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Dissolving

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I began blogging back in 2003 at Zadz/Gaia/A New Gaia. That early writing I characterized as my “spiritual travelogue.”

We all carry history forward from our past lives. I have brought a deep reticence regarding the influence that I have over people. My father asked me one day “Brian, do you understand how you keep on finishing people’s sentences for them?” When I said that I did, he asked whether that wasn’t a talent that I could use to accomplish a lot in the world. I replied, “Well, but that wouldn’t be fair.”

And I was focused on other things. I didn’t understand why until I was about forty two, but I spent most of my life pursuing knowledge of the world. While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis, I was reading the Christian Science Monitor and Science cover-to-cover every week, as well as the monthlies Scientific American and Foreign Affairs. I told my father that I was trying to reduce the world to an integral to be solved. There was a certain anxiety about it, and when I came into my spirituality, I realized that I had been running as hard as I could to find a way around, under or over a wall of pain that was crashing down on us.

As the millennium turned, I became frustrated with my failure, and began to express derision and anger about the people that possessed the power to make a difference. That led to some paranoia about my relationships at Gaia. I said some things that weren’t helpful, and spent a lot of time trying to understand my spiritual landscape. We move through time together – powerful events bind us into spiritual clusters. Sometimes to take the next step forward we have to reorganize ourselves. I have done a lot of that over the last fifteen years. I suppose that to the people around me I appeared narcissistic.

The wisdom that I brought out of that period was this: People that hurt others are often walking around the world doing unto others as was done to them, hoping desperately that they will find someone strong enough to show them how to heal. And so I try now to focus on offering the best wisdom I have regarding the power of love that I have been given to experience.

Over the last seven years or so, I have been struggling against fear of love. It’s sad to me, but people do the most terrible things to themselves in the name of material success. They try their best to ignore it, surrounding themselves with shallow diversions. Then along comes love, and they see all these great big, gaping wounds in themselves. It’s kind of like a soldier in shock looking down and realizing that he’s missing both legs. They become frightened, and often simply try to make the love go away.

So I’ve been struggling with that fear and anger, and it’s been brutal. Again, I’ve said a lot of things over the last seven years that haven’t been helpful. I’ve been really fortunate to have had my Shia colleague at work. He’s finally given me some affirmation.

I feel that period of my life coming to a close now. We take anger and fear into us and it can erupt unexpectedly when we’re tired or frustrated. I’ve just kept on pushing it away, and it’s been slowly dissipating from my relationships. I realize that a lot of the people around me have been simply the tip of the spear. Many of the behavior patterns they manifest are ancient. I’ve just made it steadily clear that the love that they want won’t collaborate in those behaviors, and tried to describe the alternatives as I see them.

That’s been the thrust of my writing here. There are so many wonderful, caring people in the blogosphere. They are passionate, and sometimes that flares up in expressions of anger and frustration. I do my best to express the alternatives, and to share my confidence that there is an enormous reservoir of good will waiting for Humanity to grow up and learn to play nice.

This has been coming to a focus for me. I went out to a new social venue on Thursday night, and had to rise above some unwanted attentions in the early morning. When it was over, I felt this beautiful glow in my heart, and the world appeared next to it. I wasn’t entirely awake, which always leaves me open to suggestion. For whatever reason, I began making circles around the world with my heart: around the equator, and two circumpolar passes that divided the globe into eighths. It was just the most beautiful thing – my heart was filled with warmth and peace.

But now I don’t know how to describe what I am about or why. It’s a raw energy that courses through me. I can explain why I do what I do, but that explanation means nothing without the axiom of that relation. I don’t know how to describe it, and I can’t prove that it exists. When I feel it moving through me to someone else, the common reaction is one of disbelief.

So I feel like I’m dissolving, adrift in this deep ocean in which food and cars and buildings simply sink out of sight. There is nothing left but the raw flame of the friends that have chosen to draw close to my heart.

