TOWARDS A SACRED SEXUALITY

By

Friar Killian Jennings, O.S.O.

with

F. X. K.

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©2001 by FXK

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Foreword About Eight Morons. 3

… More Words, Fore! 5

Be-Fore: Why “Sacred Sexuality”?. 9

I. In the Beginning: Sacred Sexuality In Genesis. 12

II. Prison & Jesus’ Homoerotic Theft 20

Words: Literal, Symbolic, Mystical 20

Prison: Jesus’ Homoerotic Theft 21

Captive: “Do Your Own Time!”. 28

The Intimate Act is the Mythic Act 30

The Dark Mother: Shade Mother 34

III. Secular Myth of Scientism and the Penitentiary. 37

Modesty. 45

IV. Skin. 47

V. The Sexual Sense. 54

VI. Deep Sleep 59

Deep Sleep Preparation. 64

VII. Intending & Attending. 72

VIII. Elements. 77

Water 79

Earth. 80

Fire. 81

Air 83

IX. Towards … Some Conclusions. 87

X. Towards …Invitation of Earthfolk. 90

Foreword About Eight Morons

Are you a Seeker? If so, then you should find at least parts of this book worth your attention. What is a Seeker? Someone who turns over rocks. Turns over looking for new insights. Dimensions. Alien realities. One who feels a bit out of place, off stride with how things are and who hears others tell them, Will you ever settle down? Settle down as to thinking as well as feeling. One who finds all schools of thoughts to be unsettling, in that they are not all they claim to be. One who feels that there is more to what everyone else claims is “It!” One who wanders after sundown, drawn by moonlight.

Okay. Not everyone is a Seeker every moment of their life. You seek. You settle down. You seek. Maybe that’s more comfortable. And it’s not Seeking as just thinking; not a school thing. In fact it is more of a feeling thing. If your heart is more restless than your mind, you’re on track. Though I do a lot of talking about thinking here, it is just a way, one way, of turning over the rock of my heart.

Each chapter is a rock. Something I’ve encountered or studied or imagined, and to write this I had to place them in some order, but don’t be constrained by linerality. Scan the Table of Contents, scroll ahead, start from the back – look for a rock you’d like to turn. That’s okay with me.

But all said and done it’s this “drawn by moonlight” which marks a Seeker in light of our current culture. Can you feel that image? …. I say a lot about “culture.” So, I hope the word has some meaning for you. It’s vague enough to have more meanings than either of us can handle. But most folk have some sense and feel for the word. It’s like water and fish – does a fish’s eye ever get wet? Like yours and mine does?

Wet fisheye. That’s a segue to “Sacred Sexuality.” For our culture has no mental or spiritual place for this phrase. It strikes most, at first hearing, as at least slightly pornographic. Our culture has a place for the word “sacred” and the word “sexuality,” but not linked. Together, they are akin to the phrase “Virgin Birth” - which has become so commonplace in Biblical culture that few – except pedants – would correctly comment, “That’s oxymoronic.” Oxymoronic: calling you to pay attention to the phrase, because each word has a clear meaning:Virgin and Birth, but linked together they convulse, resist sidling up next to the other … see, you’ve probably uttered the phrase yourself, “Virgin Birth,” without being physically repulsed. But consider: Virgin calls forth images of shy, blushing pubescent innocence; eyes averted, possibly an odor of sanctity … Birth evokes birthing, legs spread, huge belly, a scene somewhat gross, very bodily, groans, screams, lots of odorous bodily emanations, very bloody, death-spying … hmmm, pornographic? An overall implication of violation: child pornography - a Virgin Birthing!

Yet, that’s where culture exists – and innovates and imagines, as we shall see - in the area called oxymoronic. Which on the serious side has a lot to do with pornography … and on the humorous side sounds like it should mean “eight morons” – if that amuses you, moonlight is drawing you.

You’ve guessed it. I will be talking about “culture” as Western and Biblical. Also, Secular. Throw in Patriarchal. Tone it with American. Now, if you’ve been Seeking for several decades, you’ve probably been splashing about in those terms: adjectival; linked as phrases; countering each other - drowning some, rescuing others. You might be quite impatient and say, “Oh, no! Not that crap, again!” … Well, it’s like the water, the fish has no choice: the Earth is what? 80% water; and our bodies about 60%? Yet, I am not Seeking to settle in that water. Rather, to swim around and about and through and over the wet such that – what I as fish can only imagine as unimaginable! - water becomes air! That I amazingly fly out of the water! “Out?!” To turn over the rock of water: Am I crazy? Did a fish, long time ago, really break through the surface and seek to be, for even the most fleeting of moments, in the air? What was it imagining? Was it crazy?

Seekers are, in varying degrees, a tad mad, a hop-crazy, glazed-eye insane … offenders, at times criminals, outlaws … out of the law: a fish in the air, struggling to pull itself out of the water … it gives you pause: Life is a smattering mad? Well, at least for some: madly seeking.

Okay. “Sacred Sexuality.” Eight morons would comment on it in eight different ways. Turn it over as a rock eight different ways. Settle with it, eight … well, you get my drift. Mine is just one. It is, at its conclusion, an invitation to you to comment upon the phrase. To Seek with it and through it; feel it; imagine it … I desire to hear, see, feel it through you. I’m writing this to hear back about what you’ve found under your rocks.

As is fitting for the times: you can contact me on the Net. Drop a note: Friar Killian &/or FXK at earthfolk@cox.net

(Dare you be the eighth?)

… More Words, Fore!

What Is, Is Not/ What Is Not, Is – if you Seek, this is what it is all about. That there is always “more.” To see. To feel. To understand. To experience. Always a going beyond. Ever a transforming experience – mental, psychic, bodily and/or spiritual – just ahead. Waiting. … Mystery. What some call the “mysterium tremendum.” Terrifying, trembling, overwhelming but utterly The Real: Ha. Turning over rocks.

The Internet is one rock. It fits into this oxymoronic discussion. It is where I first encountered a cultural space for the phrase “Sacred Sexuality,” and where I first discovered how many different kinds of folks – those other morons – were trying to give it some meaning. As a browser “Search” phrase, “Sacred Sexuality” appeared near the end of the millennium. While a small shelf of books reference or use the phrase, it is the Internet which has given it a voice and a degree of publication

Let’s reflect upon the fact that “Sacred Sexuality” is a phrase which appeared near the end of the millennium. And that while a small shelf of books reference or use the phrase, it is the Internet which has given it a voice and a degree of publication. This is a curious and unsettling fact when trying to find a place from which “to start.” I cannot cite the Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of “Sacred Sexuality.” At least not right now, in early 2001. I can search Britannica.com and find a link, but not a printable entry. Why is this significant? It reflects the reality that the phrase “sacred sexuality” is, to most, unintelligible. That it is not a phrase the Editors anticipate the average encyclopedia user will look-up. It presses me to consider that the phrase is, culturally, an alien phrase, one that is, for many or most, unimaginable. In sum, as a phrase it is not. It exists more comfortably in that nebulous world termed “cyber-space.” Where anything can exist – just “search” and you shall find! (Type any two words together and something’s bound to be referenced.) But where is it? And does that mean that “it” is not-real? Hmmm.

The Net as “world-wide web” is oxymoronic because, if it is one thing, what it is not is a “thing,” not a net or a web – just a bunch of 1s and 0s representing On and Off voltages. Whatever “cyber-space” is, it is not a measurable space. You are no-where, rather, you are On-line or Off-line, which, again, is not a line but a frame of mind and a sense of presence. To utter, “On-line!” is to conjure. Cyber-space is more akin to the theorized endless outer space. But, curiously, an inner space, if a space at all. And, then, not even so much inner as interior, knocking on intimate. All this plays into how you and I proceed as we Seek towards Sacred Sexuality.

The Net is really more a space for imagining than one of boundaries or coordinates. A space which does not belong to anyone. An imagination which is not bound by a dominant culture. It is more “not” that it is “is” – in the sense that cyber-space is not a space at all.

Cyber-space just appeared without being “discovered.” It looks as if it is inside a computer box. But we have come to find that that piece of hardware has done something to our culture, our water. Words which once denoted boundaries, words of measure and borders: global, world-wide – have cast a subtle web across our eyes and … where are we when in cyber-space? Emotionally, we are hyper-linked. Like a quantum jump. Hmmm. It is even more curious that we now refer to non-cyber-space as being “off-line.” As if the bounded world is now the mad place to be. “Sacred Sexuality” is on-line. Hmmm. Muse on this as you read, that “the real world” is not-on-line.

Out of this “not-off-line” space has emerged that which has been culturally “not” for time immemorial. “Sacred sexuality” has been “not” since The Beginning of the culture which dominates the world, namely, the Biblical culture. For my purposes, the Biblical culture is off-line. So, in some ways, this book is not-off-line

When on-line you are as you are not. You can “logon” as anyone. Others with whom you communicate only know the you you say you are. Hmmm. For many, the Net is the place to “not be” who they are in the everyday world. Yet, when we communicate with someone, we want to know, “Who are you?” Who is Friar Killian Jennings, O.S.O. His collaborator: FXK? One person? Several? Young. Old. Fat. Skinny. Male. Female. Other. Blah. Blah.

The cyber-world has changed the notion of “I.” When on-line my “I” can have all the dimensions it really has but which have been limited by my culture. I am who I say I am – if the other person (you) is willing to believe me. More, to conjure me. “I” am not “I” as others know me – even those in the adjacent room watching TV - as I go cyber. At its best, the cyber-ego is as unbounded, rich, robust and Seeking as it can possibly be. … Yes! – most certainly – there is the cyber-shade, the cyber-evil “Not I” - we all know about the darker side. It gets a lot of press. Interesting that sexual abuse is where most offline folk are concerned about what’s online. For us, those who use cyber-connections for sexual abuse are bringing the core offline eroticism online. But that will become clearer as you come to grasp the Sacred Sexuality we are working “towards.” Online allows for an exploration of imagination which can enhance Attention and Intention as we set it forth in later chapters. Evil, on or off-line, is that eroticism which denies, abhors, rejects and thrives without Attention and Intention.

As you read this book, you can’t help but begin to say to yourself, “Hell, I know what Friar K and FXK are like!” You will construct “me” and/or “we” as you read. As I construct you as I write. All foolish sounding stuff if it wasn’t the core experience of the Internet!

In this light, “going on-line” is an anti-cultural act. Somewhat of a culturally nihilistic adventure. For culture has definition; it enables you to answer the question, Who am I? Culture is bounded by Tradition. In shifty contrast, the price of entry onto the Web is to risk encountering your own potentially endless self-definitions and identities – as you can proceed as Every(wo)man; as Hero, Devil, Trickster, et al.

The immediate consequence is that “I” am writing this somewhat conversationally – actually, idiosyncratically. Not always hiding behind distancing pronouns or indirect references. Not always being shamelessly individualistic nor autobiographical, but a bit of that – simply because you expect to be able to Search and bring up all the possibly relevant parts of my experience, even the ones a more judicious author would avoid.

Consequently, when I talk and say “I,” it is not important that you truly know who I am. Rather that you come to know who you are as you Seek through me. Enough! So, who am I? Who am I as “not I”? If you believe me, then here is who I am and am not.

I am a Seeker who grew up desiring to be a priest in the Roman Catholic faith. Spiritual warrior desiring to become patriarch of souls, I became a seminarian, young monk, and then, having left the monastery, a “lay theologian” – an academic, theological scholar. Throw in the Vietnam War and I became a Conscientious Objector who fulfilled his Alternative Service. Throw in the murder of a young Black Panther and I became a Draft Resister; eventually a Catholic Radical draft board raider; providentially, a federal inmate.

I became “not” to the Biblical culture when I refused to participate in the ritual of warring and ended up in federal prison. That’s where I started. Where I first experienced being “off line,” and “out of the law” to our water, the Biblical Culture. Conversely, it is where I discovered minute by minute and breath by breath what it means to “be” in the Biblical sense.

I cannot underestimate the spiritual epiphany which prison was for me. Both a fundamental break-down and a break-through. Yet, I am acutely aware that most who read this have not had to Seek through the prison space – “Inside” as they say, quite a bit as peculiar as “cyber-space” ... but more on that, later. … To be Biblically is, first off, to be male. Stop! Beware: it is more than that: to be Lone Male. … To be is to be Chosen. Yet, again, you must halt, not glibly roll over the word, for it is not chosen as if nestled to one’s bosom, no, it is more like the chosenness of the Selective Service “Greetings!” – you are to be a Warrior of God. Warrior and Patriarch.

In prison, I found the other side of Biblical maleness, that, to be Chosen is also to be Victim. What con ever says, “I’m guilty!” ? Ha. You forever have an Excuse … to be as violent, as maladjusted, as much out-of-the-water as any deviant can be! … What did Adam say? Not me: her! But, but, but … what is, is not – and for the first time ever, in prison, you become not a victim. No more crucifixes hanging you from dry walls. No. … While you are supposed to leave prison and live as a Victim – as a Captive – so it does not have to be. Indeed, it was inside the secular tomb that I was born anew: slain, true; legally, culturally “out of the law,” a dead-man walking thing. Ah, I shudder to remember … I exited prison a “not.” … “Not” being the incarnation of Biblical Evil: I as marked, a scion of Cain, felon, outlaw, disenfranchised, always prisoner: to some, Satanic, always blasphemer, worshipper of false idols … it goes on: 8867-147: on and on.

But, as such, redeemed, corrected, rehabilitated …not-off-line forever! Living in a spectral space. On-line to something, which I did not know then; only sensed years later. The presence of “Mother” – but more on this later. (See: “Prison, Bottoming Out, Mother” on www.earthfolk.net)

Yet, Seeking is not so seemingly a straight path – as misleading as this cursory autobiographical recount might imply. No orthogenesis or straight-arrow of unfolding. Rather, once again I settled into “normal”: culturally acceptable as spouse, father, door to door salesman, corporate senior manager, volunteer basketball coach … you’ve guessed it: bi-tri-quad-furcated being; that tad mad thing: crazy-legged: in but not of the world; of the world but not in it … all in all Seeking and Settling and Seeking … till the mind no longer had categories, except oxymoronic ones, and so it happened that “Sacred Sexuality” was whispered, then uttered aloud … and so here we are. You and me. Seekers crossing paths: on-line and off-line. So, as you read, if you slip between these states of “line” that’s how it should be. At least, as I see it, feel it, imagine it.

How “to start”? If I knew where you were, then I’d work from there. But I only know where I am, right now. I am not in the Biblical culture. At least, I work hard not to remain there. What does that mean? One key thing that it means is that I am not, nor will I be, asking you to emulate my life nor follow in my foot-steps. While I want you to value my life, my life only has meaning as I engage yours, as I embrace you. Now, I know that such might sound like pure bullshit, a sales con, but it’s not. Not to plunder the image to death, but the “I” here is like a Search Engine. A vehicle for your Seeking.

Okay. If you Search on my “I,” this is the path. The root directory. You will have to follow me “Inside” – which is akin to your seeking in cyber-space, so it can be done. This will take us to the Biblical story of Genesis. I apologize if you feel that you’ve gone there too many times already, but, it is my key to moving Towards a Sacred Sexuality.

All this to get to the most pressing question: What to do? How to practice Sacred Sexuality? Yes, the most challenging part – to both you and me. For practice requires that you put aside the Biblical Tradition with its spiritual practice of the solitary Lone Male. Not an easy task. The practice of Sacred Sexuality begins when you start to imagine yourself erotically. This means with an other. Yes, an Other-as-Beloved is required to begin Sacred Sexuality just as an Other-as-Enemy is required to begin the Biblical Quest.

The unsettling Story, here, is that you are the Beloved. Yet you need to discover your Belovedness – which requires being embraced by your Beloved. Sounds like an impossible chicken-and-egg situation, doesn’t it?! Well, Sacred Sexuality practice is creational. We can only invite you to practice.

Certain approaches to practicing are offered, rather than a list of actual rituals and happenings. Proceed as you want, but I believe they will only be fully insightful to you if you find them after the first chapters – so, indulge me as I turn over my rocks.

Be-Fore: Why “Sacred Sexuality”?

This section will be useful to some as a beginning, to others as a conclusionary end.

After all you’ve read – or in preparation to evaluate why you should spend some time reading this work – there is the question, “Why all this to-do about Sacred Sexuality?”

The most uncomfortable adjustment most readers will have to make is the interpretation of Genesis as a Sacred Sexuality story. In fact, even more might wonder why there is all this focus on Genesis at all. Indeed, for many who consider themselves secularists or non-religious, the concern with any alleged sacred scripture is a waste of time. Yet, that stance, itself, reflects the victory of Genesis’ Sacred Sexuality story! This is not a trivial statement, nor is it a put-down in any way. Rather, Genesis’ Sacred Sexuality story is that there is no sacred sexuality. Understood in this light, the “there is no sacred sexuality” advocates are – intentionally or not – true witnesses to the importance of Genesis’ victory.

We know that this might sound self-serving, namely, that it is an intellectual dodge to say that “what is not there is actually what is really there!” But throughout this work, there is an experiential claim to the correctness of the ancient phrases, “what is, is not” and “what is not, is.” The experience is grounded in that of being a prisoner.

“Why” is the question raised by the prisoner. Simply, as we sat in the federal pen, the question arose, Why are they doing this? Meaning, why are we locked up in cages? Told to suffer through “doing time”? Controlled as the prison discipline so controls? We were driven to seek further when out of prison we worked in a prison reform project. Then, we went back to graduate school to study the historical and cultural roots of what we discovered was a peculiar American experiment called “the penitentiary” – or as one of its founding lights termed it, a “House of Terror.”

It took a long, long, long time – hitting bottom in drink and depression – to confront the truth of what every prisoner feels. Feels, not knows. We feel the presence of The Dark Mother. We know the presence of the Dark Father – He who slays his own sons. She who eats her own children. Prisoners feel mythically.

Again, if the term “myth” means something silly, or a video from Disney, you will have to struggle with the experiences described herein. Only non-prisoners delude themselves into saying that they do not feel mythically. Much akin to just about every prisoner ever met stating, “I’m innocent, really!”

Your participation in the prisoner mythic emotional sphere is keyed by your working on the insights drawn from applying the “what is not, is” and “what is, is not” principles of interpretation. You have to be open to your participation as imprisoner of the imprisoned to even just begin.

As you will read, you are not required to become a prisoner to grasp why Genesis is so alive and victorious, today. No, you will discover that this whole mythic experience is yours - ! – as you explore, reflect upon, and labor to create a Sacred Sexuality embrace with your Beloved.

Indeed, Genesis is a prison story. Wherein woman: female, feminine, goddess – is captured and, mythically, sentenced to exist within or “inside” the male – which we come to term the Lone Male God.

