontextualizing our views, habits and understandings. Without fully engaging this process in a guided environment, a modern male is still energetically and emotionally tied to his mother’s apron strings. As an uninitiated adolescent, he wastes or suppresses the very opportunities he is given for leapfrogging from aimless confusion to unquenchable inspiration.
The work of shifting from material consumer to Spiritual Warrior is long and difficult; not for children. A book can only paint maps, create clarifications, or suggest possibilities. The real learning must be expansive (experiential) learning, not defensive (intellectual) learning. Distinctions and clarifications must bypass your mind and enter your body through a long series of accidents, not necessarily painless, like the way a cowboy learns to ride a bucking bronco. An authentic maturation process will leave you bruised, impacted by what you realize. The physical memory of the impact is how the teaching enters your body. When such a reality hits you up-side the head, it may send you off running after your mother, whining for her to make your booboo better. There are no boo-boos, however, only lessons to learn. Making mistakes is how you learn those lessons, so making mistakes is fine, as long as you stay on your toes and learn from the mistakes. Respectful gratitude toward the learning process is appropriate. We men are all in this together. We can help each other establish a mature men’s culture that nurtures and protects us while we get our feet on the ground and take back our rights to the experiences of becoming worthy of the name Man.
The Warrior Archetype responsibly applies the energy and information from anger to do things and to make things happen, to make decisions, start things, stop things, change things, make boundaries, make distinctions, to say yes or no, and to ask for what he needs. The Spiritual Warrior stands on all that, and takes into account a grander perspective. Whereas the adult warrior would take care of his family, his business, his fitness, and his personal projects, the Spiritual Warrior adds additional responsibilities that are sourced by the Principles he serves. The Spiritual Warrior takes care of his family, his business, and his fitness so that he can also take care of the projects given to him by the Principles. Such projects could include being on the team that runs a nonprofit association in the service of Bright Principles: associations that promote animal rights protection, research sustainable cultures, increase human rights awareness; educate about ecological systems, energy conservation, alternative energy development; support a living spiritual tradition, or develop human relationship and communication soft skills. Specific projects might include writing articles or books, giving talks or workshops, or making it possible for someone else in the same lineage of Principles to write articles or books and give talks or workshops. Spiritual Warriorship is a bigger game than standard warriorship. Deeper distinctions and energetic awareness are involved. Standing in the place where distinctions and energetic awareness originate requires the Spiritual Warrior to have the unceasing, relaxed-alert disposition of a skilled swordsman.
Sword Making
I remember first learning that anger was the discerning force behind sword work. As I learned about anger, and started giving permission for my nerves and tissues to experience and express the energy of its Archetypal levels, it came out like the anger of a raging bull. I was not a swordsman. I was a caveman. I had no sword. I had a club. I would stomp around in life energetically beating my world into a pulp. I was afraid of this raging Frankenstein monster whom I had unleashed, but the men in my men’s group supported me and said I should just keep going. They said it was far better to have my rage come alive – even if it was ignorant and immature – than to keep my rage repressed as it had been for so many years, while on the surface acting like a good boy. They said that even if there were some casualties while the brute bashed his way through crowds, it was worth it because the brute was listening to feedback and would therefore quickly mature.
I don’t think the brute matured as quickly as they estimated. I gained a reputation for being a trainer who left “dead bodies,” meaning, participants who had received feedback with a hatchet rather than a scalpel. Nothing serious, just that my beginning work with people lacked finesse, timing, elegance and precision. I wanted to take people as far as I thought they should go, rather than as far as their system could sustainably handle. I had yet to become a sword.
Sword making is an art. To achieve the kind of temper that can both hold an edge and stay flexible, the blade steel must be heated and then beaten and cooled, then heated, beaten and cooled, over and over again. The sword is not a metaphor here. The sword is you. Being heated, beaten and cooled means that your Box will repeatedly go through the liquid state and be reshaped, and you will personally experience the classic “death and resurrection show.”
After a few years of practice, I could notice anger coming up in my body and I could tell it was anger. Then, instead of being subsumed by the anger, I experimented with surfing on it to get where I needed to go. I would use an appropriate percentage of intensity of anger as the force behind my voice or my movements, but I would only use as much anger as was needed in that moment to get the job done. The anger came with its own inherent clarity. I could access the clarity of anger when I internally applied the question, “I feel angry because?” Immediately, the anger itself provided the answer. I started letting the anger inform me about what was not okay, what needed to be happening that was not happening, what needed to be started, stopped or redirected. I discovered that anger’s clarity was immediate and implicit. I did not have to stop and figure things out with my mind.
Woven into the structure of anger is an immense depth of discerning wisdom that presents itself experientially whenever requested. As soon as my anger was freed of the “anger is bad and dangerous” fetters, as soon as I loved anger just for being pure volatile aliveness, the anger unwrapped its gifts.
I remember first discovering that I had something resembling a sword. I was leading a training in Atlanta, Georgia, around 1993, and was astonished by the clarity of the distinctions I was able to make. At the end of the training, I also noticed that I had far more energy remaining than in previous trainings. The work got done, so I must have been using energy from somewhere else, perhaps from the Principles themselves. I looked around at people’s glowing faces, closed the training space and naively relaxed my alertness, effectively putting my Spiritual Warrior’s sword away. And, in that instant, half a dozen hungry Gremlins popped out from among the participants. The Gremlins took over the space and began devouring each other in competitive conflicts, diluting the clarity that we had worked so hard to establish! Out came my sword again, as if powered by its own intelligence and instinct. Through shifting into a meta-conversation about what was being created, things were swiftly put back into order. But afterwards … I put my sword away far less often. I had learned an invaluable lesson.
The sword of clarity is not an intellectual sword for slicing up other people’s arguments and winning debates. Therefore, do not be fooled
by your Box taking up a rigid intellectual position and proving itself right in the name of the sword. The sword of clarity is not from the mind. Rather, it is wordless, diamond-sharp, experiential insight; exquisite kindness; wise generous presence and ruthless compassion. The sword of clarity is Archetypal Love in action. It need never be put away. Not even when the Warrior King goes to bed. In fact, navigating the spaces of vulnerable intimacy requires sword work of the most delicate precision. You can learn to sleep with your sword of clarity always at the ready, so your Box has no chance to usurp power even when you are groggy. Sloppy mechanical reactions (“You always take all the covers.” “Why do you drop your clothes in the middle of the floor?” “Did you remember to take the garbage out?”) kill countless opportunities for precious intimacy. What good is your sword over there on the shelf? Keep your sword to hand. Learn to live with the consequences of being dangerous to unconsciousness. Never put your sword away.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 48