Thank-you all for your company!

Women: Being Loved by Christ

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When Jesus first taught in the synagogue in Jerusalem, his neighbors received him with skepticism verging on outrage [NIV Mark 6:2-6]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

This contrasts with the events just prior with a woman who had bled for twelves years, and was healed simply by touching Jesus’s clothes. Shocked by the experience, the woman hid in the crowd, but Jesus persisted [NIV Mark 5:33-34]:

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

How does this work, spiritually? The aura that forms around the head of a saint is generated by souls pressing against their minds in the hope of discovering meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are discovered most readily in the saint because they have surrendered themselves to love of the world, and the world in turn reveals itself to saint’s examination. It is as said by Tagore:

Power said to the World, “You are mine.”
The World kept it prisoner on her throne.
Love said to the World, “I am yours.”
The World gave it the freedom of her house.

The saint looks into the world and sees its spiritual needs. Among the souls that surround the saint are such that can fulfill those needs. The saint has the privilege of facilitating the union of the two parties. But where the party in the world (the soul currently “living”) seeks instead power, the union fails. The souls choose to remain to the company of the saint. That saint, honoring the compact of their company, accepts them back.

Spiritual union can be ravishing, having many of the aspects of intercourse. For this reason, Catholic nuns once referred to themselves as “brides of Christ.” But the union can be a tenuous thing. If Jesus had not been present to voice his approval, would the hemophiliac woman have maintained her cure?

When I encounter woman struggling with this dynamic, I offer the encouragement, “Believe in yourself!” There are angels in the air wishing to enter into you to heal the world. Yes, it feels wonderfully sensual, but you don’t need sex to receive them. You don’t need the approval of a father. Spirits becoming angels yearn only for the spiritual union we know as “Christ” that found its steward when Jesus took up the cross. To receive them, you need only their approval, an approval gained most powerfully through a commitment to love and heal the world.

It’s in the Cards

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Father’s Day and the Summer Solstice coincided for me down at Ecstatic Dance LA on Sunday. My devotion to that practice is encapsulated in this wisdom from Devdutt Patnaik, from Seven Secrets of Shiva:

Lord Shiva taught through dance because words are too literal to capture the essence of the intangible nirguna. One needs symbols that dance is best able to communicate. A book occupies space but not time, a discourse occupies time but not space, a dance occupies both space and time.

The workshop was an introduction to sensual Salsa that was focused with a declaration of spiritual intention. We were asked to choose from a deck of the feminine avatars. I waited, torn, until the other participants had settled back to their mats. Then a card called clearly to me, and I found myself holding “Isolt”:

Undying Love: No matter the situation, the love that you share is eternal.

When I read it to the facilitator, all she had to offer was “Thank-you.”

From that moment of clarity, the dance unfolded into the usual confusion and chaos. Whether the sexy temptress that tried to attach me to her sister, any of five young ladies crying out for love in exchange for passion, or the woman that reminded me of the lost love I offered to Persephone’s manifestation, I found myself wondering why it is so hard for women to understand that the power that surrounds me is not intended to make people feel good, but rather to make them stronger. That became clear in my interaction with Atasiea – after we finished rolling over each other on the floor, I touched his crown and suggested timidly “Say hello to my little friends.” With their affirmation, I then knelt to take his skull in my hands and ordered, “Now say hello to my bigger friends,” as I raised his mind to the sky. Trying to make certain that he didn’t get detached, I pressed my thumbs into his palms and feet and pulled on his arms, stretching him to his full extent so that they might clearly apprehend the limits of his body.

So it was only at the end that I was able to refocus. As we sat in a circle, each affirming in turn the joys found in the dance and the glory of the light, I hesitated before offering:

I came here today to plead with the light. To plead with it to be gentle with us. To be gentle with us through the summer and winter. To be gentle with all the living things.