In Biblical culture, eros has been whittled down to simple expression as masturbation. More, as male masturbation, alone – to wit, of the Lone Male. In Genesis there is no female. No female being – Adam exists before Eve is derived from him. No goddess. No Earth Mother. No Divine Consort. No birthing presence. All that is, is the same-sex creation story of the male rib being the creational source of the female. Certainly, this rib is not a birthing organ? But, then, you will see that this rib is a substitute for the cock. Indeed, the act of creating woman is an act of masturbation.

The cock is “not” in Genesis, but, as we see it, it is all that the story is about: it is the main visual of Genesis.

At this point, for those not interested in myth or sacred stories, Genesis begins to fascinate. What seemed like a really boring story with some stupid rib hocus-pocus turns out to be a pot-boiler stirred by hard cocks! Indeed, Genesis is a story told to answer the question, Why? – about women. Why are they here? Why do we have to worship them (the goddess)? Why do we value them (as birthing mothers)? Why do we have to care for them (marriage)? And so on.

Genesis is a story told and written to answer questions, not to raise new ones.

***********************

This is why working “towards” a Sacred Sexuality is so critical at this historic moment. We need answers to a lot of questions. About why we are on the earth. What, if anything, is the significance of races. Why are there males and females and not some hermaphroditic or androgynous humans. In short, the “leaks” from the current “counter-cultural” movements – which span ecological, political, religious, scientific, sexual, etc. “alternative movements” – require a mythos.

In the ‘60s there were lots of “leaks.” Social Justice was one. “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” was another. The upheaval in the Roman Catholic Church in the events of Vatican Council Two was one for many folk. In sum, there was a lot of things to do, but there was also a general feeling that we could not ground what we were doing in anything other than the Warrior Mythos. As stated here and in other documents on www.earthfolk.net, we, ourselves, became non-violent warriors. We had no other mythic grounding. In time, we warred against each other.

Maybe that’s what sounds the siren call for “towards” more than anything else. Namely, that those working for social justice and transformation towards a more fully human society and culture are warring against each other. I remember the first time a radical anti-war woman activist charged me of sexism. More, the day I entered a room of radical feminists and they fell silent until I left the room! This was pre-prison, and, at the time, I was baffled more than angered or understanding.

The “political is personal” and the “personal is political” are phrases which have been bantered about, sometimes quite hatefully. We take from this what we feel is the grounding truth: the mythic is personal and the personal is mythic.

Many dedicated and fiercely committed activists turn cynical as they age. More bitterness is found at the end of a needle or the bottom of a whiskey bottle than is enlightenment. “Burn out” is considered a radical’s professional hazard. And, to this point in time, the various “movements” have not found a coordinated center, a natural rhythm, or a ground of emotional/erotic bonding from which to ritualize and weave mythic Stories.

Now, we are aware of the Reimagining movement. Of a lot of the ritual work which has gone on especially in feminist circles. And this is where many of you will leave us. For we are not content to stay in the Garden of Eden – which is how we see the Biblical World, especially in its secularist, Americanist guise.

For us, working “towards” is a task of unimaginable scope and challenge. That is why we are not trying to do it. Not trying to be Hercules. Or Atlas. Or Hera. No, we work “towards” by inviting you to discover, imagine, explore and ritualize your mythic intimacy. The imagining of Sacred Sexuality stories is a collective and communal task – which will, hopefully, become clearer as you read. And, as we state, again and then again, your “I” is simultaneously individual as it is collective as it is communal. … Anyway, “Fore!”

I. In the Beginning: Sacred Sexuality In Genesis

“Sacred Sexuality” is a phrase rarely uttered in public. Nor even in private. At least not in our Western world or in our Biblical culture. This is part of the reason why “Towards a Sacred Sexuality” has been written.

If culture is what the water is to the fish, how can someone inside a culture speak of it as if he or she is outside? That’s a fair question. All that I can say is that there are words and phrases which, when spoken, cause others to look at you or act upon you in ways that tell you that you’ve stepped outside, into an alien space: forbidden, taboo. “Sacred Sexuality” is one such phrase. It is more than oxymoronic; it is a phrase which viscerally repulses many. They step back and away from you. You say it and you’re off-line in their world.

The primary insight articulated here – and which is the burden of explanation of this text – is that Sacred Sexuality is not our water; not our culture. Yet, paradoxically, this also means that Genesis is, essentially, all about Sacred Sexuality, but as understood with the twist of interpretation of the what is not, is approach. I’m sure you could speak of other phrases or of other like experiences. Personally, I said, “Hell No I Won’t Go!” to war; destroyed my draft card and experienced the same effect: thrust out into the non-space, the inner core of cultural nothingness called prison or, aptly, “Inside.” The oxymoronic phrase of that time was “non-violence” – properly so to a Biblical culture which has no place for other than worship as violence: the breaking of the body.

When I talk about having “done time” in prison, most, though not all, recoil: a physical repulsion and a personal distancing. This is quite curious because Prison is our culture’s “inside.” Granted, prison is where one becomes “off-line” so that they can, in due time, become “on-line” again. However, once “inside” there seems to be no way back “online” - or “outside” into the Free World, as they say. There is a key connectedness between prison and Sacred Sexuality, which will be explored throughout this work.

Let’s consider what our culture, our water, is.

American culture is a Western, Biblical culture. It is Patriarchal. It is also described as Secular. Critical to my Seeking has been the unfolding clarity about the dynamic and symbiotic relationship between the Biblical and the Secular. (See, Chapter III.) Growing up, the Secular was positioned as not-Biblical. It was as if America had two cultures – which were antagonistic and competing. Yet, upon closer historical examination, it became evident that the foundational beliefs and sacred stories of the Biblical Tradition find full expression in Secular variants. What is termed “secular” is but a ritual innovation on the “sacred” of the Biblical Tradition. It is not a replacement, nor a usurpation. Rather, they are segments on one mobius strip. Consequently, “Sacred Sexuality” is as alien to the Secular culture as it is to the contemporary religious Biblical culture.

America’s cultural history records how the religious Biblicalists have, in the main, turned into Secularists. The transformation from the Puritan theocracy into Jacksonian Democracy and Manifest Destiny and the Progressive Era’s Great Society (the Sixties is a bloom of this seed) is a seamless innovation, never a deviation, expressing the themes and beliefs of the foundational Biblical Sacred Stories. The prime guardian – at once ancient and currently entrepreneurial – has been Harvard College, now, University. While it is intellectually interesting to detail and discuss this transformation – which many scholars have recounted: the midwifery of Unitarianism! – what is of import, here, is the fact that how you (“We, The People”) are to feel has not changed.

Americans – as exemplars of the Western, Biblical, Patriarchal, Secular culture – feel Chosen. This is our Genesis Story both religious and secular. It is the primal and primary tenet of both our personal Biblical faith and what scholars have designated our secular Civil Religion.

Now, the primal emotional characteristic of Chosenness is the act of separating: stepping away, back, aside from the not-Chosen. If we are Chosen, who is not Chosen? There has to be an Other; someone Alien. Someone off-line; out of the law; not in the water. (“Inside.”) Vomiting repulsion. Here arises the variously demonized and verbally/ visually distanced: The Enemy - the first repulsing one is Woman.

The Enemy is, mythically first, God. God as Mother. “God” as gods. Those gods present in the first Genesis account: “Let us make man in our image.” This, actually, as will be argued later, is the mythic objective of the Genesis Story – the vanquishing of The Gods: gods and goddesses.

(“Gods” is what we term a “leak.” It references our notion of Family: Holy. It leaks the presences of a family of gods, presumably gods and goddesses. This is why the notion of “family” is used by us. “Family” is not simply a biological concept, rather it is the unifying literal, symbolic and mystical concept. Family is mobius yet also multi-dimensional. For us, a “swirl” image and emotion.)

Now, in Genesis, He isn’t called Father. This isn’t a story about a loving parent and how He creates his son and family. No. In respect to “God’s nature,” Genesis is all about power. El and Yahweh are “names,” but they are not familiar nor familial.

The real issue is that to grasp the utter power of Genesis you must focus on the emotion of the Story. In Genesis God is, emotionally, really a secondary character. The primary one is Adam. It is his Story, not His Story. Traditionally, the Biblicists say that in Genesis God is speaking to Man. Rather, it is Man speaking to God. Genesis is a set of answers to Man’s questions. Who do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is my relationship to Others: human, animal and plant?

The Story is written by someone – over time, by an aggregate; through accretion - who already has the answers. Genesis was not written as a set of questions which were then sent off to God; who then wrote Genesis in response. More than likely this questioning and answering was accomplished in a dreaming state – a fact which will be explored later.

Who do I come from? This is also the identity question: Who am I? The answer is given through the single and singular character, Adam. In Genesis there is only one human: all of creation is just so that Adam can be. In one sense this is a powerful affirmation of the essential worthiness of Adam. Yet, it is subordinated to Adam’s experience of loneliness. He knows his loneliness through naming. Adam names the animals and plants. It is his naming which is singular and which sets him apart from the animals and plants. Curiously, though he has language, and so names, he has no other human with whom to talk. Isolated individualism: Lone Male.

Right off in the sacred text you confront two Genesis sacred sexuality stories. The “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness … male and female created He them” and “The Rib” (“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”) stories. Since it is The Rib story which grounds Biblical Tradition, it is our focus. (The “male and female created He them” is linked with a polytheistic phrasing which has troubled Biblicalists till this day: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ….”). Apologists cite the non-rib story to show women that they are “included in God’s Plan” – and to fend off feminists - but theirs is an awkward and basically indefensible, mollifying interpretation and argument since The Rib has and continues to ground and define Biblical culture, theology and spirituality.

In finding the answer to who he is, Adam discovers that he is alone. Now, this is not just a trivial fact soon wiped out by The Rib event. No, this aloneness is the emotional core of Genesis. It is what the story has been building up to: Day 1, Day 2, etc. to Day 6. Actually, the emotional sequence plays in reverse, as do the questions asked. Day 6 is the primary emotional day: Who am I? The answer: You are Alone. Or, a more happy phrase, I believe, is, “You are Lone Male.” Of critical note is that this is not Maleness in genital terms. Since Woman is not yet created, Adam can have no sense of his Maleness in genital terms. While it might seem silly to ask, Did Adam have genitals? - the fact of his Aloneness and his Lone Maleness is underscored by the associated, centuries old theological puzzler: Did Adam have a belly button? If he is Lone Male, the answer is No. (A “No” visually affirmed and confirmed in religious art through the ages.)

Indeed, God is, likewise, a Lone Male, since the Tradition did not accept “Let us create” to infer at least a minimum of two divinities: Mother and Father. This Lone Maleness appears to be sufficient because it is expressed in terms of creational power, “God said let there …” and expressed dominion. Adam’s first emotional experience of his Lone Maleness is his separating from every other created and living thing through his naming.

Looking at it this way, the Eros of Genesis is the power of creating and naming. What God “labors” to do – the groan of creation – is expressed through Adam’s experience of what he labors to do, namely, to separate himself from all other createds. As Adam is God’s expressed loneliness, so is creation Adam’s expressed loneliness.

In the Tradition, the matter of Adam’s belly-button is not comic relief. The Omphalos Controversy, as it is called, arose from reflection upon what comes next in the story. God say, “It isn’t good for man to be alone.” God says it because the writer(s) hear it as Adam’s question. Females are, obviously, all around the writer(s). How to account for them?

Again, the “creation” of Eve is the last act before God rests. It is, however, the very first emotional question: Why is she? This, actually, is what Genesis is about, namely, What to do with women?! She who is the Other. Who is Nature. Who is the incarnation of the Goddess – those “gods” who are not-Chosen; aliens.

In line with grasping that Adam expresses God’s loneliness is the fact that so does Eve express Adam’s. Eve as “Mother Nature” is the embodiment of all that has already been named, of all other createds. You have to pause here and realize that Genesis is being written by individuals who are aware of other creation stories and other cultures. The Goddess, Mother God, Earth goddesses, the Feminine and feminine are well known ideas and felt emotions. That the Goddess is Mother is Earth expressing the life force of all createds, namely, she is the earth groaning to create children, such is an intellectual and emotional given. So, there are already answers at hand to, Why is she?

Working forward from Day 1 to Day 6’s pre-Rib event, the Erotic relationship between Adam and God is grounded in power and naming. There is an unexpressed Male bond in that Adam, though without belly button, has a penis – a “fact” never questioned through the centuries in the Tradition as is his belly button. The fact of the penis is expressed through The Rib. This is a point for reflection: Did Adam have a penis when created? Or did it simultaneously appear when Eve was “created” from his Rib? As “nature abhors a vacuum,” why would God create a penis before it had any procreational use? One could suppose that excretion could be accomplished in another way? Ha. But, following what is not, is, you can see how The Rib is misdirection, so as to subordinate and minimalize the erotic power of woman by disengaging her from the cock. Yes, it is the cock which is the visual, iconic center of this Story.

Unless you want to apply some notion of “primitive sexual stupidity” to Adam, it must be accepted that he felt the power of his (at least “potentially erotic”) penis. Again, unless you want to posit a spectacular (miraculous?) distinction between Adam and males of all subsequent ages, he knew about the intimate relationship of intercourse and the birth of babies. Again, unless you want to endow him with a stunning ignorance and barnyard idiocy - for the animals around him were male and female - he knew what had to happen for birth. Okay. Pay Attention To This: Adam is put into a “deep sleep” (he is not talking, not naming) – Note: this “deep sleep” happens only to him; not in any subsequent passages to Eve - as such it is the primary characteristic of how God and Adam create. … What now happens in the Story is a not uncommon occurrence in mythological accounts, namely, a transference of imagery: when in this “deep sleep” God took a rib … the rib is not an actual rib, rather it is the penis. Adam’s male power, his eros, is his penis – everyone reading, hearing this Story knows and accepts this literary sleight-of-hand and trick-of-the-eye in their consciousness. (Unless, once again, you posit a “primitive mentality” which is defined in terms of how stupid everyone was about human biology and story-telling.) Here is revealed that the primary erotic act is the act of deep sleep dreaming. It is in such a state that the male encounters both the divine and the female. In such a state does he continue to control her culturally. This is a key point: that culture is grounded in deep sleep dreaming. {In Chapter 6 when sacred sexuality practice is discussed, deep sleep is of central concern.}

{Okay. You live at a time when the Secular variant of the Biblical mythos is expressed in the language of Scientism. (See Chapter 3.) It is a reductionist approach & method. Believing that everything is and must be explained in terms of its components. That the part is the sum of the whole – not the whole, the sum of its parts. Dreaming is brain activity. Neuronal and synaptic this and that. There is no meaning, only explanation. As if humans came to be through dissection. Hmm. Possibly cloning will prove this view correct! Ha. Of course, if these types of secularists didn’t “dream” the reductionist dream, where would they be? Oh, this is always such a tedious discussion. Just note, that that which we have been paying the least attention to, culturally and mythically – such as the feminine, Mother and Goddess – is a key, as such, so is dreaming in terms of “deep sleeping.” In sum, this is what Sacred Sexuality is about: practicing deep-sleeping … but we’re not there yet.}

Male power is penile power. Totem. So, Adam’s penis ejaculates Eve. In deep sleep this masturbatory action is divinely appropriate to the Lone Male. In fact, it affirms his Lone Maleness. Following upon this, when Eve is created, derived, ejaculated, Adam does not receive a belly-button, but she has one. For she is born of the Lone Male.

Okay. If you are beginning to see matters in this light, then understand that Genesis was imagined from Day 6 to Day 1 – though presented otherwise. Day 6 is what the Story is about. The Story is about Sacred Sexuality!

All of creation then proceeds (moving from Day 6 to Day 1) with the same Lone Male Erotic power. God creates “out of nothing.” From out of the void and the brooding darkness. Read from Day 1 to Day 6 the lack of a Mother Goddess seems shocking. How can anything be created without the male and the female powers intercoursing? Such would have been, and continues to be, a seemingly obvious question to an apparent omission. Where in “nature” do we see creation from nothing or from the Male, alone? The only way to grasp why this question is not relevant is to read from Day 6 to Day 1 accepting the revelation of Day 6 that all creation comes from the Lone Male – even the female (and so by implication The Mother Goddess) come from the Lone Male (El, Yahweh).

Now, this Biblical Story is quite peculiar, strange, odd – at times, idiotic. But you are so overly-familiar with (desensitized to?!) it that it doesn’t seem strange, rather, it seems “right” or “natural.” Consider, for a moment, that the Biblical Story is not mythic. In that a mythos accounts for and grounds all that you experience in Story. But in Genesis anything related to the feminine: goddesses, Mother, earth, sexuality, Nature … is dis-counted, not accounted for. The Story reduces everything to a one-way singularity. Only one God. Only one Human. Only one Sex. Only the Warrior. Only the Lonely (Chosen). Only Spiritual Warfare. In this light, the Biblical Story is only cultural, not mythic. This insight is validated by the rest of the Pentateuch, where the Story unfolds as the history of a lone tribe, its laws, rituals, and rules.

In the Biblical tradition there is no “nature.” No Natural Order. There is only Naming and Dominion. Looked at in this light, the Biblical Story is “only” a cultural story. It is not a true, broad, robust mythic story, and, as such, it lacks a thriving spirituality – cannot thrive because there is no male-female eros. In other terms, the Biblical Story mandates culture – that is why it is intolerant of other spiritualities, because they, themselves, generate counter-cultures. A true, robust and thriving spirituality would embrace the Is and Is-Not of human/divine relationship. The Biblical Warrior cannot tolerate the Other except as Enemy. For the Warrior there is only “one way,” and this is the culture of capturing, subordinating, controlling, dominating and slaying of the enemy. The Story is not one of faith, rather, it is a battle screed! (“Deus vult!”)

As such, Eve is named as woman. “Her name is Woman because she was taken out of a man.” That the Eros of the Lone Male is masturbatory in its essence is the primary statement of Genesis and the grounding spiritual emotion of the Biblical Tradition. “She is part of my own bone and flesh!”

Okay. So, you can see that, with a twist, “Sacred Sexuality” is the story of Genesis. It is clearly a sacred experience of “deep sleep” wherein the erotic power is expressed through masturbatory, homoerotic sexuality. The penis of Adam is the primary “visual” in Genesis. It is its transmutation/ transubstantiation into The Rib which underscores its sacredness – for nothing of the essence of the divine can be Named. So, by calling it Rib, God and Adam are not naming “penis,” for to do so would be to Name the essence of the creating relationship Adam and God share. … This insight finds a curious companion in an observation about pornography. In popular concept, pornography is defined in terms of lewd acts of fallen women. The “cock” is not shown. It is “there” but then “it is not”! Of note, internet sex – and video rentals, even some late night Cable shows – are “revealing” the cock. There is much to reflect upon in this seemingly insignificant change. But the appearance of the cock is happening “off-line” – given that Cable TV shows are still not considered Prime Time. The writings of Friar Killian can be readily “published” on-line but not off-line; being rejected, worldwide, by print publishers most notably for the use of cock and cunny!

