Cruise Out-Of-Control

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Genesis 2 introduces the seventh day of Creation with a brief lull in the relationship between God and the world.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

[NIV Gen. 2:2-3]

Having rested, God – who is Unconditional Love – then picks up his work in the Garden of Eden, demonstrating to Adam and Eve the virtues of love. In that context, there is peace between the animals. That peace is shattered when Adam and Eve choose to eat of the fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” They chose no longer to submit to the guidance of love. They chose to figure out how to do it on their own.

Jesus is the hope of the world because he had the strength to demonstrate the power that stands behind those that chose to love unconditionally. In the years both before and after that demonstration, however, we see that the Darwinian practices of brutal confrontation are often strong in the human relationships and politics. Many people still live like animals.

This is the context for my reaction to the decision by the Trump Administration to launch missile strikes against the regime of Syria’s dictator, Bashar Assad. The immediate response of Russia has been to claim the diplomatic high ground, asserting that the US action was illegal.

Assad has survived in Syria for one reason, and one reason only: Putin’s support. Russia has used its veto power in the UN security council to prevent coordinated global action against the Syrian tyrant. When the rebels were poised to oust Assad, Russia then intervened militarily, and along with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, have now put the rebels on the defensive.

In a series of votes in the UN Security Council, the Obama Administration had established Russian complicity in the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Our NATO ally, Turkey, has suffered greatly as the destination of opportunity for 3 million Syrians fleeing the war. Both of those institutions – the United Nations and NATO – were therefore poised to demand Russia’s removal from the UN security council, allowing unified international action to suppress Russian and Chinese military adventurism around the globe.

Russia was the guarantor the Syria had no chemical weapons. By resorting to force before the international community had established that indeed a chemical weapons attack had occurred using sarin gas, Trump has made the conflict one of brute force between two parties. By acting without consultation with our allies, Trump has undermined the institutions that could have acted to discipline Putin across the globe.

It’s all very satisfying to punch a bully in the nose, but it just adds confusion to a situation that should be managed by institutions of law enforcement. Trump has undermined US authority in those institutions – NATO and the United Nations. His action will have long-term consequences that will be to the advantage of those that seek to sow chaos across the globe – principally for the purpose of preventing humanity from grasping the enormous power that arises when we adopt peace and love as the guides to our conduct in all spheres of life.

A far better course would have been to mount a campaign to expel Russia from the UN security council.

Raising Tyrants

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In Revelation, the One on the Throne – which is Unconditional Love – has seven virtues in his midst. Taking the numerological insight, these should be set against the methods of Self, released from the scroll when the seven seals are broken.

So we have this (I apologize for the clumsy formatting – I can’t figure out how to style the table in WordPress):

Love Self
Stewardship Dominance
Harmony Conflict
Innovation Opportunism
Peace Death
Justice Vengeance
Creativity Destruction
Passion Rage

In each pairing, we see that adding love to the method of self ennobles its expression.

So I wake up at 2 this morning, with Bannon and Rove and Putin grumpily groping for dominance, projecting negativity into my domain, and how do I deal with it? I spent an hour our so trying to damp it down, and finally decided that stronger methods were needed.

Here’s the principle: dominance is about forcing people to pay attention to your demands. That involves establishing a spiritual network for communication. So I just inject a stronger signal.

I put in my earbuds and turned the volume up as loud as comfortable, and started with songs of hope for those trapped in bondage:

  • Francesca Batistelli – “Write Your Story”
  • Lauren Daigle – “O’Lord” and  “I Am Yours”

Followed immediately by a message of redemption to those enforcing selfishness:

  • Lauren Daigle – “Once and For All” and “How Can It Be?”

Finally toning it down with:

  • The Katinas – Draw Me Close

The early visualizations came in from all over the world, and were primarily feminine. I eventually found myself looking at the world from the outside, trying to push power down into the points of contact that had been established, projecting them into ever widening circles of influence.

The message of redemption came with a shift to the oligarchy, with specific individuals considering whether the effort of trying to maintain control was actually gaining them anything. Underneath we exposed the serpent on its throne. The tyrants were forced to confront their own obeisance.

It was nice at the end to find myself again among friends, relaxing in peace back into my mattress.