A terrible sorrow filled me then. While Robin took the time to say that he liked what I had said, it is clear that we haven’t learned our lesson yet. It will unfold as it must.

Can ‘We’ Be Selfish?

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I need to try this argument out, because I am being driven crazy by a pattern that has developed in my conversations with rational people.

The pattern is, when arguing about morality, to observe that I identify specific benefits to myself of caring for others. Those rewards (such as joy, a sense of purpose, and spiritual strength) are interpreted as evidence that I am simply being selfish like everyone else.

There are two points to be made here. The first is to assert the definition of selfishness. From OxfordDictionaries.com, we have:

lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure

In other words, to be selfish is to disregard the effects of our choices on others. When we are selfish, the survival and rights of others are of no consideration when we set out to acquire resources or satisfy our bliss. In fact, that lack of consideration is an important psychological element in preparing us to destroy others in the service of our self-interest.

The lie of selfishness is that acquisition of power and pleasure makes us better prepared to survive. Raw power can serve any purpose, but requires skill in the wielder. If we focus only on power, we never learn to channel it in acts of creation, because to create is to consume power. We are required either to share our power with those that have learned to create, or fall into the terrible abyss of acquiring resources through the destruction of the people that hold them. The latter course ultimately renders us powerless, because without people we have no means of converting the resources that we have accumulated into value.

The second point is that of the three benefits of caring for others, joy and purpose are entirely subjective. Only spiritual strength is a resource to overcome life’s challenges. But spiritual strength arises as a projection from those we serve. It is to assert “Yes, I want this person in the world.” That good will follows us around like a cloud, and pushes against the will of those that seek to harm us.

As that description makes clear, spiritual power is contingent upon our continued commitment to consider the well-being of those that affirm us. It is to assert reciprocally “Yes, I want this person in the world.” It is to surrender some of our spiritual power to them.

The proposition of “We” is that the individuals in mutually supportive communities enhance their odds of survival by distributing power. In that state, the selfish have no particular reason to target any particular individual, yet when we face difficulties we have the pool of distributed resources to draw upon. And when resources are plenty, our creative efforts are amplified by the inspiration of others.

Of course, there are no guarantees. What happens when the challenges facing the community overwhelm its resources? Who is going to survive? To the loving person, facing the loss of all that they hold most dear, the response is simply “Who would want to?”

The promise of religion, of course, is that surrendering the flesh under those circumstances opens the gates to a far better reality. The power we store in things is lost when we die. The power conserved in our spiritual relationships endures.

Why do we feel driven to believe that acting in our self-interest is selfishness? I think that rather the opposite is true: we have been so indoctrinated to believe that “greed is good” that we simply cannot accept that selfishness (the belief that only “I” have any meaning) is just a really stupid idea. Our self-interest is in nurturing a caring community. It is to submit the needs of the “I” to the “we.”

The Moral Arc

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As a scientist and mystic, I am frustrated with the conflict that divides the scientific materialists from the Biblical literalists. Both camps contain people that are well-meaning who tend to focus on the defects in the world-view of their disputants, rather than considering the good that can be done by joining forces.

When I first framed this debate at everdeepening.org, I celebrated three great threads of human thought: science, which is concerned with creating languages that accurately model objective reality; philosophy, which refines language to ensure that we understand one another; and spirituality, which is concerned with the negotiation of the boundaries between the I and the we (encompassing politics as well as religion). I have argued here that science can explain spiritual experience, but we cannot avail ourselves of its predictive powers to control spiritual growth. We simply cannot establish initial conditions without mutilating the personality that we would like to study. As a result, moral growth is unavoidably consensual.
The Moral Arc
Looking at the moral liberation of humanity from that perspective, with a balance between material and spiritual experience, I summarize our moral growth in the figure. We began as animals, completely amoral creatures. This is to say that morality was not initially a consideration of our existence: we simply did what needed to be done to survive. As relative newcomers on the spiritual scene, the weight of mammalian behavior patterns overwhelmed rational analysis. The exit strategy towards moral discourse was monotheism: a cold and callous rejection of all spiritual associations that were not wholly human in their origin.