Obviously, humans had been living for millions of years by the time Genesis was compiled. There were also competing creation stories in the broad culture of the writer(s) day. Literary analysts, including many fundamentalists, accept that there were various versions of Genesis, and that the “final form” of the story was not put to bed until the fourth century of the Christian Era – during the same time that the Christian New Testament & the Christian formulation of their “Old Testament” were also codified & “authorized.”

So, the aloneness of Adam is a staggering revelation. God created the Garden of Eden, and it was emotionally insufficient. More, since God was the only one with whom Adam could talk, you realize that talking with God is also insufficient on an emotional basis. Adam – as has been carried forth in the Biblical Tradition – cannot and does not “name” God. He cannot and does not because to so name God would be to give a name to his loneliness. (This is an insight which being imprisoned makes clear. See, “Prison, Bottoming Out, Mother” on www.earthfolk.net )

One can only infer – though remember that Genesis is not God’s story – that Adam is God’s name for loneliness. Yet, Adam must be sufficient for God, because there are only the two of them by the time everything is created. On the Sixth Day – just before Adam’s deep sleep and The Rib event – the reader (for centuries, the hearer) has it “revealed” and confirmed that homoerotic, lone male, masturbatory sex is all that is “really” necessary – sufficient for the Creation of the World, and for the Creation of Woman. Also, the clear message that male sex alone – “same-sex sex” – is all and only spiritual, pure, sufficient,

and that – as later phrased by the Christian Paul, “It is better to marry than burn!” – sex with a woman is derivative, a “lesser good,” a concession … in fact, that it is pornographic: to be done, but done so that the “cock,” the sacred rod, is not seen: and so, The Rib!

While the issue of “sexuality” is vigorously discussed by the secularist and the religious Biblicalist, neither would claim the phrase “sacred sexuality.” Neither has any “space” within the broader Biblical and Western Tradition for the phrase. It has no intellectual or emotional heritage.

When dropped in casual conversation, “sacred sexuality” raises eyebrows, for it is heard as if referencing pornography. Why? Because in the Biblical Tradition the sacred and the sexual are diametrically opposed. More, they are adversarial. As will be discussed, as expressed through its Sacred Stories, the religious Biblical imagination judges sex as the cause of all evil. Satan is oft described as The Great Seducer. Sex stands as the first cause of the primal sin. Originally, Eve seduced Adam. For the secularist, sex is just sex; there is nothing holy about it. Cannot be; will never be.

In secular terms, women are property. They are booty. “Pieces of ass” akin to pieces of gold. This peculiar Lone Male form of patriarchy undergirds the secular imagination with the same force as it does the religious imagination. The primary and primal Warrior ecstasy is masturbation. Female bodies are merely vehicles for this pleasure. Necessary only for procreation and the birthing of sons. Sexual imagination, here, is posed as the delights of mutual masturbation: “Was it good for you, too?” (See, To Everyone Else It Was Only Sex, on www.earthfolk.net ).

Of note is that “War of the Sexes” is a phrase acceptable and meaningful to both the secular and religious imaginations. It is descriptive of how males and females relate. To the religious imagination War is spiritual as well as fleshly. To the secular imagination Sex is never-ending warring; a state of perpetual emotional conflict. This opens our exploration of the erotic basis of War (see, “Vietnam Undeclared” on this website www.earthfolk.net).

“War of the Sexes” reveals the primary bond which links the religious and secular imaginations. Namely, both are grounded in a Warrior Mythos. There is an Enemy for the Chosen One. From Genesis onward, the Warrior Mythos (of the Lone Male) becomes the interpretive matrix for all Western sacred stories both religious and secular. The Iliad, Jesus the Redeemer, Natty Bumpo, Atlas Shrugged, and every minor video and film rendition.

In this light, Genesis states that sexuality is not a spiritual fact. That it is secondary; derivative. More, that it eventually becomes the fact of Original Sin. It is the source of Evil: without Eve there would have been no sin! Remember, Adam existed with the Father God before Eve was created. The core fact of the Biblical Tradition is that existence as The Lone Male was – and, is - “Good.” Only when the female was created did Evil emerge on the scene. (Things went off-line as Eve came on-line!)

Woman is Evil. Sexual intercourse is evil, except when sanctioned for procreation of Warrior Sons. Male genitalia are not visible; only the female’s is present, made manifest as she seduced through offering the Apple – which is, for the Story, her cunt; much as the fruited “cherry” functions for contemporary banter.

We will stop here. Where we have come will be picked up later. Namely, that Genesis is a Sacred Sexuality Story about Her and her. Note – but we do not want to get too far ahead of ourselves – that Genesis concludes when the Woman causes Expulsion from the Garden – the Garden of Lone Male delights: homoerotic masturbation. Yes, She is the cause, but it is not “She” as in Goddess and Great Mother, because she is not “there” – only Eve, which is you, woman, female, of feminine Name … but was it only Eve?

Or was another “She” there?

II. Prison & Jesus’ Homoerotic Theft

Words: Literal, Symbolic, Mystical

When we start talking about Sacred Sexuality, we immediately run into the problem of language. Not a problem once it is analyzed, but a problem when you have forgotten how plastic words and phrases are and can become.

In its simplest presentation, words function for us at three levels: the literal, the symbolic and the mystical. Our “everyday” language is mostly literal with a twist or turn here and there of the symbolic. (Throughout, we use “symbolic” to include metaphorical and analogical language and imagery.) Such makes humor possible and present. We laugh when we cross the boundaries: “Show me your balls,” gets a laugh, even when literally correct. Those who pray cast about their mystical meanings, “Show me The Way, O Lord!” – which is not an imploration for directions to the restroom. It doesn’t take much reflection to realize and accept that language is plastic.

The interrelationship among the levels is that each can become a bridge to the other. New words – neologisms – often arise as bridge words. For example, currently, “Net” and “Web” are used to bridge the Cyber and everyday world. Certainly, there is no net or web in a literal sense – despite the cable equipment and cords – rather, there is a new “something else” which the words reach to describe. Cyber-space is neologistic. Web and net bridge, and in bridging move from literal to symbolic (some – followers of William Gibson - might say mystical!). In nuclear physics (as just one example) words such as charm and spin give a charming spin to talks about quarks and the quantum “world.” At times when words get so literal that they lose their links to either the symbolic or mystical they get turned-inside out and spiral onto new levels; here, consider recent usages of “bad” to mean good and “cool” to mean “hot” and the like.

Where we get in trouble is when we – individually or as a group – attempt to make language rigid. Literal does not necessarily mean rigid; it means accurate or fully described or validated by the five senses. However, literal words are the ones which most often become rigid and then brittle and then shatter into pieces – they drop out of our vocabulary because they have “lost their meaning.” Reading Shakespeare gives the average high school American a taste of how words disappear from the daily tongue.

Curiously, the three levels in this plasticity model appear to have a circling and spiraling relationship. Meaning, that literal words often become mystical, and mystical become literal. Plop “virgin” and “birth” together and you get Virgin Birth. Once fully mystical, for most contemporary Bible-based Christians, the phrase is used literally. For others, it fully and robustly describes, as the literal does, the fact that God became Man at a certain historical moment. It is as if Mary were to walk into the room, that such a Christian would say, almost matter of factly, “This is Mary. She’s the virgin who gave birth.”

Rigidity often sets in with symbolic phrases, such as “the burning bush.” While this should point towards the mystical, it spirals towards the literal. Most fundamentalists collapse all words towards the literal. “The Bible. It’s true.” A slogan popular on Yuletide billboards.

“Sacred Sexuality,” in this light, hurts the tongue because one word is mystical and the other literal – for most folk, anyway. Few people apply the word “sacred” to something in their everyday sensible world. At the Catholic Mass, the common bread is changed into the body and blood of Christ – and the hosts which are not consumed are placed in a special tabernacle because they remain sacred. This is one of the few instances where the sacred abides within the literal, or here, the profane. On the other hand, for Americans and within the Biblical Tradition, “sexuality” is a thin veil for the more literal “genital intercourse.”

To complicate matters, there is a tradition – one which certain followers of Carl Jung have re-articulated – wherein the consecration of the wine and bread is a symbolic act of the mingling of menstrual blood and phallic seed. Symbolic, but alchemical: so a transformation of consciousness and of the state of being is effected; literally. Since this tradition is now considered “esoteric,” few interpreters cite it as the symbolic bridge from literal to mystical via the symbolic. When we present SilverSex, (on www.earthfolk.net) it is with a nod towards this alchemical tradition. However, SilverSex’s alchemical substances are the flesh, blood, fluids, actions, thoughts of those now in senescence. The alchemical force is what the Warrior Culture terms dying, and which SilverSex experiences as mystical. But this is getting ahead of ourselves.

For me – us – the experience of Prison is the spiraling bridge between the literal, symbolic and mystical. HALT! Even if you’ve been imprisoned, how I will discuss and interpret prison in this text will strike you as peculiar, possibly moronic, at worst, incomprehensible. If I – we – were more talented, the text would be more controlled, where at every point it is clearly shown that “this is literal turning into symbolic” and so forth; but that is not the case. I – we – can only express what we have experienced. Your patience (long-suffering?) is appreciated. So, let’s proceed.

Prison: Jesus’ Homoerotic Theft

How does the experience of being imprisoned impact my approach? First, I never wanted to go to prison. Despite a certain romanticism of the Left, few Vietnam era war resisters, that I knew, thought that going to prison meant anything. It certainly wouldn’t qualify us for veteran benefits, so why take the risk? A dark joke, there. Why didn’t I go to Canada? In fact I did visit Toronto. Got accepted into St. Michael’s to continue my theological education. But, though I helped thousands escape to and stay in Canada, leaving America wasn’t for me. (Escape: thousands of blank draft cards and official Selective Service rubber stamps were removed from the State Director’s office in Minnesota by the “Beaver 55”.) What is significant here is my conscious struggle with staying “inside” the Warrior culture. Just as I stayed in the seminary so that I could enter the Holy of Holies, don the garb of monastic transformation, and set myself to the Discipline and rigors of the Religious Life – until I left … so, something inside me wanted to go the full mile, to understand as only committed action enables one to understand, “just what is going on?” What war really is. What’s blowin’ in the wind.

Friends and relatives engaged the IndoChina War by entering military service. They donned the garb, etc. I’ve explored this ritual in “Vietnam Undeclared” (on www.earthfolk.net) and elsewhere. My Warrior Ritual was to enter prison. Not knowingly as “captive,” but that’s how it unfolds. (For me prison was, literally, “Vietnam.” As “Vietnam” was for many soldiers more symbolically or mystically “America.”)

Anyone who has donned a ritual uniform becomes acutely conscious – even if for just a moment – of the artificiality of it all. At one moment you are “citizen,” the next instant, “soldier.” For me, “citizen,” then “prisoner.” There is a high school drama rehearsal foolishness about it all. Like the first time walking onto a stage – acutely, almost embarrassingly aware of “It’s me, Killian, the kid who delivers your morning paper” - and the fact that you are now the player, not just the role, not just rehearsal, but the real thing. Quite often most of us don’t effectively make this thespian transformation, but that’s another story. Here, the fact is that the audience is the one who creates you. They accept you in this new role. Yet, you proceed warily, nervously waiting for them to discover that it is “only you!”

My first acute awareness of the intimacy of the three levels was as a prisoner in Hennepin County jail when I grasped that my family was my incarcerator. Also, that I had locked them up. It was a literal-mystical connect. Sure, you could make a case for railing against The State as my imprisoner – and this is correct on the literal-symbolic level. After all, the State operates the institutional edifice and programs. Sure, I was alienated from Society. Blah. Blah. Actually, I shouldn’t underplay that. I realized that the guards, judges, marshals, etc. moved me about like a chess piece. And that in their eyes I was really a bad guy – badass to many. But only my family is intimate with me. Only they were doing time as I was “doing time.” … Badass: Judge had said, “You gentlemen are worse than the common criminal who attacks the taxpayer’s pocketbook. You strike at the foundation of government itself!” Amen.

I took my family into prison with me. How else? Yet my family “let them” take me away. Stood by as I was shackled and lead away by the Marshals. They came to visit … and were content to leave me there. Now, I’ve a wonderful family, everyone of whom suffered with me. Who visited me and so can recount their visceral agony when inside the caged Visiting Room. Actually, it’s because they were – and are – so emotionally intimate with me that I gained the insight which I did.

It is central to the Warrior mythos to have a Captive. It is enfleshed. Or, as a traditionalist would say, incarnated. As in Genesis, the Lone Male Warrior captures the female in his flesh; incarnates her, a curious type of both an Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. As if the Lone Male was immaculately conceived, and as such could give birth without having intercourse with the feminine or a female.

The Jesus story is also a Captive’s tale. Born from a “not really real” female (one who was “immaculately conceived,” meaning “without sin” – which means “without sex”: no divine penis and virginal cunny), he is, eventually, condemned, made a captive of Warrior Justice. He is sentenced to death – capital punishment: therefore, the captive of all, of everyone in society, as Society acts on the individual’s behalf. In the Gospel stories, both the Jewish and Roman societies and their rulers validate this condemnation; possess Jesus as Captive.

In the Catholic Tradition, this Captivity is theologized in several ways. First, that Jesus became – “on the third day” - a Captive of Satan – Jesus descends into Hell – but only to trick Satan, because Jesus is there to Free the Captives! All those bound in darkness, in ignorance until He, the Light, was incarnated, died, and descended. His Resurrection is often expressed in terms of Freedom, Liberty, Escape and New Life. The twentieth century “Liberation Theology” grounded its radical, revolutionary social justice in this Captive motif.

Second, Jesus by being Captive “satisfies” His Father for the offense of Adam. Now, this is a really strange and weird theology (articulated most fully by St. Anselm), but it comes to be the foundational “soteriology” (theory of the meaning of Salvation) of the Tradition. It is also the common denominator belief across Christian sects. Of course, there might be some sects or groups that I do not know about which reject this dogma, but it holds in the main. This “Satisfaction Theory” states that we are to accept that God the Father is “satisfied” by Jesus’ agony on the Cross. (Satisfaction is also accounted for in terms of a Divine Economy wherein Jesus pays Adam’s “debt.”)

I’ve never read an interpretation of Satisfaction Theory which employed the father-son relationship to explain this theory of salvation. Would anyone want to say that a father is satisfied in respect to how much his son is tortured and suffers the convulsion of crucifixion? That at the base of the father-son relationship there is a primal equation of arithmetic justice? One that goes beyond a tit for a tat and plunges into the perversions of child abuse? Looking at the Crucifixion, isn’t there a place for the question: What type of fatherhood is manifested here?

When pressed, religionists always plug the phrase “divine mystery” into the gaping black hole such as this question exposes. But, myths are primal and culturally primary communications. What is being said through the Crucifixion/ Resurrection story is meant to be the template for how fathers and sons relate. (Fathers & Sons are the only real creatures: mothers and daughters of dependent to no consequence.) Indeed, the Warrior gains manhood and meaning through the shedding of blood. (More “washed” in His Blood. Baptized in His Blood! Themes of vigorous Protestant hymnody.) Of his own, and of his Enemy. Only on the battlefield is the Warrior in touch with his soul and spirit. Like The Rib/Cock exchange, slaying is an act of substitution – for the blood of birth; and menstruation. Why do Warriors want sons? To die for them. To be slain by them.

Here is a key to the Warrior sense of Family. The Family is to be slain. In fact, the Family is the Enemy. A Warrior father cannot be proud of his Enemy nor his Enemy’s son or family. The Enemy, here, is inconsequential. Anyone can become the Enemy. An Enemy is needed only as an object, a nameless thing, a “gook” or some naming which is non-human; to be slain. But all the Warrior’s slaying on the field is a dress rehearsal for the intimate fight between father and son. The son wants to become father. The father wants to remain father. To become father, the son must slay the father. In physical battle, possibly, but always in spiritual, psychic and emotional battle.

The only Enemy with a name is the father and/or the son. The Father/The Son. All the external battles are mere symbolic & mystical jousts within this greater literal War. The Warrior Father tells the son – “At the least, die well!” … Look at Jesus. Bear it. Suffer it. It will Redeem you! You will live forever! Resurrected in Christ – the Cosmic Warrior.

This is why my personal Family as Warrior Family “let me go” into prison … and why I, as Warrior son, went. Like Joseph thrown into the well, so was I. Like Jacob, so did I try to steal the inheritance of my brothers. Like Noah’s son, so we sons all try to plunge into the tent and catch our father naked!

The question, then, can be turned around. What type of son accepts the Cross as a way to manifest his Sonship? Why didn’t Jesus skip town? Kick the dust from his sandals and skedaddle? There were more than enough Jewish Messiahs gasping & suffocating: croaking to death on crosses for him to know that such wasn’t an especially effective or singular or inspirational way for him to die. So, what was Jesus doing by staying in town?

Okay. Stay with me on this. There’s a little history and some conclusion coming.

Historically, the Jesus story congeals – as said, there were many “Jesus” stories, many Jewish Messiahs, many Crucified Ones during this period - at a time of vast global swarm and diverse cultures meshing. Others have discussed in greater detail how Jewish-Greek-Christianity arose as a mythos of the City, an urban spirituality. You can look at the City as a new form of Captivity. A place where Nature is held captive in solitary confinement. And with Nature, so Mother Nature and all the goddess forces. What happened – and continues to happen in our participation in the manifest Warrior sense of urbanization (“walled cities”) – is the opportunity for mythic breakdown which occurs when there are vast shifts in how people live. Abraham and Ur. The City and the Empire – or their numerous companion notions, e.g., Pax Americana and The Global Market – afford an opportunity for a break-through during the break-downs. What happened with Jesus, then, is a remanifestation of the Biblical spirit – to the nines, so to speak.

(If you’re into “Old Testament” Hebraic text studies, Norman Gottwald’s works are worth the upset.)

The special terror which Jesus adds to the Biblical Story is that he is more than a Second Adam, as Paul stated it - and which has become a staple interpretive device of Warrior theology. Jesus was more than a Second Adam in that he did not replace or supersede Adam (as some profess), rather, he interiorized him. Jesus’ crucifixion is a displacement tale. Again, like The Rib.

Jesus becomes the female. Others have stressed the points which I am about to discuss, but their interpretation is totally obverse – often, inverse - to mine. What you have to grasp is that, for the Warrior, blood is the creative force, which he knows, mythically and intuitively, is “of Her.” He is not ignorant of the moon-flow. Rather, he wants to bring this awareness to the fore. Where Genesis is indirect, the Gospels are quite direct.

Jesus associated with women. Many have interpreted this as a positive sign of Jesus’ openness to the feminine. I found great comfort and strength in these female contacts during my years of non-violent and anti-war activity. I felt that Jesus was validating the feminine, and calling men to find the female within. However, in prison, I found this to be absolutely incorrect – actually, a horror.