I hope that you see the strategy, dear readers: don’t fight them. Just use them as a transmission network. We only need to stick together, and when they die, we’ll recover those that they’ve tried to wall off behind their greed. They have one life; we have eternity.

Golly, Gowdy

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While the press digs in against President Trump, the Republican establishment doubles down on its support for him. Why?

Observation: if Russia did hack the US election, it succeeded only because over the last 35 years the Republican super-money PACs spent billions of dollars smearing Hillary Clinton’s name. Russia succeeded only because in the House of Representatives Gowdy’s Benghazi committee unlawfully used the investigative powers of Congress for pure political purposes.

The Republican flight from reality left them with a con man for a presidential candidate in 2016. They were looking at the final humiliation: the breaking of the glass ceiling by a candidate that they had realized 35 years ago would be the woman most likely to accomplish that goal. They were desperate.

Given the corruption, the lies, the hatred – what wouldn’t they have done to avoid that outcome?

I’m wondering: who was guiding the Russian operation. Was it really Vladimir Putin on his own? Or did he have help? Putin may be simply the fall-guy patsy for people like Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers.

And this may be why Ryan and McConnell are undermining the investigation – because it leads back, ultimately, to the Republican Party itself.

Feminine Power

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Letter to Dr. Marcie Bianco in reponse to her recent article in Quartz.

Reading “The Future of Feminism” in Quartz, I am concerned that the references you cite depart from the masculine framework for gender relations.

Many have also questioned whether strict “equality” is desirable, even if attainable. Diversity implies difference, if only in particulars. In the case of the genders, biology guarantees that there will never be strict equality.

My recommendation is a focus on “fairness.” Patriarchies do tend toward the centralization of power (to paraphrase Unamuno: “every man wishes to rule the world”). Practices of fairness – returning value commensurate to an individual’s contribution – will be interpreted by the “establishment” as a form of resistance to centralization. There is more to fairness than that, though. Fairness creates robust networks of trust.

My observations and research on “matriarchies” tends to support the conclusion that this is what women naturally seek. They give support to those that suffer, empowering them to think proactively rather than reactively.

I understand that “robust” is difficult to quantify. My belief, though, is that “robust” is the metric that feminists should pursue as alternative to the calculus of power (“What percentage of CEOs are women?”). I was heartened by Balanced Scorecard methods back in the ’90s (https://hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that-drive-performance-2). Unfortunately, in the interim exploitation of foreign labor and resources has made it too easy for the economic elite to centralize resources, and such disciplines don’t appear to have become part of American management culture.

Winged

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After six months, my masseuse is still trying to dissolve the knots that lie above the parasympathetic nodes along my spine. The visualizations that come have been intense at times.

The lady with the alabaster jar capturing the memory of Jesus before  he suffered the lash, projecting it into the future so he could be restored  to himself when the world was finally ready to receive him.

So she’s made some progress, but those lumps are persistent. Saturday night she was working persistently on the nodes between my shoulder blades, just under my neck, and I shared this silly thought with her:

You keep on doing that and you’re going to make my wings pop out.

We already knew that the lumps are tied to the pressure of the darkness that resists me.

I was working on the first of the scripts on Revelation yesterday down at Renaud’s café in Santa Barbara when a cover of “Blackbird” came on, this one through a woman’s tender vocals:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night:
Take these broken wings and learn to fly!
All your life,
You’ve been only waiting for this moment to arrive.
You’ve been only waiting for this moment to arrive.
You’ve been only waiting for this moment to arrive.

I had to go out into the gentle morning sunlight to let it wash the grief out of me.

At Dance Tribe, the gift from the avian kingdom – the lady that I fell in love with last January – finally returned. Not wanting to torment her, I just kept on dancing, and she fell into the embrace of her lover. As they wrapped themselves into each other, I reached past her for the gifts that she had received from me. He gripped her more firmly in his powerful arms, trying to protect her, but they had chosen me – they were only on loan to her in the hope that she would open herself to the Holy Mother.

When I resumed dancing, they brought the memory of her joy with them. It had been a long time since I danced with such playful abandon, just letting my parts do their work together.

The penultimate number of the session was the beautiful gift from the Wailing Jenny’s, “One Voice.” The souls of the dance surrendered themselves to union as the progression advanced: One voice…voices two….voices three, and then “this is the sound of all of us.”