Was this a clean process? No, it was a bootstrap process (witness the Bible). People exhibiting animalistic behaviors had to learn painfully from experience the consequences of failing to think carefully about the consequences to others of our actions. They had to develop languages to support moral analysis (philosophy), and they had to form communities willing to surrender resources to those pursuing that study. The Bible is best understood as one culture’s experience of that growth.

The rise of moral philosophy that culminated with Jesus of Nazareth asserts that Unconditional Love, which is the divine presence, propels our ascent. In part, it is because the contract is that the moral analyst must commit himself to the service of others.

Not everyone can master the nuances of moral discourse. What the faithful can do instead as moral actors is to invest their hearts and souls in caring for the world. There is no social system that can guarantee that investment – in fact, most of our social structures tend to consolidate the gains of those that abuse the contract. Only by reliance upon a divine external source can the less clever be ensured that their investment in moral conduct will be made good. Does this presence actually exist? Well, that is a matter of faith and personal experience (see the closing paragraph).

The difficulty in modern moral discourse is that the power of science outraced our philosophy. The world is changing rapidly around us, and most of humanity is still mired in amoral patterns of behavior. The power of science is often unleashed with terribly destructive consequences. This creates fear in the faithful that the institutions that safeguard our spirituality will be destroyed.

The counter of the scientist is to reject spirituality in favor of pure rationality (top of the diagram). What they seem not to understand is that most of humanity is not capable of participating in the discourse under those terms, but requires the deep psychological immersion of religion to substantiate trust in the mysteries tended by the intellectual elites. The faithful can only judge the trustworthiness of that elite by their pronouncements. Words like “stupid”, “sheep”, and “irrational” obviously will be interpreted as inconsistent with reliable moral stewardship, and tend to push the faithful into the arms of sociopaths that promise to protect them (as if that were possible, given the problems that we have mounted up against ourselves).

My experience is that economic exchange exploits our strengths and exacerbates our weaknesses. Obviously, it is in the interest of intellectuals to trumpet and enhance their virtues. But what I find, with Hume, is that spiritual engagement with such people is often hollow in the heart. The substitution of science for monotheism elevates rationality without replacing the guarantee of moral stewardship. In my own experience, that guarantee takes this form: when my heart is ready to break under the burden of the pain in the world, I open it a little wider and a great flood of love rushes through. I know that power is not mine.

Why God Is Love

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As a man of faith, my greatest challenge is seeing selfish behavior validated in the world of things. In the extreme case, the perpetrator of psychological abuse secretly withholds resources from the victim, blames others, and then meters out sustenance while saying “You’re so worthless. Nobody will ever love you like I do.” As a result, many victims actually identify with their abusers and seek to protect them from the authorities.

How can the victim see past that trap? Typically, it’s by looking at the circumstances of their abuser. People that love us share their power with us. If we are truly loved, we should feel stronger every day.

So let’s now step back and take the long view of this process – the process of merging our souls into heaven. This is described in all of the great religious traditions. But should we seek that so eagerly? Heaven is described as a place of love, but why should it be that way?

We know that there is conflict there: Lucifer rebelled against God. So could heaven not be a place just like Earth, with different types of pain, the pain of angels struggling against each other?

Imagine the evolution of the angels. Did they have wars and battles before love ruled the heavens? If so, why did they choose, ultimately, to submit to Unconditional Love?

To understand this, we have to recognize the difference between angels and us. Angels are beings of pure spirit. They relate to each other not through the exchange of material objects, but through interpenetration of their spirits. It is impossible for an angel to destroy another angel, only for one to suborn another’s will to their own. So naturally, selfish angels would want to establish boundaries that kept their captives from having the opportunity to join another personality.