In fact, the female contact stories are perverse. They are brutal moments, where Jesus appropriates the feminine. Though scholars have argued for drawing great meaning from the fact that some women held administrative and leadership offices during Gospel times, the terrible fact is that Jesus sucks the life out of women and the feminine. Jesus does not forward the feminine as a spiritual source, truth or way.

You can follow my interpretation best through looking at sacred art and song. Jesus’ “blood” becomes a tremendous point of interest. It is invested with supernatural and miraculous meaning. While as a Roman Catholic I did not sing the Baptist tunes which glory in the blood, I was surrounded by the broken and bleeding body. The gaping, gash-wound in Jesus’ side is not only the wound in Adam’s side which gave birth to Eve, it is the wound which gives birth to no woman, rather, it is the wound which substitutes for the vulva and the cunny. Because Jesus’ blood has potency and ultimate spiritual meaning, so is every hint of the power of female blood abolished.

What Adam dreamt, so did Jesus do consciously. Adam set loose the mythic tale of the feminine-inside-the-male; Jesus made it physical fact. In effect he said, Look at my physical body, my flesh – what need you of women? My blood redeems; is the blood of the new birth, of being born again! … “Eat my body. Drink my blood.” … Through the Lone Male comes the Resurrected Life. Jesus as Lone Male is all that God the Father needs - and all we need to know to become true Sons of God. Time spent in “adoration before the Crucifix” – a Catholic custom – makes real the totality of Jesus’ flesh as the way to birth into everlasting life.

“God the Father needs?” Yes, in the Tradition, God needed to be satisfied. For the offense of Adam; the “debt” owed; for the faithlessness of Israel – whatever – but He had to be Satisfied. Jesus shed his blood and the Father is satisfied. Hmmm. Satisfied by the pain? A father being sated in his soul by hearing his child cry, moan, groan, suffocate to death? Is this not bizarre? More, a horror and a terror?

What is satisfied? That the Mother, the feminine, females are obliterated in their intimacy. Which means removed from literal, symbolic and mystical language. Note, that Mary – though popularly invoked as “Mother of God” - is not, in the Roman Catholic Tradition, a divine Mother or Mother Goddess; no, she is – as infallibly pronounced by the Pope to be eternal dogma - “Co-Mediatrix of Grace” – chew on that! … What man needs to cleave to his wife after Jesus’ death on the cross? You have heard the sermon, endless times: all you need is Jesus. Nothing else. You can thrill and swoon to the Pentecostal ecstatic utterance of “Jjjjjeeeeesssssuuuuuuussssssssss!!!!!!!!”

Is this not a peculiar and truncated form of homoeroticism? A mythic theft?!

It is as if God was dissatisfied because Adam had to have Eve. Spiritually pissed. Moping around for generations. Symbolized by Israel’s unfaithfulness. … So, what woman, what manifestation of the feminine, did Jesus need? Absolutely none. Nada. Obliteration supreme.

Because, Jesus is All. To be saved all you need to profess is your acceptance of Jesus. Jesus comes into you. Abides within you. … Okay. Sucks your heart out. Vampires the feminine blood. For the Warrior male, your are his booty, his Captive. He can have you whenever he wants: for you have given your life to him.

Can you sense this terrorizing of your intimacy? Can you feel the solitary confinement of your captivity? If not, consider the traditional spiritual advice: give your life to Jesus and let Him live through you. Hear that? You are not to live a life. Not sensately; sensually; erotically. No. All your thoughts and actions, even your being, is to be given over to Him. He – so the Tradition says – is your Vicarious Sacrifice. Which once demythologized means that you are His vicarious sacrifice! He lives through you and you live vicariously!

When I went into prison, I thought that I’d find evil there. Confront Satan. Descend into Hell. Ha. I did. But all became as I have commented on before: inverted, obverted, converted to its abhorrence – what is, is not; what is not, is. I found that Jesus was the evil, malignant spirit. That he was manifested, not just through the Catholic Chaplain’s robotic benedictions and odorous seductions, no, he was manifested in and through me!

I realized that I was Jesus’ captive. I was, like my Master, an expert Warrior. Inside prison, everyone and everything is the Enemy. Just what a Warrior needs! And I was comforted by that. I could hate without restraint. Other cons. The hacks. Even – and this is how it became clearer – my family. I could hate my family – for they were The Enemy. Those who lived on the Outside. Those who still harbored – however subconsciously – the desire to worship Her. They were devotees of family. They were Adams living with their Eves. But, not I! Not all who were “one with Jesus.” … The Oneness the Pope affirms and confirms when he states as a matter of Faith that to be holy you need a cock and balls … so, in prison, there are only cocks and balls. I – we – was finally among “The Saints”! Closer to finding The Way than when I – we – was in the monastery.

When I opposed the war, I had done so as a non-violent Warrior. A pacifistic John Wayne. Full of the self-deluding pacifism of his “The Quiet Man.” Well, as I listened to the cacophony of Lights Out!’s gay sexual activity inside my dorm, I realized that I was at the true Daily Mass of the Biblical Warrior/Gospel culture. My dorm – we slept either in open rooms double-bunked with seventy others, or in single beds with thirty-five – was the Sanctuary. Our cot-beds were soon to become altar stones. As odd as this might sound at first, the gays I had contact with were “at home” in prison. Sure, they hated being locked up, but there was a sense of being spiritually at home.

For them, being a Captive was an erotic rush. That they were bought and sold for cigarettes as “wives” was something I thought, at first, was an abomination. Fool! I was laughed at, not simply for being hetero and a bleeding heart liberal type to them, but because - so I was challenged to experience! – I was an erotic innocent. I simply did not know what real sexuality was about. It was more than the teasing taunt in the showers: “I can give you more than any woman can!” It was the almost condescending snigger that I just “didn’t get it!” (As within the monastery, I – we – was to learn humility. How to “bend a knee” and “bend over” and surrender to The Will of The Master.)

The “slave” aspect of gay sex, so I came to understand, was one of core validation. To become a slave, to be owned, to be abused – to suffer through humiliation, was to manifest the core erotic spirituality of what I came to grasp was the quintessential Warrior act of validation – making another male so much a part of one’s self that the other has no identity but what you, The Master, bestow on him.

At first, I found all this repulsive. I misunderstood it. I was not threatened by it. Yes, propositioned, but big enough physically not to be intimidated. So, I never seriously feared getting raped – it was a medium security federal prison with a large “draft resister” population, so I had “gang” identity and security. True, gays had always been “over there.” Like most straights of my generation, I grew up pitying gays, and being not unsympathetic with guys who beat them up. (After all they were minions of Satan, seducing you into Mortal Sin!) For someone who had been in the seminary, I certainly didn’t see – back during those early “seed” years - a lot of what was happening right in front of my altarboy face! But in prison, I began to see; peer.

When the Catholic Chaplain talked to me about “straightening out” and becoming a “role model,” I came to realize that he wanted me to become Jesus’ captive – His slave. It was the gays around me who were the heuristic device here! Instead of seeing them as the Enemy, as the Outcasts, as the Rejected Sons, I realized that they were Jesus’ own: his disciples, those who carry His message of the interior abandonment of the feminine, of the obliteration of intimacy. Like him, they were women; are. Erotic Priests.

Yes, gays act out. That’s the story. In their flesh they manifest Jesus’ spirituality. They live fully as all that of the feminine which is requisite to be a Lone Male. Which is – following in Jesus’ Way – males who act out as females, as he did on the Cross.

Now, you have to be thinking – But gays have been persecuted! Condemned by the Church! Literally, burned at the stake; faggots! … Curious, isn’t it? A perversion, truly. But look at the Crucifix. What do you find? Child abuse? Hatred of one’s own Son? Torture. By whom – man and God? … An interpretation which could be – and has been in the Tradition – turned upside down and preached as, “God’s Love,” “The Father’s Mercy,” “Forgiveness and Reconciliation” – yet, enter a physical prison, today, and you will know and feel differently. It is almost a validation of gays as Biblical priests and God’s Son to exposit their persecuted history. Their history of being The Enemy and of being hunted, captured and slain.

I am not going to call on the word “mystery” to avoid answering, “Why does the Warrior Father act this way?” … but I do say that I am perplexed. And it is a perplexment grounded in stone and barbed wire. Inside prison I felt the tortured concrete walls, grasped the cold bars, watched the preying eyes of the Counters, thumped basketball, circled The Yard … and I said to myself, “Is this real?” “Do they truly believe that this will positively change an inmate, turn him onto the Straight and Narrow?” … But then – I, the eternal optimist, ever so I am accused – realized the truth that Prison is the Interior, not just the Inside. That it is more “real” that the Outside, the misnamed “Free World.” I, who had always sought to be a Servant of the Almighty, to be a priest, to approach the Holy of Holies on behalf of the People of God – well, bunko, here you are!

The heterosexual world does not matter. Not in the spiritual and mythic realms. Only insofar as the heterosexual world validates what is sourced in the sacred ground Inside does it have meaning. I, who had sought to find the Inside by going into a monastery, now, realized that I was Inside … “Interior Castle” as one saint described it (female, nun Saint).

You can “live” in the Outside, Free World only if you interiorize the spirit of Prison. Only if you are Captive. Only if you live as someone’s Enemy. Only if you live hating Family. Only if you pledge to live vicariously.

Captive: “Do Your Own Time!”

This notion of Captive is vital to grasping how to start exiting the Biblical mythos and the Warrior manifestation. While the strongest sense of being captured comes when someone does it to you, when it comes from the Outside or the External, the wickedest kind – in terms of evil enchantment – comes from the Inside or the Internal. More, when it is Intimate.

This, again, is the true Original Sin of the Biblical mythos: convincing you and me that we are Captives such that we imprison ourselves! As I’ve mentioned about entering prison, I realized that my family let me go. That, more, I let myself go Inside! I accepted the notion of Captivity, the perverse sense of Justice which undergirds it in Biblical, Warrior culture. The external Prison walls will only be torn down when I tear down the walls I’ve erected inside myself, within my intimacy.

Intimacy: at the core of Prison’s interiority is the intimate command, “Do your own time!” This harkens back to the original penitentiary objective. Namely, to separately confine offenders and have them be reformed through their personal, individual intimate contact via their conscience with the moral authority of the judging but Benevolent Deity. (This was formulated upon 18^th Century theology.) Yet, as with the failure of the original vision of separate confinement – for it was cruelly implemented as solitary, rather than separate, confinement - so “Do your own time!” has a special meaning. A special meaning which, moreover, expresses the core spiritual energy of Prison.

On the Outside, in the Free World (Free Market and all) great stress is placed upon individualism. Rugged individualism. Heroic individualism. Entrepreneurial individualism. Today’s Movie & Rock Star worship. Isolated: ME!

In one sense, We the People is a jiggly-loose collective. There are scant communal symbols: a few gathered up into what some scholars call our “Civil Religion.” But this articulation of this Civil Religion has mainly served to underscore America’s lack of strong collective cultural bonds. At best, we are a society in flux. One always in Progress. Etc. Etc. Hmmmm.

Prison clarified for me that the ultimate and final message of the Biblical mythos as expressed in the New Jerusalem of America is, “Do your own time!” Which means that there is absolutely and one-million-percent no need for an individual to form collective bonds to obtain or ground being and meaning.

Inside, this phrase was heard often, but most poignantly for me, at the time, from the Catholic chaplain. The few Masses I did attend before absenting myself forever from this ritual had the continual theme of Do Your Own Time. It came dressed in many ways. One is to Get Right With Jesus. Meaning – and this was stated, preached, not just inferred – trust no other human being, trust only God through His Son. People, in this message, were the Enemy in the sense that they were all occasions of sin. All other cons could do is get you in more trouble. If you wanted Good Time, if you wanted Early Parole, if you wanted a parole recommendation from the Chaplain, then straighten up and fly right. Go read your Bible! … In solitary confinement, naturally.

If taken to heart, this meant that the inmate worked hard to disengage himself from the physical world. He walked through the day, hand in hand with Jesus; not in Prison. He did not trust any of the other cons with whom he shared some commonalities, e.g., socio-economic status, urban neighborhood, prior time in the criminal justice system, and so forth. He was not to trust the Guards, not as individuals, but only insofar as they represented the System. Now, this wasn’t intellectualized. Meaning, I never heard it said, “Trust the Institution.” But that was inferred. Always. It was a version of Give Yourself Over to Christ – with Christ representing the collective, and here the System.

Obey. And, when you get out, you will be Obeyed (by those owing you patriarchal allegiance, namely, wives and children). Obey all the Rules. And, you will be endowed with Authority; the Authority grounded in Christ. Obey every rule and every directive. Do not hesitate! … Whew! I thought that my short monastic experience had shown me Absolute Power and the impact of following the imperative, “Surrender You Will To Christ” which meant obeying the Abbot in every detail at every instant.

Prison clarifies the ontology of the Biblical mythos. It is, as with Adam, to be a Lone Male. To be in the world without others. No humans. No women. No children. To be with God in the Garden, being totally obeyed by all the animals you just named. Being there, doing your own time. Doing Adam’s time.

To get “back:” to Adam’s time, you go “forward” to Jesus’ Sweet Embrace. This is how the Christians set it up. With Jesus, the Lone Male experience returns in erotic spades. If there is one thing the Tradition – embracing just about every mainline and historical Christian sect – accepts and posits as a primary truth is that Jesus was a lone male, unmarried, not sexually active, without question a Virgin … so triumphally represented by the Roman Catholic’s doctrine that you have to be male to be spiritual, here, for them, a celibate priest.

“Do your own time!” is what Jesus did. He did not call us to a new collective experience. Later, certain followers forward the notion of ecclesia, the church; with the Catholics, again, plundering a single passage about “Thou art Peter …” into their edifice complex. Jesus appears by all accounts to be a solo actor, a lone male … in intense struggle with his Father’s Will. What he is not is a political zealot calling for social revolution. Nor a reformer. Nor an officiating Rabbi. Nor a family man. Nor a star-crossed lover. … He came. He went. He did his own time!

So, you thought it was a Prison. An institution. A fenced and walled enclosure. Bars and lidless crappers and all that. Ha. It’s the Garden of Eden! At least it is the symbolic representation of the Garden. Wherein through Discipline and Obedience one is delivered into the mystical experience, not of a Body, but of your own Lone Maleness.

Prison: Adam’s Garden without Eve. Jesus’ Lone Male faith.

The Intimate Act is the Mythic Act

Prison’s insight is that the whole mythos depends upon personal, individual, intimate action. That’s why I talk from my personal experiences. Not because I want to ego inflate – Ha, you lose such silliness moments after the handcuffs clink on your wrists. No, I understood as I had not understood before how “intimate” is culture.

What’s critical here is that everyone’s actions are creative. Sure, we all vary in degrees, but no one is not-creative. In the anti-war movement, this also was “there” but not with the clarity bestowed by prison. When I destroyed my draft card, I had crossed over the line. I knew the Feds could come and get me, but being an educated white middle-class male who had already satisfied his Alternative Service, a direct personal attack by them was not a really real expectation. When I broke into Selective Service offices, I knew that the ante had been raised. But, still, there was a distance. I knew that I had defenses to summon, from legal to personal to spiritual.

But inside prison, there are no defenses. You are there. “Nakkid as a j-bird!” It is just you, but it is also your family. In that they are “leaving you there.” How else can they act? For they are the Warrior Culture. It is not some abstract academic concept. It manifests directly through the words, tears, embraces, longings, sighs of my family. I am their prisoner.

Literally, then, there is my own complicity. As I’ve stated, I “accepted” being a prisoner. I did not try to escape. I was out on bail until I had to surrender to the Feds. “I” – the mythos cannot exist without “I.” It appears as the literal word, “I,” but it bridges the symbolic “us” and the mystical “we” – finally to become both: the “I” is the only word which is simultaneously literal, symbolic and mystical. Prison reveals such. Without “my acceptance” of imprisonment, the mythos would dissipate and vanish! … See why your story is important? Why cultural change towards a new mythos awaits your personal, intimate creativity?

“Inside.” Inside the Free World - there is the Imprisoned World. Iron Cage. Reflect upon that. A bit of ying and yang. An environment – Dantean for those who have walked with him – which was brutally spiritual; mythic; literal Hell. I mean, if I had ever wanted to prostrate myself before Divine Power(s), now I had no choice. I, Slave of the State. A mere number: 8867-147.

“Inside” is interior as revealed by “the feminization of the male” which is another way of grasping the how, what and why of being a Captive. This is discussed in “Prison, Bottoming Out, Mother” on www.earthfolk.net.

In prison, males are transformed. “Doing time” is as close to a male being pregnant as any male shall ever get. Your flesh is a messenger. You find this out, quickly. Your flesh is taken from you. Numbering is the first step. Which is a form of naming; bureaucratic but exercising Adamic dominance with effective submission. At any moment, you are apt to discover that your body is not your body. Other than the uncontrollable basic urges to piss and shit, as prisoner, your body is not yours. You are told where to go, how to act, when to eat … no, it’s more. Russell and I were playing cards. In a flash five guards appear. Russell is told to get up and come with them. I’m told to sit still or get cracked on the head. I never see him again. My body is as invisible as his.

You have no right to anything. Body hair. Time. Sleep. In fact, you are Counted several times a day; even (especially?) while you sleep. (Ah, the matter of “deep sleep”!)

What was all this? It is Adam back in The Garden before Eve is created. There are no females about. No odor of cunnilingual musk. There is only you and the Lone Male God. He who lets you know that you are his creation – the relationship is intimate but dependent. You know that you only can do what He wants you to do.

But what is Adam before Eve? (See, “Prison, Bottoming Out, Mother” on www.earthfolk.net) That’s almost easy to grasp. You get a new “name” – here, a number. You wear the clothes he wants you to. You have no rights, hell, there are no knobs on the doors and you have to call The Man to open up. The dependency is clear. It becomes boringly obvious over time. But there’s more. It’s not just dependence – yes, they want that and The Man gets it. It’s rather the revelation of intimacy and the erotic character of your soul.

Adam before Eve is a Lone Male, in imago dei. In one sense, he’s in solitary. The Garden is a lock-up, for it is revealed that he’s lonely. Hell! If he’s had an erotic impulse to this moment in the Story, all he has around are animals. Ha. Fucking the hole in the wall – when Inside you understand that possibility! But Adam’s completeness is not in finding Another, the Other, a Beloved, no, it is in going inside himself. He is put into a deep sleep and from his side a rib is taken and a woman formed. From his male intimacy is the female created. She is an expression of his intimacy. She does not form or complete or bring intimacy, rather, she is his erotic expression.

In prison I came to realize that the prison is The Garden. I felt this but had no mental space for it. So, once out, I studied the history of prisons in graduate school, and came to know more than most about the ideals and vision which created the first American penitentiary. I had been Inside but I hadn’t known the story – how could I’ve have guessed that The Garden was real and not just part of a fable? And that it all was a Sacred Sexuality Story – a phrase which would have embarrassed me, if not shocked me, back then?