But they weren’t expecting what happened on the last stanza. I spread my arms wide, pushing against the darkness with my palms:

This is the sound of one voice
One people, one voice
A song for every one of us
This is the sound of one voice

Oh, my humbled heart! The sound of a world grieving it’s sorrows.

Somebody must hear them! Oh, if it needs be, use me, dearest Father, use me.

Divine Intercourse

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At the AMP conference last month, Michelle Tepper’s topic was “breaking the silence on love, sex and relationships.” Michelle trumpeted her success reaching college students, but I found her message uncomfortable. She relies heavily on Biblical rules in framing responses to the psychological needs of individuals.

So when I approached her afterwards, I began by suggesting that we sit down, bringing our eyes to the same level.

As I explained, if any of us were complete in ourselves, we would be God. He made us a duality on purpose. I expressed my concern that this aspect of the Biblical message was underrepresented in her teaching.

Having warned us in her presentation that we shouldn’t go around looking for a relationship that completed us, Michelle was hostile to the idea. I guided her away from reiteration of her message, observing that I have been advising youth on-line.

Then the conversation took a sharp twist. She asked “Do you think that Jesus was satisfied?”

I knew that she meant sexually, but I shifted to a large view of his life. “No, he wasn’t satisfied at all. He knew that his culture needed to change, with a passion that drove him to the cross.”

Michelle wasn’t to be deterred. “I meant satisfied sexually. I believe that he was beyond that need.”

Well, it was time to plunge right in. I shrugged. “Read the description of the New Jerusalem. It is a metaphor for the union of the divine masculine with the divine feminine.”

She was struck dumb, as were the onlookers.

I continued “Look, the Bible is all about men’s problems. The holy mother is in hiding, and it is time for her to be sought out and revealed.”

I know that I appear to be uptight and tortured as regard my sexuality. But the Bible describes the brutal beast of the apocalypse as possessing ten “horns.” This is an apt metaphor for the masculine approach to dominance: many men run around the world trying to stick their penis into it. The feminine beast in Revelation is red, suggestive of the menstrual cycle. The feminine beast uses sex to co-opt masculine aggression.

So the reason that I haven’t been “playing the field” (which would be easy to accomplish) is because all the women that I meet accept these conventions. They may not wish to personify them in their relationships (part of what makes me attractive to them), but they accept that bestial patterns of dominance define the world that we live in.

Being who I am, I am incapable of submission to any ethic that limits the domain in which love is expressed. So I choose not to have a relationship with any woman that brings that with her.

Sera Beak has been in my mind ever since I read “Red, Hot and Holy.” I believe that she showed up at MovinGround one Sunday after I filled out her online contact form. In that message, I suggested that if we were each who we claimed to be, that would be apparent only in relation to one another. She was clearly uncomfortable in my presence during the dance, and stood before me timidly afterwards. My thought was “Not yet.”

She lives in Texas, though, which is a hot-bed of Christian hypocrisy. Last year I felt her reaching out in concern, and I poured power into her spirit, trying to expand her range of influence.

Why? Read the book: Sera went all the way in with the Red Lady, and found wisdom waiting for her on the other side. That wisdom came from the holy mother.

Putting this all together last night, I reached out again, sending “It’s time for us to merge our powers.”

But what are those powers? What is the nature of love, and how is sex a metaphor for its operation?

Our exploration last night was complicated by pragmatic concerns, but it boils down to this: any act of love that preserves self involves penetration and yielding. A gift is offered, but room must be made for it to be received. As we are aggregates (both physically and spiritually), reception is consensual at many levels. Full acceptance requires communication of the nature of the gift, and adaptation to the perceptions of those smaller parts. That involves circulation, which is stimulated by withdrawal so that the gift of yielding may be repeated again and again until consummated.

Yeah. This is “White Hot” and Holy. This is why Jesus told the Magdalene “Do not cling to me.”

The visualization eventually evolved as a complex many-dimensional Klein bottle. A man penetrates a woman, the women connecting to the Earth that gives life to the man, the male penetrating the Earth as light from the sun, the light from the sun sheltered in the womb of space, and on and outward.

The Bible, being concerned with men, celebrates the masculine aspect of God. But that is only half the story.