Then along comes Unconditional Love. Love says, as I explained above, “Let me create strength in you.” What an attractive proposition! Who could resist it? But unconditional love goes beyond that. It says “I love everything equally, and want nothing for myself.” So the selfish angel, in serving only itself, must push away unconditional love, thus losing the benefits of its power. The alternative is to be infected by Unconditional Love, and thus to submit to the re-organization and eventual liberation of its captives.

Is renouncing love that a big deal? Maybe not initially, but you see all those smaller angels now find a place of refuge inside unconditional love. It enters into them and says: “Look, if you join with this other angel, you’ll be more powerful.” Unconditional Love is a restless seeking to find strength in the other angels. As that occurs, the angels that submit to its tutelage become more and more powerful.

In the warring regions of heaven, parts are broken off from the combatants, and some turn to Unconditional Love as a refuge. The most aggressive angels, to penetrate that refuge, must allow themselves to be infected by unconditional love. If they manage to seize part of the community of Unconditional Love, the lost part immediately withers and loses its vitality. Fighting against Unconditional Love is a losing proposition all the way.

So in the realm of the angels, once Unconditional Love came into being, there was no sensible angel that would resist its ministrations, no selfish angel that would survive an assault on it, and no conflict between angels that would not liberate pieces to join Unconditional Love. In the end, the corporate personality of heaven had to be ruled by love.

As we will be here on Earth, at least once enough of us realize that the soul is what matters most.

Pope Francis Submits to Scientific Materialism

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Last week, the Irish Republic, long dominated by the Catholic Church in its management of public morals, stood up on its feet and granted marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Hallelujah!

The response of the Pope is to claim that humanity “lost” on that day. That claim is rooted in a Biblical passage that asserts marriage is between a “man and a woman.”

As I have discussed before, many same-sex couples involve a masculine personality and a feminine personality. Since I hold that the domain of religion is the soul, I see such pairings are sacred before God. Actually, I would assert that any relationship that brings love into the world is sacred to God, because as we were taught by John, God is love.

Pope Francis, unfortunately, has submitted to a philosophy known as “scientific materialism.” In that world view, it is only the material presentation that matters in judging right and wrong. A “man”, in that world view, possesses a penis that is used to penetrate the vagina of a “woman.” And, of course, God’s primary purpose is in seeing to it that the global ecology is destroyed by human overpopulation.

Yes, Francis, humanity has lost something indeed when even the Pope holds that what we do with our bodies counts more than what we do with our souls.

A Christian Reaction to Buddhism

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Ethan Nichtern is one of my favorite people, and has an exceptionally clear and gracious understanding of the path he represents. As any wise teacher, he understands that wisdom is rooted in our personal life experience, and so that each of us arrives at wisdom in our own time.

As Nichtern presents in “The Road Home”, Buddhism is a technology for self-introspection and other-relation. Adherents are taught a method for analysis of the operation of their mind. Given Ethan’s lucid description of that method, we could advance a critique of Buddhism through categorical comparison with records of objective and subjective experience. I am hesitant to do this because I know from personal experience that Ethan is reticent, as many spiritual practitioners, to expose deeper truths to minds that have not attained a certain strength and discipline. I believe that he leaves much unsaid about spiritual experience.

I am absolutely convinced that Buddhism is a powerful technology for spiritual self-assessment. While it might seem like a matter of no lasting consequence, just learning to sit in stillness for ten minutes is an important manifestation of both mental strength and discipline. The concern that must be addressed of any spiritual teaching, however, is what guides the application of that strength. Nichtern asserts that most of us are conditioned with self-destructive perceptions, and that when we learn that the world does not actually behave according to those perceptions, we are released into a playful and compassionate exploration of life’s possibilities. However, I have experience with people that attain a certain power and enter into childish exploitation of others. Nichtern does not, by my assessment, advance a proof that exploitation is excluded by Buddhist practice.