Erotic is what it is all about. You are driven, when Inside, to discover the primal spiritual power of masturbation. Stay with me here! Of course, without women – and even where they have occasional conjugal visits – the “obvious” erotic character of prison is guys whacking off. And the acceptance in most prisons – and where I did time – of the homosexual slave trade only underscores this character. (Homosexuals were allowed to dress a bit differently, just enough to reveal their status, e.g., a simple blue string. They were trophies often on the arms of hardened cons. Cigarettes were the main currency of their trade. Bought and sold into “marriages,” they were prisoners of the imprisoned.)

But it is more than just a story about sticky fingers. It was/is the revelation that I could find the creative power totally within myself; my interiority; my Lone Male intimacy. Just another side to “Do your own time!” and to “Walk with Jesus.” Doing your own time was the counsel to not be involved with anyone. Just you and The System. Do your time. Accumulate Good Time (ironic phrase). Get an early Release. To walk with Jesus meant the same thing. To find your spiritual strength in a one on one relationship with The Male Son. Homoerotic it all was and is.

Masturbation here is Adam in deep sleep. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that when Adam lies down that his side becomes a vulva, the passage for birthing. The use of “The Rib” conveys that the feminine is brutally cracked and torn from Adam’s body – but it is his “mothering body” which is whacked: the wrenching of the stroked penis, one laboring to push forth creating seed, a seed which is also ovulatory egg, impregnated egg, zygote, fetus and child. The only procreative organ Adam has is his penis. There were no vulvas around – in fact, it comes from within him, as she is “born.” (It’s all inside Adam; his interiority; his intimacy.)

All there is, is The Lone Male. The Lone Male with his Lone Male God. … ME!

All which is, has been created through the masturbatory act of bringing forth what is within The Lone Male. All “seed and egg” is within The Lone Male.

All this to open for you an insight into why I talk about intimacy, why I reflect upon my own intimate experiences, and why I feel them as mythic. Why is it that I find it so very critical to explore the many layers of Genesis? It’s because I went “Inside.” I went Inside where there is only cock. Where the creative power of masturbation is boldly declared. Where it was revealed that there is only male flesh – that females are more manifestations of us males, that they are, indeed, expressions of our intimacy, but not co-intimates. That nothing female is the basis for spiritual insight, power or growth.

You might not like this analysis. You might think it nutso. But consider that where a society is breaking down is where it is also trying to foist its defenses. Also, that where things break-down there are often break-throughs. This proves true in the history of thought, of scientific discovery, global exploration, the emergence of Revolution, and the mystical, spiritual experience.

Guys are rehabilitated if they come out and Go Straight. Four lines into a square. Go home. Becomes Fathers. Better, Patriarchs. Take care of their own lives. Don’t get involved with others. Walk with Jesus.

So, I met Adam and Jesus. Stood there with God the Father offering me Obedience as the Way. I turned around – not knowing why – and started looking for … I didn’t know for decades: decades during which all that I knew was that I had not killed myself while in prison or when just out… I drank too much; I was crazy … but something which became a Some One was There. Also there in the Garden. “There” on the Inside; my interior; my intimacy. Maybe hiding in the Bushes; I don’t know. But somehow I survived … and then one day, She came to me or rather I stumbled into her or rather, my son almost died (see, “Two Boys” on www.earthfolk.net) … and in the miracle of his recovery, no longer was I doing my own time.

The Dark Mother: Shade Mother

Okay. Weird stuff. But it does not end with this insight. It gets weirder! No, despite what Biblical Culture wants to hide, Genesis is a Sacred Sexuality Story – of the Lone Male, but, no! no! no! … in the Garden/Prison you are not alone, there is the Mother – the Dark Mother.

Who was my imprisoner? As born from within my mother’s womb, so is prison the steel womb of the Dark Mother. The obvious and evident principle of Male and Female IS manifest in the Biblical Story – thus moving me beyond, into a contradiction, for the Biblical Story is robustly mythic and not just cultural!

Dark Mother: There is a tradition of the Dark Mother throughout world myths – most recently “revived” in Western awareness through the psychological work of Jung and the Jungians. Here, the Dark Mother is She who eats her own children. Who slays the Innocent. The apparent absence of the Dark Mother from Genesis affirms the truth of what is, is not. In fact, the most jarring mythic reality of the Biblical Tradition is what it does not say or show – for that is the most potent message it communicates. The absence of The Mother, of the Goddess, of Her is only apparent. As stated before, every mythic tradition has “leaks.” Where truths and insights which are intentionally omitted, repressed, suppressed, obliterated – these “leak” through double-meanings, mystically evocative images, and so forth. Eve is one such leak. Meaning, that no matter how crazed the Biblical writers were, they could not absolutely obliterate the feminine. They could not, literally nor mythically, pull off The Rib story. Through the centuries: too much chuckling in the background by the females as the males read/spoke this Sacred Sexuality Story!

Yet, we should describe Her as the Shade Mother. True, any word which references color, such as “dark,” has the potential to offend someone, but that is not the point here. “Shade” conveys other more rich and subtle truths and realities. Namely, that She was there; is there. In the Shade, just beyond the rim of Light. In the “what is not.” In one sense, She is on-line in cyber-space, yet not apparent, viewable, not “there” to the off-line world (the world of print and The Book).

She is Shade Mother in her presence. Shade – the “place” where the Light fades; what we consider the Land Beyond; dreamland … the place of “deep dreaming.” When Adam laid down to deep-sleep, it was She who gave birth to Eve. Yes, the “leak” phrase of “let us create” with its haunting polytheism – She is present!

El/Yahweh/Lone Male does experience loneliness. But note, this loneliness and Loneliness defines his relationship with her and Her. He with Her. She is there. In Eden, ready to eat her children. He stands ready to be her Warrior Knight: Slayer of the Innocents.

And She does – eat her own children. For what is warring but the slaughter of the Innocents? The Warrior but the dutiful slayer of his own children … but, not just him – her. The complicit wife, mother, lover, girlfriend. How did women support the Vietnam War? By letting their men go. More, by fucking them so that they’d Go! – or Go-Back! after R&R. By enticing them with what they’d get when they came home as heroes. By accepting the body counts. War as abortion.

This is the horrifying and choking insight that must be received in order to move towards Sacred Sexuality. If it is not, then the male approach to the female will still be but some variant on the Warrior’s Way.

Understand: women ARE sacrally potent. The Biblical Tradition tries to deny this. Prison reveals it. All we try to do in prison is find the feminine. Fuck other men, trying. Only to find that that is all She, The Shade Mother, will allow. All She grants is a truncated homoeroticism: male and female. Fucking assholes!

The Shade Mother appears more visually in other patriarchal myths. Yet, Her apparent absence, her apparent Obliteration in the Biblical Story is Her most mystical and mystifying act. She refuses intimacy with the male. She is not intimate with Yahweh. She only allows him to have sexual intimacy with his own maleness. All He is allowed is masturbation. To find full eroticism only within. He wars against his own body; slashing it, gashing it, whacking it … desperate to find the mystical transformation – as Jesus did! – into some presence of the feminine. He ejaculates and believes he holds Eve in the palm of his hand!

In this light, in the Warrior Culture, males are born to continue the Fight. They bring honor and glory by dying right. “He gave his life for his country,” is a variant of “He gave his life for God.” Which is the mythic act of substitution for Mother Love.

The hardest part in my task to move towards Sacred Sexuality is to state that the Lone Male has to first discover his Warrior in the erotic terms which his Shade Mother has defined. Then, on the literal, touch and feel level, he must spiral to discover the sacral power in his female. Again, remembering, that the Lone Male currently rules all males and females.

Many believe that the goddess has been discovered as women have become more public. As they have become Warriors. This, however, should not be taken to be more than a variant on the Warrior Story. Liberation is often defined as a female’s now accepted “right” and ability to kill and murder. Athena has become all that she can be.

Women, like men, have to discover the Shade Mother. Confess Her. Males have to listen. Both have to embrace. Both have to confess the Shade Mother.

Embracing the Shade Mother is a mystical experience. And its linkage to the literal and the symbolic foreshadow “mysterium tremendum” shudder and earthquakes in the intimacy of males and females.

Intimacy: which is interior and inside; embracing: cock and cunny deep sleeping.

*********

I – we – are working on this during the World Trade Center insanity. I don’t know when you will be reading this, but if you have been observing those around you, and/or listening to the News, you will see how language moves the individual from the literal to the symbolic to the mystical. How the individual wants to become Warrior so as to be Redeemed as Son … and so become Father.

Hopefully, you will have spied The Shade Mother. Sensed that what you see – what is – is not what is. In other words, the challenge of the WTC attack is for us to realize that we are all Family. One Family: Holy. That we are each and everyone, Earthfolk. More – quite disturbing – that the WTC is a direct, logical and totally mythic manifestation of the Biblical Story of Genesis.

Among Earthfolk, no one is Chosen. All are Children. All are Parents – biologically and/or psychologically and/or spiritually. We Parent each other. We Parent the Family. We are Parented.

There is a limited role for the Warrior. Basically, to control other Warriors. It is a sense of Warrior severely limited, restricted and bounded by Justice. A Justice whose only objective is Peace. In this sense, the Warrior is called to act non-violently. Understanding “non-violence” as a way of expressing and discharging the violence within each of us. “Non-violence” is not inaction, lack of action, no, it is just the opposite. It is the bridge from violence to Peace.

Consider that we are told daily that some “strike” at the enemy must be part of a Just Response. Yet, in a somewhat unprecedented historical & mythic moment, The Enemy is hard-to-almost-impossible to identify. … Can’t we see that we can’t see The Enemy because The Enemy is Us! (My apologies to Pogo.) This insight is an application of What Is/Is Not.

I – we – will pass from this planet with the Warrior still dominant. Yet, there is always the hope. The look in a child’s eye – or childlike eyes – that wonder which says, “Why did they do this to us?” only to realize that “they” are us and so we go off to play ball, swing back and forth, play on the teeter-totter, gather in the sandbox to build the earth.

Why is there strife within The Family? It is a matter of Parenting. Once you discern the Shade Mother and the Warrior Father (also Shade), then you have to deal with the fact that we have abusive parents … but do we want to become as They are? You can transform … because you are the mythos.

III. Secular Myth of Scientism and the Penitentiary

Myths are all about intimacy. They are the intimate tales of all humankind. They “work” on multiple levels. Many, like the Jungians, realize that every “objective fact,” every “real thing” is a nexus of mythic energies. That the objective and the real are but manifestations of the mythic.

This must be said because the Secular myth of Scientism tells a tale which denies the mythic spectrum. It tells a tale which has humankind moving on a straight line, in historical progression, moving towards Ultimate Truth, whether that be the Progress of its early phase or the “Knowledge” of its current phase. It argues that once Progress, now Knowledge, will do away with myth.

The Scientism myth is all about intimacy. That there “really” is none, and, more, that there should be none. That to be fully human is to become, “evolve,” into being non-human. Here, the machine or The Machine.

The Machine has an inside, an interiority, but it lacks intimacy; possibly, abhors it.

The Scientism myth is an historical expression of the Biblical, Warrior culture. Structurally, there is always an Enemy, here, Ignorance, Superstition, actually, anything “mythic.” Its method is also the “Take no prisoners!” driven “Since we can, we should” probing into any and everything: which is all but a new version of “Might makes Right!”

Scientism in its progressive guise is the Warrior in white laboratory tunic. If the scientismist can define something in laboratory terms, then he can proceed to destroy it. Dissect it; alive, if necessary. Exhume it. Dissolve it. Map its genetic code. Whatever.

In Scientism there can be no interior which is intimate. There is no “soul” or spirit or mysterium tremendum. Nothing sacred nor holy; everything is profane, in the sense of its expendability, its ultimate transformation into trash and debris. “Just a bag of bones.” Or as Star Trek had an alien confirm humans as: “Carbon based bags of water.”

The curious linkage between the Biblical-Secular-Warrior-Scientism segments of this intimacy denying mythos can be seen in the development of the American penitentiary. Few realize that the penitentiary was “invented” in America. Current penological textbooks and histories will not agree with what I am about to say. They present the development of the penitentiary as an evolution from European ideas of the 1700s into a set of ideas forwarded by the pacifistic Quakers (Society of Friends). They present the development as “good intentions gone wrong” or as being sourced in the muddle-headed, soft-hearted “reform” spirit of the Do-gooder left-wing-of-the-Reformation Christians.

When I left prison, I got involved with the social justice arm of this historic Quaker faith. I was a project director for a prison project. The objective was to divert funds away from building new prisons into developing community-based alternatives. It is an objective which historically comes and goes in-and-out of favor in an identifiable cycle; being in turn adopted as a cause by conservatives, then liberals, then ….. I’ve been inside many prisons: worked with reformers, wardens, county officials, community-based providers, academic penologists, and so on.

Given my personality type, in order to suggest a reform, I wanted to know why this system was created. When I started I truly had no idea of how, when, where or why the penitentiary was formed.

I read the standard penal histories and set off to simply identify and clarify the role of the Quakers. Seemingly a simple task. What I found, both inside academia and out in the institutional judicial world, is that no one - and I mean no one - knew the how, why, when or where of this system. I asked theologians, historians, judges, probation offices, shrinks at the State lunatic prison, etc. I sometimes received short answers, or seemingly competent sources to explore, only to find, almost instantaneously, that these were insufficient.

What my primary research began to expose is that there’s a heady time in American history called “The American Enlightenment.” Anywhere during the 1700s into the early 1800s: plunge a marker. Of course, you immediately note that this encompasses our Revolutionary period. Intellectuals and politicians of that past era were awash in optimism, and they expressed bed-rock confidence in the efficacy of rational analysis, rational ideas and a benevolent God (which is where rational thinking has to take one, isn’t that true!)

(My research is titled, “The Religious Dimension of the Penitentiary, 1787-1822. See, www.earthfolk.net. It was completed in 1978.)

The notion of “City” comes into play again; another urbanization period (re: Abraham and Ur). The Puritans spoke of a “citee on a hill” and these fellow “Americans” had definite notions of a “city of brotherly love” – to pillage the fact that this all happens in colonial Philadelphia. Somewhat utopian, they were confident that they could design a city which did not have the defects of Europe – which was, for them, the symbol of what they were revolting against. While directly influenced by Europe – there was a strong Atlantic trade in goods and ideas – they were early believers – in act if not in words – of the purifying experience of the frontier. They were on a new frontier in every aspect of thought and life ... and spirit. (On an “errand into the wilderness” as oft noted.)

So, what to do with “the least.” The poor, the sick, the broken in body, the criminal? Hmmm. These are not superficial thinkers. They belong to a class which meets during the day at the Constitutional Convention and who convene during that same night in one of the many voluntary societies which were focused on a wide range of social and political reforms. They are not some shallow intellectuals overcome by brandy after dinner as they set down to ponder human nature. No. They were activists who sought to create and/or change legislation. They were aware of international, mostly European, issues and movements, and they knew what they were about, namely, creating a “New World” - “a citee on a hille.” Sober artisans of statecraft who met the nitty-gritty issues straight-on. As their leading ideological proponent, Dr. Benjamin Rush, stated, they needed to create a “House of Terror” – but one which would reform, not just terrorize. But, never forget the terrorizing!

Instead of the oft-ill-described “pacifist” Quakers, the voluntary group which formed to spearhead this penitentiary reform was actually “The Pennsylvania Prison Society.” (PPS) It still operates; headquarted in Philadelphia. The PPS’ membership included Quakers, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and upstanding representatives of local society. Their leader for forty-five years was the Episcopal Bishop, William White.

Now, this is a broad-based Christian effort. Yet, I could find neither letters or sermons or reports which reflected upon the Biblical basis for their efforts. In sum – almost as solitary witness for reform inspiration - they quote Matthew: “I was in prison and you visited me.” This lack of thorough, expansive and robust theologizing of such a momentous social, cultural and religious change is more than somewhat astounding given the world-wide impact of what they created in this Penitentiary System.

Note that this is a movement which Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont came to America to study on behalf of the French government. In a curious cultural back-flow, the penitentiary is – as I see it – the only social institution which was exported to Europe. Rapidly, “the penitentiary” became the model for criminal justice reform throughout the European-colonized world.

More, during the following centuries - and even to this day - there are few, if any, sermons preached on criminal justice. And if any, I’d wager, none which know the story I am relating.

What happened that is critical to Sacred Sexuality is the absolute transfer of sacral power from its Biblical form and practice to the secular institutional form and discipline of the State.

Consistent with the times, when the ministers who formed the PPS petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature for reform, they signed not using their pastoral titles. Bishop William White became simply William White.

From this period onward, ministers become institutional and State epiphenomenons. Their language, story and moral practices are never again central to the administration of criminal justice. Without going into a discussion based on comparative historical analysis, in many countries, past and present, religious language, religious courts, and religious sanctions have power over, sometimes over-against secular, State sponsored criminal justice institutions and tenets.

So, you might say, Big Whoopie!? … But what was transferred? Let’s look at the practice inside these new penitentiaries. In the old ones, prisoners often had to pay for their own meals. They also paid for sex, liquor, and whatever they could bribe the jailor to obtain. This is noted by the reformers. Their core reform is to separate … here, this is a word to remember, for it is a word of interiority and intimacy … to separate the prisoner. Separate from “normal” society (a modern word, not theirs). The prison population does reflect class, economic and racial/racist characteristics. But we hold that it is more than that which is of importance here. The inmate is, in effect, Chosen. He/she is separated to be put on a journey of reform – of transformation of character.

Each prisoner was to have his own cell. With a small garden. In his room he had only the Bible to read. This was the basic plan of the “separate confinement” approach. It was institutionalized at first in a renovated Walnut Street Philadelphia jail and for a short time in the now defunct Eastern States Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

This “separate confinement” reformed failed. Several causes are forwarded: over-crowding, high level of immigrants, freed slaves, and so forth. Yet, in the curious way things do happen, the architectural form remained as the theory was discarded. In place of “separate” confinement came “solitary” confinement. This plus multiple prisoners per cell; the reintroduction of the lash … the architecture and the psychology of punishment without any intent to reform became “the System” almost as soon as the first separate confinement penitentiary (Eastern States penitentiary) was opened in the 1830s. You might conclude, then, that nothing really happened. Ah! The revenge of the What Is Not, Is. For while the prisoner’s lot became and remains dire – State raised convicts, in the main – the cultural, theological and spiritual shift took hold. Set in at the deepest cultural level wherein the true character of prison life is not talked about. Not preached about. Not integrated into the re-forming of wayward citizens. Rather, as is true today, the prisons are warehouses, more a mix of Dante and Sartre: a hell, for sure, with No Exit. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Note that this is “separate confinement.” Not “solitary confinement” – which was practiced later in another prison system and which is what the penitentiary became and has remained, namely, a warehouse with inmates as inventory. (Solitary confinement was put to the test at Auburn state prison in New York. During the first year it is recorded that forty-five prisons in solitary committed suicide.)

Separate confinement had a literal link to the symbolic, namely, the weekly visits of members of the PPS. They came to spiritually aid the prisoner, which here – and again this is significant – meant to correct his morals. The mythic connection is to repent not so as to be Saved but to become a reformed Good Citizen. The PPS ministers are secularized as simply PPS members, as citizen volunteers (re: they did not use their religious titles when identifying themselves on memorial documents submitted to the State legislature wherein they urged various reforms).

All the “spiritual” labor of the members of the PPS is towards wholing the Democracy. Though it requires another line of discussion, there is a “reduction” occurring here. A reduction of the Spiritual (as Mr. Bunyan had in his prison cell) to the Moral. The sign of spiritual reformation becomes moral character, especially moral citizenship. … Yet, a counter-argument could be made that these Enlightenment moralists acted in classical Calvinistic manner. In Calvinism – as evidenced in the sermons and writings of Puritan ministers – the Word was preached to those awaiting execution because no mere human knew who the Predestined were. The murderer could be predestined, and the minister not! This certainly unnerved lots of folks who wanted their Good Actions to count, and their Moral Character to be a sign and proof of the Father’s favor. In time, predestination and moral character merged in the measure of “good citizenship.” Meaning, as the work-culture of Protestanism evolves inside America, an individual’s goodness – his favor with God – is measured by the good work he does on the job which must by a certain necessity – a necessity almost predestined – issue forth in good works … but here defined as philanthropic, not necessary good works of social justice.

During separate confinement the prisoner was brought into his cell with a hood on his head, so that he could not identify other prisoners, nor they, him. There was to be no “school for crime.” No association among the captives of the State. Literally, he was alone. Symbolically, he became part of the PPS weekly visit group. Mystically, he was a citizen on a journey of conscience – out of the law and back. When his time was up, the hood goes back on, and he leaves. The objective was to allow the ex-prisoner to re-enter society without others saying, “I knew him in the Pen!” His connections were to be with the greater moral community of good citizens.

The isolation is accompanied by cleanliness and purity. The prisoner has no opportunity for sex, except solo – in this vein, there was found nary a discourse on the evils of masturbation! No drink. His clothes are all uniform. He labors during the day in his garden raising food. At night – and here’s the other link to interiority – it is his “conscience” which comes to accuse, convict and educate him. Actually, it comes to haunt and terrorize him as the good Doctor Rush so conceived and wrote.

There was a school of philosophical psychology in Scotland (the “Common Sense” school) which influenced these reformers. It held that the conscience was a lively organ. In one sense, the conscience was the vital vehicle through which God spoke to you in moral terms. Here, in the cell, in the darkest hours of night, the prisoner wakens – cold sweats, trembling hand, the icy clutch of loneliness, and then the interior voice, the voice of his conscience … it rises up to indict him! As only it can, for it was there when the perfidy was committed. Theft. Robbery. Murder. Rape. Whatever. Who knows you better than yourself? … And in line with how God had been speaking to the mystics down the ages and especially to the practical mystics of the Protestant Reformation, like Mr. Bunyan, so does He continue to speak to all of us, and so to this prisoner, through His/our conscience.

It is not social pressure. It is not the lash and the hangman’s noose that terrorizes. No, it is God, Himself, directly, person to person, mano a mano – Jacob wrestling the Angel – right here in the prisoner’s cell. The penitentiary then is the sacred meeting ground of God and Man. Inside the cell is the Burning Bush; the prisoner awakes to see the Pillar of Fire … and, if he cannot see the error of his ways, if he is not reformed, then he is doomed! For the penitentiary is, to these Protestant Christians, truly a sacrament.

Sacrament. Pause for a moment, for this is not their theological word, though it is their intent. A sacrament in Roman Catholic theology is a rite which unfailingly makes God present to the human. This is important to grasp: this unfailingness. In Catholic sacramental theology, the efficacy of a sacrament is not dependent upon the state of the priest’s soul. A depraved, evil priest who baptizes someone effects a true baptism. If that same satanic priest offers the Mass, the host is consecrated into the Real Presence, that is, the Body and Blood of Christ. There’s a phrase, “ex opere operato” – for those of you more interested in this theme.

The relevance here is that the penitentiary becomes a sacrament of the new Democracy, of the American City. The reformers believed that it was inevitable, almost impossible (nothing being impossible in light of either human frailty or, for some, the ever-present seductions of Satan) … almost impossible for reform of the prisoner’s soul not to take place.

Now, one last thing. On a weekly basis members of PPS visited with the prisoners. They were there to be role models; they were icons, symbols of the Good Citizen. To discuss the Bible and the right conduct of life. They continue to serve, to this day – knowingly or not – as a model for most prison reformers and visitors. Namely, that they are visitors. Being faithful to the Biblical mandate, “I was in prison and you visited me.” They are there as epiphenoms. They are not central nor critical to the daily operation of the prison. They are there, actually, for themselves. In response to what their God has mandated, not drawn by a desire to engage the prisoner in an intimate moment. Validating that to be a Good Christian means to be a Good Citizen.

Only God is intimate; not your fellow human. One is to “walk with Jesus” – not with the Family of Mankind. Once “outside” of prison’s “inside,” you were on your own. There was no need – one can infer – for a social, symbolic response since you were “one on one” walking with Jesus. Indeed, the ex-con was the new myth of the Rugged Individual – carry his rugged Cross.

This is a pivotal thought. Because the penitentiary becomes an organic part of the State. Just as the practice of Confession is organic to the Catholic Church – and deals with sin and applies Divine Sanctions – so the Penitentiary becomes the only place where the prisoner (offender, sinner, outlaw, whatever) becomes reconciled to society, but not in terms of human solidarity, rather in terms of the right-sizing by the State. Remember, in our legal system, the State is the first victim of a crime, not the personal victim. In like manner, the prisoner is “released” – supposedly as “corrected” – when the State adjudges him so; there is no input from the victim – no reconciliation, no restitution, no psychological closure of any sort (good or bad).

What has been corrected? Re-formed?

The penitentiary is the culmination of the secularizing trend which originated in Genesis wherein Loneness was revealed as the primordial state of humankind, and which described the interior relationship between God and Man. Note, “interior” and not intimate. For there is no intimacy in Genesis. El does not birth Adam; He creates him.

In the penitentiary, religious language is stripped away. This is a foundational step in the development of the Secular myth of Scientism. Though in its nascent form, this 18^th Century Scientism reveals that the Garden of Eden is the Penitentiary. It is the secular space of Loneliness expressing the same Loneliness Adam experienced before Eve – which Loneliness, as was stated before, defines, in full, the relationship between Adam and Yahweh/El.

However, the Penitentiary takes this one step further. Actually, clarifies. Namely, that the Biblical Way is a way of morality and not spirituality. As occurs in the Hebrew Tradition, the emphasis is placed on laws and rules. With the spiritual reduced to the moral, to the legalistic mentality. Yes, there are “leaks.” Individuals and events within this Tradition which point to another way, but the overwhelming thrust of the Biblical Tradition is the equation of spirituality with morality … moving towards the literalism of legalism and ethical codes. In this way, as stated before, the Biblical Tradition is a cultural tradition. It is not inclusive, but exclusive. It does not seek the Family of Man, rather, sectarian membership.

The penitentiary is all about intimacy. And, as such, all about Sacred Sexuality. The ex-con does not feel compelled to reconcile with his/her victim. There is no call for them to rejoin the Family of Mankind. Love is simply to remain in “the bosom of Jesus.” Though returned to family life, life on earth is vicarious.

Where Secularism vents Scientism in the penitentiary history is the movement within the “solitary confinement” school – which dominates over time – which sees the inmate as a laboratory test rat. At first Scientism’s tools are sociological. In the early 1800s, various and numerous sociological examinations of the prisoner and of criminal activity are conducted. This is displaced by the psychological movement, with its early phrenological phase. Moving into the 1900s, the psychologists are, at first, basically psycho-analytical (Freudian) but become, in time, experimental druggers. In the late 20^th century, the inmate has been re-imagined within the medical model. Pills, shots, narcotics, sedatives, then, hallucinogenics become daily fare. The most infamous chapter in this narcotic story was the 1970’s experiments of Dr. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West out of UCLA, who championed the theory that criminals have no right to their personality. That personality is a social construct, and so it was the State’s right to break-down that personality and re-build it. This is a bit like “Clockwork Orange,” but there was also an alleged pilot conducted in Springfield federal prison which followed this approach. Whatever the actual truth, there were more than enough zoids shipped into Sandstone FCI from Springfield while I was there to allow me to offer personal witness to the ubiquitous use of mind-washing and personality-destroying drugs for inmate control.

Scientism is a secular method. It holds that anything and anyone can be probed because there is nothing inside, nothing interior to respect. No “personality” nor animalistic vital force which requires respect. So, its probes and probes. Exposes. Reduces to whatever it finds – microscopically unto nanometers – makes-up the larger entity. If you are following this view, you will see a parallel in Genesis. There, humans are created. They are not, themselves, a manifestation of the Divine, meaning, they do not participate in the Divine nature or person. Rather, humans are Other; alien. If you remove “Yahweh/El” from this – reduce them to what Scientism would say “they really stand for,” namely, the realization that “the force/energy” (whatever term used) which created the world, this force/energy is not dependent upon humans in anyway – you then can argue (as Julian Huxley did) – that humans are epiphenomenona. No more “important” or “special” than rocks or insects – possibly, not even as important or special! The “truth” of Genesis is, in this way, manifest in the truth of Scientism that the world is what we create it to be. So, individuals, in themselves, have no inherent nor intrinsic value. No, rather, individuals are created by the group (family) and their social identity is or can be re-created by the State. This, again, is a variation on the tenet that the individual is created by the group; the species by the genus, and so on, arguing that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – without a moment’s pause to reflect upon the mystical image which emerges here, namely, that the whole is also a novel individual.

Scientism logically manifests itself in the philosophies which reduce sexuality to the mechanistic genital in-and-out – as all but only an act of mutual masturbation. Hugh Hefner is a leading figure in this “erotic” movement. For him and his followers – male and female – sex is always “solo” – with the other being used as an instrument; often, nameless. This is a theme we deal with in our collection of short stories, To Everyone Else It Was Only Sex on www.earthfolk.net.

For us, the merging of scientific Scientism and this broader Secular Scientism is manifest in the touted counter-cultural writer William Burroughs. One of his projects was to create a machine with which to have perfect sex. Lunch, for him, may have been Naked, but it certainly was definitely Lonely.

From this you can gather that we are not part of the “Free Sex” movement as it has been bandied about here in America. For us there is nothing free about this movement; nor is there much of what we would count as sexual. This, not to deny that in our works we envision a spiritual place for collectively ritual and mystically communal erotic play and intercourse within Sacred Sexuality. (See, The Hand on www.earthfolk.net, among other works.)

Today, group-sex is barely more than group-grope. It is warrior orgy driven by the eros of rape. It is not a ritual. It does not pretend to be a mystical moment. While stories arrive and conversations often turn towards a discussion of polyamory and other collective/ communal efforts, without an articulated mythos and/or discipline, we are suspect of claims that Warrior Sex has been transformed and a new eros is here. We say this because we hold that the first step “towards” is the reclaiming of a person’s intimacy and a mutually creative development of erotic language between Beloveds. While we have a sentimental openness to collective ritual – being participants in the thunderously erotic ritual of the Mass and Divine Office (yes, truly!) – we have imposed upon ourselves a working silence in respect to group-eroticism until we hear and observe an emerging language of Beloveds. However, social, ecological and cultural transformation “towards” necessarily requires the imagining and enactment of collective and communal erotic rituals. Yes, we await Bodywanderers and the emergence of The Hand (see, www.earthfolk.net).

Modesty

Another value we hold as key to Sacred Sexuality is modesty. The present Free Sex movement seems to tout its freedom only in terms of being totally exposed in the public space. “Let it all hang down!” – and out. Free Sex, so it would seem, on their terms would be for everyone to walk around naked in public. Total exposure. For us, this is a logical conclusion to all that started in Genesis … but it has not an ounce of spiritual worth.

Sacred Sexuality concerns interiority and intimacy. And intimacy and interior space are personal and private. Now privacy has different boundaries for different folk, but for us privacy and intimacy and interiority all play together. Here is the difference. Over time two Beloveds develop a presence which is so intimate, so robust and so full that it can only be expressed in private language – a language most difficult to share with the public and best nurtured (“gardened”) upon interior landscape. For the Free Sex people, group acts of sexual intercourse on the Today Show would seem to be a celebration of ultimate freedom. For us it would be meaningless.

Beloveds are modest. What they share is precious. Eternal. Life giving. Death-creating. They move into a space, spiral into it, which is truly creative and singular in Embrace. While public affection is certainly a comfortable manifestation for Beloveds, the public arena is for symbolic and mystical acts. Distinct from these is the intimate act of embrace. Passionate, lust filled, craving, wildly blitzed-out Sacred Sexuality dons an interior modesty.

Lastly, Evil. The Shade Mother and Father are manifest through the Warrior “Sacred Sexuality” as sourced in Genesis. We find and hold up Genesis as an Evil Story. Evil because it Lies about Sacred Sexuality. Because it obliterates the feminine; annihilates the Goddess; and reduces the female to a fuck-bucket – the container for mutual masturbation. In the Genesis Tradition, to look upon a naked woman is to be Tempted. For she is a shimmering manifestation of the Satanic. One couples with her only as a last resort – “It is better to marry than to burn.” Yes, in her there is no divinity; she is not a source for spiritual companionship or mastery.

Evil is when the male and the female look at one another and see only cock and cunny.

The penitentiary is evil: solitary confinement. The Scientism method is evil: there is no intimacy.

Sacred Sexuality embraces this Evil so as to transform it; to create with the Beloved.

Charles Dickens’ Remarks on the American Penitentiary

Charles Dickens incurred the wrath of American editors and readers with his comments. They seem insightful, even today. Note that he describes the prisoner’s emotional experience under “separate confinement” as being one of “solitary confinement.”

“In the outskirts, stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary: conducted on a plan peculiar to the state of Pennsylvania. The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

In its intentions, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carried it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.”

“I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries which human ears can hear ….”

“He sees the prison officers, but with that exception, he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out by the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.”

“It is my fixed opinion, that those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased.”

From, American Notes for General Circulation (Philadelphia 1842) and in the newspaper, Journal, January, 1861.

IV. Skin

At this point we have some answers to, Why “sacred” and why “sexuality”? It is because the core of the Biblical creation myth deals with these as primal acts and primary energies.

Another starting point is to look at Genesis as a story of Skin.

In other creation myths, whomever creates – God or Divine Being or Coyote or whomever – is dealing with the original creative space which is also holy. Non-Biblical and non-human-creator myths often position humans as part of a greater fabric, of a Nature or a Light or some such force. Clearly, elements of this type of mythos are also present in the Biblical creation story. If it is the Great Spider, then your body is part of the fuller body of all life around you. If it is a Mother and Father God – even if one is rendered in animal form – then you are part of a clan or tribe, one which has clear and definite connections to the animal world. You are related to the world, to the whole creation because you are part of, even though not exactly identical with, all other creatures. In one sense, all creatures have skin because each one was born.

With Genesis, a Creator conjures the created “out of nothing,” out of the Void, or Dark Vapors. It is all “Fiat!” “Let there be …” This is not a birthing story. Immediately, you know that the Creator existed/exists outside of and before the Creation. The Creating Act then has no analogies or metaphorical links to the created’s world. Whomever this Creator is, “it” is not linked to the created world by any necessity or “natural” bond. It is not family. It is not body; not-skin.

You can infer some degree of intimacy by arguing that the Biblical Creator somehow “needed” to create the World and Humans, but the real impact of Genesis’ opening is a “Wow!” Meaning, there was no need to create the world. In fact, Creation becomes, in the Tradition, a graceful, grace-filled and in the same vein a gratuitous act of God’s love which is a mystery unplumbable. One cannot look to the created’s experience to understand the Created.

In short, Genesis lets us know that this World is God’s World, not ours. The subsequent Garden of Eden is not ours, either. It is God’s holy place, not mankind’s.

Okay. What is the impact of all of this? Well, for me, it speaks directly to the notion of intimacy, of skin. While we come from this Yahweh, we are not created from his intimacy. Intimacy is a term of birthing, and in Genesis there is no birthing. No cosmic groaning. Rather, an exercise of power. A magical moment of conjuration. “Presto!”

Right from the start, then, you begin to understand – as you first hear this tale told, today or millennia ago – that something rather peculiar is being proclaimed. This “Biblical myth” is truly a revolutionary, radical break with any prevailing myth – either of its original day or even today. You need to pause to consider what it must’ve been like to first hear this. The hearers would “feel” the erotic change. Erotic? Yes, the Biblical Story is like a direct punch in the nose – or, kick in the groin! - there was no need to parallel or emulate other myths by using analogy and metaphor, e.g., humans are not suckled by the Great Wolf. In these other mythic accounts, there is always a way to connect to the creation story by examining one’s current relationships to humans and animals. These stories explain the erotic linkage – how the energy of life flows from one living thing to another.

Now, the Biblical account says, There is no erotic linkage! There is no necessary or natural relationship between the animal/human and the sacred/divine world. The erotic power – the Life Creating Energy – of this El or Yahweh: however named – is absolutely separate, distinct from human and animal experience. The Creator is not “father” in the Family sense. Rather, It is Patriarch in the power sense.

In the Biblical tradition, you cannot go directly or even indirectly to the divine experience from the human. You cannot contact God through your own intimacy. Rather, the contact is through a power relationship. One of submittal. Of being a Captive. Or, in the Islamic way, through Surrender.

When the Bible presents the Eve-from-Adam story, it is consistent within itself. For who, upon hearing this now or then, is not given pause by the oddity of the account? Women from within men? Clearly, the Biblical folk knew the meaning of their own stories. They were preaching a fantastic new way of not only understanding God, Man and the Universe, but they were unleashing a wild and even alien erotic imagining.

You hear it. You look at women. Everything changes. Presto! … You can’t ground what you hear in any type of human experience. No. You take it on faith. It is a Revelation. A voice from beyond. A Beyond beyond Beyond. Where this El – Yahweh exists.

Heady stuff. Sweaty palms. As a male you walk differently. Your feel your skin differently. You look at animals differently. You inhale, fill your chest – power! Divine Power can be yours if you submit, obey, surrender … surrender everything which up to this point seemed human, was a way of human knowing, was a sense of how one fit into the world. Fitted into family.

You looked at men – and it was Cain and Abel.

It goes on from there at a rapid pace. From Chosenness to a Promised Land to Joshua dedicating his genocides to his God.

The erotic is no longer the Life Force. No longer an experience – in ecstasy – which makes present the divine – Nature or Mother Nature or Love or whatnot. Rather, eros becomes sexual. More, it becomes genital. Thus arises the Biblical importance of having male sons and of rendering women as “useful” only and when they give birth.