But he does offer an experience, describing a night flight cross-country to an empty home. Overcome with sadness, he begins to weep, and does so without self-judgment. Nichtern does not describe his submission as leading to any catharsis, except a certain satisfaction that he was open to the experience of the moment. So why does he advance this as a moment of profound self-connection? What was he connecting to that made this experience stand out from any other?

Perhaps simply that at its deepest throes, he heard his father’s voice reiterating a wisdom believed fervently to be profound, “I live in the center of my awareness.” To me, this is the key: the love that others tender to us is not bound by time or space. It is delivered in the form that we have conditioned ourselves to receive it, in the moments of our greatest receptivity. Love alone has that power, the power to heal and strengthen our souls.

Those that practice exploitation do so at the cost of that great benefit.

I don’t know how Ethan would respond to this characterization. Buddhism is, at its core, a method for linearizing our reaction to experience with the goal of subjecting it to analysis. But we know that is not the way that the mind works. The mind is a parallel-processing device, with many threads of interpretation and analysis combining to produce a reaction. For this reason, Buddhism may be the province of rational thinkers capable of forcing reaction through the logical circuitry of the cortex. In Nichtern’s development, I certainly find support for that conclusion. Even as a Ph.D. physicist and having processed previously the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hahn, I can only read a chapter at a time before needing to rest.

From the Christian perspective, human intelligence is a key and essential capacity in bringing love into the world. Christianity holds, however, that while our lives appear to drown with sorrow, this reality is suffused with a divine love that will nurture us if we honor its constraints, foremost of which is that we not use its power willfully to cause pain. This gift and covenant is what Christians honor in their worship of “God.”

Now, as I have said, I find much in Nichtern’s writing that suggests that he has experienced the power of this love. So why the reticence? Perhaps it is found in his assertion that Buddhism is not a religion, in that it does not “tell people what to believe.” But it is exactly a connection with divine love that is needed by those that cannot draw upon mental discipline, but must rely upon the urgings of their hearts.

Nichtern characterizes the problem of karma, or negative conditioning, as a problem of self-trust. Through the development of that trust, he records that he eventually recognized the full depth of his father’s love, and perhaps thus freed himself from the negative conditioning of growing up in a broken home. Did he understand the experience that way? In other words, has he learned to trust in the love of others?

Buddhism strikes me as a tradition rooted in a failure of that trust. It asserts that we must first learn to love ourselves before learning to enter confidently into relation with others. Christianity takes the opposite approach. It teaches, “Abandon yourself to divine love. Surrender yourself to trust in that presence. Allow it to guide you, heal you, and use you to do great works of healing in the world, and thus to enjoy the admiration and gratitude of others.”

I find this to be compelling. The reason that we have to work so terribly hard to understand our reaction to our perceptions is because we are trapped in our viewpoint. It is so much easier for an outsider to see us in the context of our relationships. If that outsider is trust-worthy, they can offer us insights that would take us years to achieve on our own. So why not draw upon the strength of the only completely trustworthy guide, the presence of divine love that awaits our embrace?

I know that in human relationships, Nichtern would identify with this truth. When I met him at a Buddhist Geek’s conference, he stood out as the contrary voice that insisted that growth to maturity required the sangha, or spiritual community.

Considering that context, Nichtern does allude to the burdens of the role of the disciplined mind. I expressed them once to another Buddhist who complained that his meditative practice was regressing. He found himself struggling to prevent extraneous thoughts from entering his mind. I suggested that he simply send them metta, or an offering of acceptance and love. I then explained that in my experience those voices were not extraneous, but the thoughts of people reaching out for strength. I encouraged the gentleman to embrace this new and incredibly important stage of his practice.