Male genitalia assume importance as identifiers. Circumcised cocks are Yahweh’s totems. This – to me, wild and bizarre – emphasis continues down through the centuries through Catholic priestly cock obsession through our Warrior culture’s “mine’s bigger than yours!” obsession with guns, weapons of mass destruction, and the penile Missile Defense.

Anyway, when inside prison – another whack on the nose! and kick to the groin! - you discover the essential place cock has in Biblical culture. Because, as said, prison is the Garden of Eden. It places you back at the Biblically creational moment. It is where you get skinned alive!

What is prison if not an iron womb? And the guns and clubs, the bars, themselves, but penile projections? If you think this is too Freudian, then you have to be there to see how it goes down. Psychologically, inmates are feminized. They are forced to role-play being the bitch. Total control of their bodies: rules and regs about facial hair, names taken away and numbers bestowed, dependency enforced through knobless doors and the constant “waiting” for The Man: to Count you, “Lock up and Count!” … counted even while asleep: what is the infidelity feared? … It goes on: every action regulated – one hug upon meeting, one upon exit; sitting straight ahead, not touching knees in the Visiting Room. Mail censured. … Okay, so you say, Hey, it’s prison! Exactly my point.

You in the “free” world, who read this and say, “I’ve never been a con!” - inferring that somehow by your “free will” you’ve been Good and Law-abiding … Pardon me as I gag! … It is not just a matter of sins that you’ve committed – however you define that term – it’s a matter of your acceptance, year after year, minute after minute, of your own self-incarcerating. You are who you are because of Fear.

Okay. You think I’m picking on you? I still live inside this Biblical culture, in its secular manifestation, and the Fear hammers at me, too. But what I’m saying is that as you grow up: once you begin to hear about prison – what its “founder” Dr. Rush called: “House of Terror” – you begin to figure out a way of never going there. Smart boys and girls, that’s true.

Your adaptation is to the institutions which are derived from that of the penitentiary. The “discipline” of schools, the army, the workplace … for most, of the family … is the same: “Behave or God will strike you dead and you will be beaten by archangels for eternity!” Something like that.

At the base of all this is your learning how to deal with your erotic energy, with your intimacy. You may not think this the case … until you try to act in a sacred sexuality fashion.

How to begin? As always, many ways. But here are my thoughts and experiences. (You might read, “Looking at Woman” on www.earthfolk.net)

First, your skin. This is the reality of your individuality, your separateness, and your potential isolation. Yet, if you look at your skin you immediately know that you are related, interconnected, linked. You did not generate your own skin. In fact, you come to realize that you are skin because of others, here, your parents.

Your skin, then, is memory, present and future. “You” are in your skin, but so are “others.” All those who came before you as family, and all those who will come from you as family – whether physical or spiritual.

As you explore your skin, you come to realize many of its peculiarities. That “it” – and so, “you” – have certain needs. To be touched by another. There are hands to touch. Lips to press. Arms to embrace. Though you come to manage and control these, you observe, in yourself and others, an almost uncontrollable urge to touch, hug, embrace.

Through touching you discover yourself as you discover the other; embracing. This is the creating message. “You” become as “others” become known, felt, embraced, etc.

There are urges and desires which you come to know and to observe – and you learn about the big, vague words used to wrap these urges and desires: Love, Friendship, Loyalty, Hunger, Adoration … words which seem only to point you in a direction or towards someone, but words which never seem obtained – you learn quickly that Love is something which you crave again and again.

Your skin has many “functions.” There are holes. Entrances and exits. There are tricks: eyes which can be opened or shut. Tongues which play hide and seek. As a youth, you experience that this skin grows … that you expand, and as you expand physically so you hear that you are growing “up.” In mind and spirit, as well.

The most shuddering discovery of skin is when you learn its erotic linkage to sex. That your genitals allow you physical entrance into another – wherein you have an experience like no other! You grasp that these male “outties” and female “innies” are more than appendages of physical sense. They are more than simple interior probes. Yes, they probe the interior like no other part of the skin; they seem specially attuned to mutual embrace! What you discover is that they evoke intimacy.

If you’ve never experienced your body in its multi-dimensionality, when you engage in sexual intercourse you experience a profoundly new and quite often unnerving sense of who you are: your literal physical self, your vulnerable emotional self, your mind-boggling, mystical self. You experience your “self” as “we” in a breathless and heart-pounding way.

In the main, everyone discover this sense of intimacy. There is a very unusual sense of discovery, of yourself and the other. There is a grasp that what happens through sexual embrace is a redefinition of who you are, for you begin to think of yourself as always in the presence of the other. He/she becomes your Beloved.

Clearly, “skin” is you made present in fantastic and erotically imagining ways.

As you look around, and as you age, you notice that skin is ever-changing. Yet, that it is also deathless. The skin of those who die lives on in the skin of their family: siblings, nieces, cousins, etc. Skin changes … but yet, then, it seems not to. It appears to be one which can be called ever-lasting or even eternal.

If you look at, feel, lick, smell your skin, you can learn everything you need to know about answers to who, where, when and why you are here and what “here” will always be.

You are present to your skin and you are present to everyone else, to the other.

How, then, the relationship to other skins? Here, male to female skin?

Cocks and cunnys. Are they in anyway special or different or peculiar in comparison to other parts of the skin? To the eyelids? To the fingers? To the tongue? Mouth? Anus? … Not special, different or peculiar in a separating way, as we have with the Warrior, rather, in a way of fullness, of fulfillment.

You observe that the flirtatious look finds itself touching in a tender way, leading to a kiss, then a more pervasive touching of the body, of all parts, genitalia, excitation … leading to a somewhat seething, frenzied drive to enter into the other, not just with cock and opening cunny, but, needing those, yet, the drive is so intense that words clang hollow, emotions whack you both about, and the convulsion and propelling of bodily fluids and contraction of muscles and the sheer heat and sweat and … whew! … the genital embrace is certainly one way of entering the sacred, the holy, the mystifying and mysterious. You hardly know yourself. You stare, peer at the other … wondering! Wonder-struck.

As you age, you come to know, or if you’re young, you might hear from “old lovers,” that such intimacy is engendered in quite different ways. With varying degrees of intensity, but nevertheless with as much, if not more, a sense of intimacy and presence. You learn that the skin, itself, in its many manifestations (as body, as mind, as soul) is but a simile, a metaphor, an anagogic allusion. … Hmmmm. (See, SilverSex on www.earthfolk.net)

But what you come to understand is that, Skin creates. Has been creating. Is the creating presence, now and forever.

This is one way “sacred sexuality” is discovered. You engage in your own creation story, in the creating act, with your skin … and all that your skin can be: which is the other, here, The Beloved.

What we don’t have in Genesis is Skin: there is no Beloved.

What we do have in The Beloved is both sacredness and sexual presence. The world is, has been, and will be through being The Beloved, now and forever.

************

A starting practice, then, is to look at your skin until you begin to see your Beloved. Sit, stand, whatever – be before each other and observe. Gaze and travel into the endless fractal crevasses of your Beloved.

Skin is the map of ages. Carrying family history. Family stories. Personal tragedies and triumphs. Sadness and comic relief.

Behold your Beloved. In the morning stand so that your Beloved is the moon receding and the sun rising. Hail your Beloved. Celebrate his/her individuality and distance. Shout, “Hello!” across the infinite space which is not yours and not your Beloved’s but the playground for your mutual celebration and creating. Move towards each other – peering, looking as the shadows of morn unveil your Beloved. As the brazen exposure of light betrays the uniqueness of each other.

Shout, speak, point, delight in the differences. “Great Red-head! I yearn to draw my fingers through your hair.” And with a gleeful eye, scan every hair. Checking from ankle to top of the head; peering into private areas. Smile. Laughter. Play with this awakening. Play with the unraveling of the dreamer into the body of your Beloved.

As you come closer; to the dance of touch. Ever so slightly greet each other with whisper and puffy breath. Meet each other with your breathing as you have with your sighting. Touch with the smile, the look, the leer, the wicked flick of finger … and, as practiced and designed, meet in your space, that chosen space: rug, blanket, a boundary of candles, whatever, and come, dock unto each other: fingertips, gently, drawing, and moving about so as to receive the form of your Beloved, of her cheek, his thigh, her nose, his ears, her belly, his chest … drawing forth as extracting their power, the power of just being, the power of having come into Time and into Flesh and into the Moment, of having come into meWE (see, meWe on www.earthfolk.net) … now embracing and sniffing and licking, down and up, scenting your Beloved, licking the drop of her breasts, licking the thickness of his bicep, pressing your hands upon her feet, wiggling toes, laughing, coming up and around, feeling asses soft with sleep, stroking to raise the fire of morning, chanting, chanting a practiced prayer of morning rise and moon-set … lighting candles, dipping a flower into a silver bowl of fragranced water and blessing your Beloved … laughing, lifting up, dancing about, slowly, like galaxies shifting, and all the time filling yourself with the presence of your Beloved, to come to that moment when you latch onto each other as Skin … cupping her breasts, cradling his balls, sucking sweetly the lips of unfed hunger, pulling and tugging, shifting and plunging, rolling about, simply sitting down legs thatched … however it comes: cock into cunny, cunny over cock, the penetration, the probe like shooting star, the salutation to your Beloved’s interiority: pray, sing, with words short or long: awaken your Beloved by your arrival, fingers, hands, palm and cock, tonguing deeply: so many ways to arrive! … and there, with your skin now conveying all your eyes had touched and your breathing recognized, there, with all that is of you which is now your Beloved … searching for the common breath, the comfortable embrace, the locking kiss, kiss of cock and cunny, the melting and the melding, all of your desire, desire for life, desire for the creational moment, desire to be desired and to be desire … and so it comes: moon-set and sun-rise … with coupling of body and soul: which is Skin.

V. The Sexual Sense

If you’ve been following our analysis of Biblical eros in Genesis, you should not be surprised at this statement: that there is a sexual “sense” – in line with the five senses. What its rank is – 6^th, 7^th, 8^th – is not of issue; the fact that it is, is.

Genesis’ sacred sexuality message is that there is no such thing as a sexual sense. That’s in line with its message that women – the feminine – is part of the masculine interiority; and that the feminine does not exist on its own as a sacral power.

Genesis is relentless – as is the ensuing millennia of Biblical erotic storytelling (“theology,” for some) – about affirming, re-stating, “revealing” the “truth” that, sexually, there is only the male, the Lone Male. Lone Male masturbating into ecstasy as worship of his God. Consequently, there is no “sexual sense,” when referring to male-female intercourse. Nothing sacred or holy can emerge from sexual intercourse in the Biblical context.

You can see the ready translation of all this into its secular variant. Whose high priest is Hugh Hefner. In Playboy women are only visual stimuli for beating your meat. All just Eve’s daughters. Ho hum. Well, women are visual stimuli, but they are not only that – they are numinous and sacrally potent. Hefner is just “a second Adam” masturbating himself into dreamland.

What is the sexual sense? As with our notion of “leaks,” you find in literature, movies, locker room banter some moments of awe-struck “Wow!” about “fucking some broad.” The leak is that the male loses himself. There is the old Warrior tactic of striking your male Enemy as he lies in bed – depleted in strength … with “strength” here referencing his non-warring state of mind. Ejaculation is seen as a loss of vital, core power, a weakening, a being sapped by the feminine seductress: the male’s intimate enemy. Again, there is the somewhat legendary advice to athletes not “to do it” before a game. Bottle up that awesome power! Don’t let some “little lady” break your bottle.

On a mythic level, there is the Tradition’s inability to get rid of Mary. Now, Mary is Eve’s daughter, and, straight-on, there is not much to get excited about here. Eve was not a goddess reeking with feminine lust for Adam – at least not in their Story. But she is a “leak.” Meaning, what is it that she did which was of such great import that they got the heave-ho out of the Garden? In like manner, what was there in “Mary” which made her a “necessary” part of the Incarnation? The Tradition labors (fights and kills) over the doctrine of Jesus’ being “fully God and fully man.” That he suffered in the flesh; not that some divine alien figure possessed his body, using it simply as a “vehicle.” Similarly, there is the Manger scene – at least once a year – showing that Jesus was part of a family; with a Mom and a Dad. Implied in all this is that Jesus’ birth was “real.”

So, somehow the cunny was there. Every effort to sanitize it, immaculatize it, virginize it … well, they don’t call her “Mother of God” as goddess, but they can’t get rid of her. Mary leaks.

Mary leaks the Earthfolk Story. That males need females for birthing; that no child – male or female – comes from the Lone Male. Adam’s deep sleeping and wound in the side are – so Mary leaks – not “real,” rather they are symbolic; not mythic.

Mary leaks the truth of the sexual sense. That to create a mythos – to birth the world, the human family: children – you need man and woman in embrace. Cock into cunny; cunny enfolding cock. Embracing. That two are one as a third is birthed; namely, the Beloved. In flesh as child. In spirit as Child. As Child, so the Family: Holy.

That, however, is just the beginning. Just “knowledge.” What we humans have been missing under the sexual repression of Biblical eros is practice. We have scant rituals to assist us in exploring this sexual sense. Again, one leak in the Roman Catholic Tradition is that marriage is a sacrament. “Sacrament” is an esoteric word to many. What it means, here, is that the union of male and female is holy. Not just a civil contract. Not just living together. No, more. That two can find themselves in the presence of God through sexual embrace. Yes, few sacramental theologians have expounded on this – mainly, we believe, because most were/are celibate.

Here’s where we come back to one of the first stories in The Confessions of Friar Killian (See, “Infidelity,” a short story on www.earthfolk.net). Associating “fuck” with “God” or “sacred” and “holy.” One of the difficulties of working “towards” sacred sexuality is that we lack a rich and robust language of sexual embrace. The Warrior culture has reduced its language to quasi-militaristic imagery, namely, that associated with the War of the Sexes. The word “fuck” is driven by a sense of attack. “Fuck you!” – however and wherever said – is a threat; sounds an alarm; raises one’s defenses. Screw you. Suck my dick. Cunt! Ram your ass. I need to get laid. … Hmmm. Not much breathlessly seductive poetry there!

To discover the sexual sense, one ritual, then, is a search to discover language. Given the fact that we are at an historic and mythic moment when this discovery must begin with two Beloveds in sacred embrace, the language being developed is not necessarily “ready for prime time” – not something you might be able to share with others. But in time, we believe, the private language of the Beloveds will ripple out into the collective and communal.

So, it might seem crazy … but start with a sacred space. Make some container: rug, candles, flowers, scents, music – however you want. You might find it helpful to associate the following words with an act – one of undressing. First, greet each other with the Skin ritual. Recognize and welcome – not necessarily a physical coupling at this point.

Take off your hat, throw it aside. Let it rip – whatever sexual word comes first – we can start with, “Let’s get laid!” Who starts first, man or woman, is not an issue. Just begin. Work on all the words and images. “Screw you!” and toss off a shirt or a blouse. “Suck my dick!” “Lick my pussy!” Be as “warrior” as one can be – seduce through cupping your breasts and stroking them; tongue deliciously darting in and out … there is, at some point, the moment of contact. As you want it, with lunge and attack or coy wickedness – all the time playing the tune of the Warrior, using the words which are all about … until exhaustion, until numbness, until loss of words, until all the emptiness of such words fill you up …

Maybe this is too physical and extroverted an exercise. Might be for some. But somehow you should find a way to move beyond Warrior words. To so throttle the imagery and poetry it offers that you are hungry for new imagery and poetry. Until you find the Warrior banter boring.

The objective is to find yourself on the other side of your words. If the male has been all Suck me, Fuck you bitch, Eat me … and the woman has been all Slave and submissive and Innocent to become Captive (a Dumb Fuck) … well, try to face that, Look at it … Look at each other … then exchange places: work that language the other way: she becomes the Eat me, Suck me, Fuck you … are you sensing where this is going? That up until this point there has been no language for the Shade Mother? No recognition of Her presence. In either of you.

What is the Shade Mother’s language; her imagery? We don’t know! But you and your Beloved have the clues secreted within! … At the least, this reversal of roles will ferret out some of Her presence. Some of what She does through the vicarious acts of her Lone Male. So, male and female act out the Lone Male … to get to that place where you feel the hunger – There has to be more?

For some, foolishness and silliness are useful tools at this moment. Dress back up, but each as the other. Male in female dress. Female in male. Talk as you so dress. What does it evoke in the male to put on a bra? Or panty-hose? She to slip on his briefs – with the cock slit? Play with that slit? … Let this foolishness take you many places. Play with exchanging names: he’s Sally and you’re Sam. But share you imagery – in words or however. For some, your words and images will come later. That’s fine.

The playful objective here is to broaden your sexual sense. Like when you wade into a lake, as you shiver and splash water onto yourself, as you attempt to become part of the water; for it to be part of you; for your wet sense to take over. The weightlessness of the wet; the alieneness of it all. So, you are playing your body – all its five senses – to move into the wetness of your Beloved.

Cross-dressing; working through Warriors words; reversing Warrior sex positions – she on top; doggie style, whatever … these are like oxymoronic words; juxtapositions of your senses in search of a break-through. Yes, for some there is the risk of break-down. Your discovery that your Beloved can’t go “there.” That such actions open up too much interiority – there is a sense of invasion; of attack; of capture … the lingering Warrior fears. Yes, yes, yes. Approaching the numinous within your coupling makes clear how each of you has to prepare to open the numinous within your own self, first.

So, this ritual – as any ritual might – could result in a break-down with no break-through.

If you proceed – days, weeks, months, years later – what you are present to is the peculiar emotion of letting your Beloved into your presence. This ritual exercise seeks not to “discover” that your Beloved accepts you – in the sense that you have wrapped yourself up in such a way that you are recognized. No, the subtle shift here is that you are in your Beloved’s life as an unknown. You are there not as you know yourself or even want to make yourself known, rather, as unknown and to be known. In like manner, “embracing” does not mean accepting the other; no, it means allowing your Beloved to be in your intimacy without condition; without control; without expectation. A total surprise. A discovery. Allowing your Beloved to muck about within your intimacy!

There are no Biblical words, images or rituals to assist us here. That is why “Towards” is an invitation to you. To you to explore, venture forth, stay still … reveal, make present … your Beloved; yourself as Beloved.

The sexual sense is the hunger to be born again, right now, here, in this moment. And in embrace you can unveil the numinous. Again, the leak of sacramental theology is that within sexual embrace the divine, the holy, the numinous is manifest.

Being born again is literally manifest in physical children. As you raise them, you realize that parenting is – or can be – a numinous experience. Through children the past, present and future unfold. “Now I have someone to cry at my grave,” is a variant of an Irish saying, oft voiced upon the birth of the first child. It conveys a sense of history and continuity; and the fact that we, ourselves, are someone’s child and so as much an historical being as we are individual.