The final stage of Buddhist discipline, the Vajrayana tradition of Tantric practices, organizes the collaborative generation of reservoirs of positive intention. At the workshop during which he warned me against the path of the “suicide bodhisattva”, Ethan introduced the practitioners to White Tara, the Buddhist manifestation of loving kindness. While many Christians might have considered this to be an invitation to demonic worship, I recognize it as just another engagement with the divine emissaries that Christians characterize as angels. Consequently I believe that Buddhism must come in contact with the power of the ultimate “suicide bodhisattva”, Jesus of Nazareth.

A truth that I am fairly certain Nichtern has not internalized, or reserved in his writing to this point, is that our bodies are wonderfully designed to channel love to create healing. Submitting to the action of tears, feeling deeply our sorrow: those are practices that inform love when and where it needs to do its work. Christ was the ultimate manifestation of this truth: after preaching that there was nothing we can do either to alienate God or to gain preferential claims on his love, Jesus surrendered body, mind and spirit to the purpose of healing humanity of the self-destructive consequences of the predatory programming that we brought forward from our Darwinian past. In his resurrection, he delivered compelling proof of the power of love for those that rely upon their hearts, and thus must trust in faith.

In the eventuality of their encounter with Christ, I am confident that the power of the Buddhist collective and its Tantric constructs will be a magnificent aid to those of simple faith. I am also confident that Nichtern, whether or not he understands it as such, already guides others to the love that secures their peace of mind.

Suppression

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She asked, “What does that card say? I can’t read it.”

“Guilt.”

She waved it off, and then, ignoring the facilitator’s instructions, launched into a description of how she would run a workshop like this.

I broke in. “Mine says ‘suppression.’ When I read it, I remembered a conversation with a man that told me it was time to ‘unleash the dragon.'”

She smiled slyly. “Dragons are powerful creatures.”

“Yes, but my power comes from a different source. That’s why what he said didn’t work. I’ve spent a long time dealing with hostility to my aims, as a means of understanding the reasons people pose for resistance. I guess that it’s time for that to end.”

Our shadow cards put aside, one of our late-arriving “tricksters” found the “maturity” card as the lodestone for our journey. To aid in activation of our shadow side, we were instructed in “shaman breathing”: two sharp inhales through the nose, and then a vocal exhale. My partner escaped to the far side of the room before we donned our blindfolds.

I knew what I needed to do, but I have always tried to keep others out of my struggle. I filled my lungs with short snorts and breathed out with a low moan. Focusing on my brain stem, I allowed it to fill with energy, placing fingers on my neck to guide it more deeply. Distracted by the moaning and grunting around me, I concluded that trying to control the process wasn’t going to work. I inhaled harshly and deeply twice, raised my face, and roared at the sky for ten seconds.

When I finished, a man’s voice exclaimed “Whoa!” But we were no longer just in the room. I was in a jungle, 140 million years ago. The air around me was filled with frightened chirps and the thumps and grunts of herbivores. The echoes of the day filled the room.

Thus began the long dance forward through time. I gloried in all the tools of the predator: teeth, thumb-claws, powerful legs and tails. We swept through the sky and water, and bestrode the land. For a time the dance became arhythmic: music did not move us – it was the twisting of the land and the rolling of rocks that punctuated our steps.

I rolled myself into an egg and listened for danger before cracking the shell. My snout dug into the belly of my prey. But the pressure of disaster dragged at me. I became the last saurian, dragging my limbs through the smoke-laden air into death.

Settling on the floor, I listened disdainfully to the shuffling around me. I had lost my body, but I still had fear. I pounded hard on the floor. I am present! The room shifted nervously. Again! I sat as a king and surveyed the herd, turning my will first this way and then that. I ruled as Emperor from the pyramids in Tenochtitlan. When Europe arose, I sent cannons into the field. After war was tamed, I rose heavenward on skyscrapers, driving my claws into the flow of money to suck energy from human industry.

And then, with a sudden startle, I realized that the game was wearisome, tawdry, boring. There was no evolution, no innovation, no change. I was sinking into abstraction, losing myself.

And then a higher understanding came to me.

“I was told this by a woman that I loved very deeply:”

It’s just a process, Brian.

“Don’t feel guilty. Destruction clears the field. It prevents us from repeating the mistakes of the past.

“Work with us.”

The back of my skull twitches. It’s trying to get back in, but we don’t need the personality any longer. Just the principle, as one among many, in service to love.

Separation of Witch and State

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During the 2004 campaign, NPR put up a fascinating juxtaposition of the two candidates on the campaign trail: John Kerry speaking before a thoughtful gathering of the League of Women’s Voters, and George Bush standing with sleeves rolled up and arms raised in front of a crowd of raucously cheering Republicans. Rationality versus emotion. As a Christian, the choice was obvious: John Kerry was the right man to be president.

In the subsequent months, I had a number of dreams about Ohio, the key battleground state in the election, and clearly projected my preference. A young woman showed up at a dance club I enjoyed a few months later and asked me: “What if George Bush was president in 2004 and you were president in 2008?” I held my laughter, but let loose the thought, “I happen to know that I’m not qualified to be president.”

It wasn’t the first time I ran into the Bush machine, nor would it be the last. While I was writing everdeepening.com, a mute woman showed up in the library, the ex-wife that the Bush clan had silenced. The president himself showed up in my dreams one night to beat his forehead on mine. I simply stood back from the confrontation, shrugged, and announced “I’m not impressed.” And when I returned to LA during the second term, I noticed a room across the parking alley filled with electronics gear, and one night my son announced “Dad, those guys in the other building are shining a red laser on your window.”

Women tend to complain about conservative institutions as being “male-dominated”, but my mother told me when I was a child that all the great religious figures of the day were “propped up” by women. When I heard that the pastor at Saddleback Church “spoke to Jesus every day”, I went down and poked around to discover that it was his wife that was putting up the counterfeit. During Easter observances, I was sitting in the stadium seating at the local mega-church when the pastor observed that Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders because he “wasn’t what they expected.” I found myself frowning out of the corner of my mouth, but when I tried to break in on his train of thought, a wall of sorts came between us. It was his wife and her girlfriends trying to protect him.

Protect him from what? The truth?

The book of Genesis is about men breaking out of this trap – the trap of being the tool by which women work their will on the world. Nancy Reagan lives in a mansion just adjacent to the Reagan library, and when I stood out on the lawn overlooking Moorpark, the message I got from that direction was “This is a strong man” – not “Wow, another man like Ronnie.” And when the Obamas couldn’t figure out why Boehner kept on blowing in the wind, I looked through him and saw his wife in the background. It’s not just the conservative men that are upset at a minority presence in the White House.

It’s started up again now that Neil Bush has thrown his hat into the 2016 race. A sexy young thing showed up at the café, claiming at one point to have attended SMU (“You know, where Laura Bush went to school”, she observed). Once I got all the pastors’ wives and Bush women out of the air, we had a productive conversation concerning the use of technology to help people with mental disease validate their experience and find support.

During W’s second term, Laura Bush showed up to ask whether I could help her husband with the pressures he was under. I was direct: “Not until he’s out of office.” What hurts your men, ladies, is the Peter Principle. Your support of their oversized egos pushes them to heights that they can’t manage. Take a page from the Obamas – it’s not the success of your men that matters. It’s the success of the people they lead. When those two things align, your man will be lifted up.

Should I be concerned for the men propped up by the women of our political elite? Intrinsically, no: they have enormous resources at their disposal. It’s the children in the inner city that I push on the swings on Saturday: those are the people that most deserve my concern.

And if Neil Bush wants to be president, I start with this: what’s he done to prepare Florida for global climate change? When is he going to stand up to the Koch brothers? When is he going to avow that government is the practice whereby we solve problems too big for us to solve alone, and that when the rich avow “no new taxes”, they’re simply pushing their problems on down the road to my children?