Being born again is also manifest in sexual embrace with the Beloved. The Warrior has no way of talking about spiritual children, but such is made manifest through sexual embrace. The “sexual sense” is that there are many ways to have children. As two become Beloveds, so do they become Parents of the world; of the Family: Holy; they become Earthfolk. (See, SilverSex on www.earthfolk.net)

The sexual sense is that we humans are eternal beings. We pass on, but we do not die in the Warrior sense of being obliterated; of becoming nothing (also the dire view of Scientism). The sexual sense is a scent of fullness or the robustness of life. It is a sense of the unplumbableness of sexual embrace. There is no end to the erotic imagination. Indeed, Beloveds imagine all time. Their imagination is creational.

The sexual sense is that each of us is holy, a god or goddess; a divine entity. Yes, “human” is, in one view, the literalness of the divine. Yet, human also becomes symbolic through ritual; and mystical as Beloved. The Biblical Tradition has been unable to articulate a clear and acceptable doctrine of how Jesus was “fully God and fully man” because to be a full man necessitates embracing the feminine. Not as within the male but on its own potently sacral terms.

Sacred sexuality’s sacred sensibility is expressed through the moments of embracing wherein words such as god and man, divinity and humanity, sacred and profane break-down as they break-through through laughter, “coming,” fucking, getting laid … the ecstatic moment of drenched being which makes manifest our eternal presence each to the other.

The sexual sense “senses” that the creational power is within the embrace of the Beloved. Which means that you and your Beloved create the world. Yes, create. The world within which we live is the creation of individuals as they manifest themselves collectively and mystically. Every “you” has its collective sense, e.g., as an American or a Catholic, and its mystical sense, e.g., as part of the Human Race or as a Child of God. There is more here, however.

What is made present through sexual embrace of Beloveds is the Love which creates the world. We speak today of “energy.” A mechanistic word, but here it is useful to convey that what issues forth from sexual embrace is a practical energy with which to form the world. The “world” we inhabit every day is continually created at every level – literal, symbolic, mystical – by each of us. We manifest the world; we are manifestations of the world.

In sexual embrace Beloveds make present the creational energy. Yes, again, back to Genesis. The creational energy manifest there is manifest without sexual embrace. It is Lone Male energy manifest through masturbation. It creates a life of Loneliness; the life of the Warrior … of the Shade Mother. A world at war; with sexes at war.

If there is to be a New Age. A new vision. A new anything, then it will issue forth from the embrace of Beloveds. This is the insight of the sexual sense. Sensing that there is the creating moment … that the Beloved is, him or herself, the ritual moment … the ritual of sexual embracing.

This all leads to Intentionality. The sexual sense is intentional. In the Warrior view, you fuck and buck! Lay ‘em and leave ‘em! Make your deposit and vamoose. Use him just to have a baby. Variants galore on this theme. In sacred sexuality, the embrace issues forth in being born again – as Beloved.

The Beloved is always present. It is a shared presence. Multi-dimensional. Present. Past. Future. … Creational and creating.

VI. Deep Sleep

Dreaming. In the Biblical culture dreams have played a fairly standard though minor part in mythic development. Most mentions of dream or dreaming come in Genesis and in Daniel. It is employed as a standard device of God’s forewarning or an individual’s sensing God’s intentions. In the Christian Testament, Matthew is the only one to employ it in his stories; mainly in the Flight from Herod warning to Joseph and Mary.

I want to claim a more significant value for dreaming. In Genesis, Adam is laid down into a “deep sleep.” This phrase occurs a handful of times. There are events where the sleep takes on the character of deep sleep. Abraham had at least one. In the Christian Testament, several disciples fall asleep while Jesus is in the Garden of Gesthemane. There is a sense in these references that to sleep and deep sleep means that the sleeper awakes! … or, should awake … into deeper insight. Once so newly awake, then, their spiritual action or moral action takes place in wakefulness, in consciousness.

All this may seem somewhat unreasonable and a focus on a minor theme, and if significant then something not that unusual at all in general mythology for the theme of deep sleep and awakening is present more robustly in other myths. Indeed, “Awake!” is a common device to denote change and the discernment of a great insight. “Dreamer awake!”

I think, however, that there is more, a tremendously significant “more” to this “deep sleep” imagery than meets the eye. Why? Because it is the device used to present the most significant moment in Genesis. Namely, the “discovery,” the “creation” of woman.

Where is the woman, the female, the feminine to be “found”? From within a deep sleep. Adam does not know how to enter this on his own power, rather it is an action of Yahweh upon him. His maleness then does not say, “Yahweh, lay me down and take woman from inside of me!” In fact, when she is “created,” it is as if Adam is surprised! Like, “Wow! Go, Yahweh!”

Adam’s ribcage is a birth canal. A vulva. But he is unaware of this motherly aspect of his masculinity – as we males continue to be to this day! In the What Is Not, Is approach, Adam’s (and our continuing) forgetfulness about this aspect of masculinity, the Tradition’s total obscuration of the meaning of this deep sleep event, simply underscores deep sleep’s centrality. The act of birthing woman is quickly done; Adam is awakened; but he does not have insight as to how Eve got there; he simply believes that she is him, “bone of my bone” … and this IS his Biblical insight, namely, that all woman is, is a boner. (Divine humor here?)

Considering that the “creation of woman” is the prime purpose of Genesis, discerning the meaning of deep sleeping is critical and crucial. Consider that you are hearing Genesis for the first time. You’ve heard mythic stories about how the world was created. About how you are to relate to Nature and animals and other people. You know women. You know men. So, in order to get to the “Let there be!”s, the writer(s) of Genesis have to position the feminine force, Mother Nature.

As a contemporary reader who starts at the first line of Genesis, you read the chapters as if they are linear and cumulative. As if they are leading up to a conclusion or objective which is the necessary result of what has proceeded. But, as in languages where the verb comes at the end of the sentence or utterance, or where folk read from right to left, if you’re a Westerner, you might be annoyed to know that the Story’s conclusion explains the beginning and not vice versa!

So, when the “creation of woman” passage is heard, an “Aha!” drops. Of course! the hearer says to himself – Aaaagh! many women probably groaned! … this is how things are! They hear that “what is, is not.” Namely, that the “what is” of male-female relationship: that it is a relationship, a marriage, a conjunction of heaven and hell so to speak … they hear that this is not how it is! Rather, that everyone up to this time (of the composition of Genesis) has gotten it wrong! That all those other myths are wrong! That women were not created when men were. That the feminine force is not a divine force, not a goddess. No, that there is a novel revelation. Indeed – Revelation! - if every male was put into a deep sleep, then he would know what Adam came to know about God. That God drew the female from out the male.

There’s a Great Simplicity here, a Great Division: the world is rent in half. Only males count. Whew! Okay. That makes a whole lot of things a whopping lot easier! …. “Woman, fetch ….!” … “Woman, obey!” … Henceforth – and oh, so Fortunately! - when they meet wifely or feminine resistance, the male can say, “God made me do it!” Alas, “The woman made me eat that damn apple!”

If you sit with this deep sleeping insight for awhile, you see that the realm of deep sleeping, of dreaming, of imagining is the realm – now discarded; now devalued – of the feminine. More, when Eve goes about being in touch with her inner self, to whom does she speak? Not to Adam. Rather, to the Serpent.

Adam comes off as pretty much of a half-wit. Sort of the dumb jock stereotype. The “heavy stuff” of the story centers around Eve and the Serpent. Yahweh tells Adam and Eve about the Tree of Life, but only Eve is connected to a source which threatens their relationship with Yahweh.

Who or what is the Serpent? Okay. Let’s go back into Prison. If I accepted being a feminized male: bent over: Hack screwing me up the butt, then I’d get Good Time. Sort of where Eve ends up. When she leaves the Garden she doesn’t have the Serpent with her. She and Adam just go off and get on with living. But back in the Garden, for a moment, she listens to the Serpent.

The Serpent is that of the male which speaks with the feminine. Speaks about heavy things, about what goes on in deep sleeping. Dreaming. The Serpent is, as imagery, the spinal chord. “He” connects the brain to the pelvis: ratio to eros; mental, psychic to the sexual, erotic.

Adam doesn’t speak to the Serpent. Being created by the Lone Male God as a Lone Male, Adam, in one sense, has no spine. Remember, he had walked around in the Garden doing whatever Yahweh asked him to. Adam didn’t complain. Didn’t say, “Hey, El, you forgot to give me a woman. My dick’s driving me nuts!” Rather, it is God who makes this discernment. Saying, that Adam needs a companion … not a good lay or anything off-color.

But what does he get? A woman who brings the Serpent with her. For why did the Serpent come, but to speak with Eve? Where did the Serpent come from? Yet another leak: from out of the deep sleep. And what is the Tree of Life but an image of the fire, the energy, the creative force which births … for life only continues through birthing. It does not continue through ongoing “creation from nothing,” where Yahweh continually creates humans. No, Life continues through birthing.

The “Tree of Life” is rooted in Mother Earth; her bowels; her womb; her ass … and the Tree breathes the air and kisses the sun’s light; is showered by sunlight: solar sperm … this Tree is the connecting life form between Earth and Sky: it is a symbol of the spinal column, and is, indeed, God’s spinal column: that which connects the divinity of earth with the divinity of sun: of dirt and sky.

So, the Tree of Life is that erotic source which is in the male and drives him towards the female to embrace, couple and bring forth children. What else could it be? A factory? … Consider that the tree represents aspects of both the male and female, that aspect wherein they embrace, couple … it is a symbol of sacred sexuality.

Eve is supposed to not know about the Tree of Life for she is supposed to – considering that there are women listening, these potential “Eves” – supposed to not see herself as divine, as holy, as sacred, rather, as negatively unique, different, special only because of her genitality. She was not born with a penis, so ….

But Eve does know about the Tree of Life, because the Serpent lives in the Tree. The Serpent lives inside of everyone, as the power which rises, is aroused, by the erotic imagination. Without the Serpent, there is no birthing.

Okay. Why does Eve leave? Not revolt, etc.? Well, the writer(s) let the hearers know, “Forget all that goddess stuff. Forget all that sacred sexuality crap! Have babies – males, if Yahweh blesses you! – and be happy!” Brrrr! “By the sweat of your brow …”

Why the Biblical vision takes hold, I don’t know. No one will ever really know. Theorists forward many and varied explanations of why patriarchy emerged and triumphed. Physical need: physical dependence of child-bearing women on males is often forwarded; and it resonates, to a degree. But, why did men “allow” this to happen? Let’s not just try to figure this out by talking about women. For the story must have sounded weird and somewhat laughable to lots of males. I mean, take a look at your penis (if you’re a male!) – you hold it in your hands; you say, “Naw!”

But we’re at another millennial end of the Story. Under mythic layers so deep that we often fail to see how the Biblical Stories continue to structure our lives – in “secular” society. Secularity is derivative of the richer Biblical soap operas. Derivative, but as potent. Sometimes more so because its Stories are not plumbed for mythic connections or interpretation. Meaning, you hear Hollywood say, “It’s just a story!” or “It’s a documentary!” so they can have you “consciously dream” (which is what TV is) as you connect your mind and psyche to the cold fire of the Tube.

Here is my segue to dreaming and deep sleeping.

The Biblical tradition exposes – for me – the mythic fact that the feminine, the Mother, the Goddess, are mythically reachable only through deep sleeping, through collective and communal imagining. This is how I define sleeping – as collective and communal imagining.

Collectively and communally, every night when you go to sleep, you become a deep sleeper. You re-dream the Biblical stories. Consider that you are commonly told that sleeping is a state of unconsciousness or non-consciousness, meaning that nothing happens. Creatio ex nihilo. We all know that you can have bad dreams, and wet dreams, and totally idiotic dreams when you “Wake!”. Jungian psychologists try to work with dreams to gather some meaning. But I think their task – admirable in so many ways – ultimately fails because deep sleeping is not a singular, individual act, rather it is a collective and communal act.

But you say, Nah! If so, consider the many ways in which you are bombarded with variants of the Biblical Story and the Warrior’s way. What are the themes on the News? What is it that they consider news-worthy? Stories about war, conflict, violent crimes … politician’s infidelities; oral sex in the Oval Room … and sports: drawn increasingly into coliseum spectacular with clips of hockey brawls, and baseball teams rushing the field, and football players throwing each other around by face masks … and into the sit-com, where the humor is hurtful, deprecating, humiliating … and anything upbeat is dismissed as polyannish or cute or sentimental. Adam obliterating Eve: in our recent “horror” at Islamic attitudes towards women we often fail to see how the same “obliteration” is effected through our valuing only stereotypically beautiful, spotless Playmates. Cain and Abel: at once we are the World’s Policeman; while simultaneously being the main funder and dispenser of armaments … and the self-proclaimed “good guys” over-against the latest “evil-doers.” These themes manifest themselves in business management theories and “team-building” philosophies – with just a moment’s reflection you can see the Biblical patterns emerge in such secularized form and manifestation. If we do, as we argue here, “awake” and so act, it is, so we hold, because of how we sleep and deep sleep.

You might think I’m valuing this one instance of deep sleeping from Genesis too much. But, again, if the creation of woman is the Story’s objective, then I don’t think we can undervalue this insight.

Once more, back to Prison. More than anything I came to grasp that Prison’s main goal is to get you to dream the Deep Sleep. To get back on the track to being a Biblical Warrior. You are told that you don’t see the Big Picture – that you should become a Family Man – that you should assume your Patriarchal right and restore society to moral order. If you don’t, so the threat is expounded in so many ways, you will remain as Prison has you act, namely, as a feminized male, one with his neck bent, always a Captive.

Prisoners deep sleep the Captive’s dream. And what was Adam but God’s captive, walking around the Garden as if it were The Yard, all Alone, Doing Time …until Yahweh settles the Story, sets the vision, takes care of the woman. Prison takes care of the woman, in like manner. To get “right” is to “get with God” and usually “to get with Christ.” Christians, Jews, Muslims .. . the same story; and with other religions, it is patriarchy in another guise. But the same vision is given to the Prisoner. The message is, “If you don’t want to be a convict all your life, straighten up, cast off your wantonness: become a Man!”

You gotta sit with this awhile. In prison, eros is masturbation, by yourself or up the ass of another guy. And, that’s acceptable! Sure, the Chaplain says it’s a sin, but the secular Prison, which has all the sacral power, says, Okay.

The prison’s deep sleep is the dream of being right with God, which is to relate to women as subordinated vehicles, useful for procreation, only. Useful.

Where does all this get us? To the fact, discussed later when talking about Intending and Attending, to the power of sleeping and dreaming. It is not enough, I believe, to simply straighten out our conscious relationships with the feminine through our relationships with women. Rather, both men and women have to start seeing each other differently. They have to peer at one another. They have to see that the other is them. Not that either one is in the other. Some feminist thinkers have simply donned Warrior and secular Biblical guise in language, imagery, and imagination, and hegemonic quest. They simply want to dominate, be “on top.” Blah. Blah.

What I see is something quite different. What prison did not want me to see. Peer. That to be fully Beloved that men and women have to explore their communality, their collectivity. They have to Embrace. This requires Embracing their imaginations and their dreams. Yes. Deep Sleep Dreaming together.

How can this be done? Who knows? We don’t have a Tradition of deep sleeping. Rather we have one that, basically, says, This is how we got Eve! And one is enough. So, stop! And so men and women, for millennia, have followed this Biblical discipline. Meaning that when they laid down to sleep, that they accepted that sleeping was the land of meaninglessness, that it was non-conscious (not something of its own, just “not” conscious).

As with many things I’ve said here, I do not know other than to Invite you to deep sleep with your Beloved. By doing so, a quite different Presence of your self to the other will be manifest. I believe that through dreaming together that you will encounter the Serpent. That an exciting form of erotic energy will be unleashed. Starhawk talks about “Dreaming the Dark.” I’d appropriate that with a twist, meaning that from this Dark will come Light … sourced by a novel erotic imagining!

Deep Sleep Preparation

Sleeping is a moon ritual – for most, except those on the graveyard shift and insomniacs. When the moon appears, folks begin to yawn, stretch and think about retiring for a good night’s sleep. Maybe we should get down on Thomas Alva Edison – or maybe not, in that Great Men are made by the Times as much as they make them – but he is responsible for technologizing the Sun ritual.

For how many eons? – folks gathered around the campfire; watched the stars appear; talked, possible augured … then went to sleep “under the stars.” Until the electric light bulb. Not too long ago. People forgot about stars and just kept “sunshine” around. One result is that we “stay awake” longer; that, plus we do consciousness activities. We read. We watch TV. We keep our consciousness humming. Then, we weary, collapse, possibly pop a sleeping pill, and go to bed. But, even before that, we wind up the clock and/or set the timer. Don’t want to sleep too long! … How long is too long?

Possibly it is a bit romantic to say that people in the Biblical culture and others used to prepare to go to sleep. But let’s look at the Monastic practice. It created Divine Hours for every hour of the day. There was a sleep preparation hour – Compline. In our experience, we prayed, “Be sober, be watchful! For your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith.” (1 Peter 5:8-9) This is appropriate to the Tradition which has you live adversarially. So, you prepare to sleep by alerting yourself that in your dreams you will also encounter the Adversary. Ah, those sins of pollution so feared by the aspiring young monk. Wet dreams. How often we were counseled about that “weak” time just before you dozed off and just as you are awakening when the Devil likes to slip in – succubi of delicious beauty, nakedness and pleasure! – to tempt you to sin!

In the Secular culture, sleep is just a rest period between Hours of Work. In Scientism, sleep is simply a turning-off of conscious thought, and a random, bizarre, often humorous experience called dreaming which, curiously, most often refreshes. One wakes to the clock. One flips on the lights. All is preparation to Work. Ready and raring to “Go!”

There is a lot more to explore in this regard, but, for the moment, the simple fact is to recognize that sleeping and dreaming have no numinous weight in the secular, scientism culture. One lays down so as to rise up to work. There is “Labora” without any “Ora” – though this latter phrase, Ora et Labora, does play out in the indirect and sneaky ways things do in the secular culture.

In order to deep sleep, you have to encounter the Dark. Again, I prefer the word “Shade.” It is a more robust word. There are so many degrees of Shade. Others have explored the Dark, from John of the Cross to Starhawk. However you go at it, you need to set aside the technological sun; set yourself into the rippling tide of Shade as it descends slowly from twilight to a starless pitch dark night … to the Shade which is Moonglow.

You can practice with a plant or a pet. Watch their cycle. Watch how they relate to the common sun and moon’s relationship. A bit silly for some, but very revealing.

In time, you and your Beloved move into dreamtime, together. You lay down the Sun as it lifts up the Moon. You observe each other in this new glow. You observe and create. Mime. Mediate. Play. Whatever: together. An embrace of your presences. This to move you towards lying down together. To the opening of your Moon self. That fuller self you become as you move towards deep sleeping. Because deep sleeping is the creating of an Other. It is an Embrace.

In bed in the Biblical Tradition only Adam deep sleeps. The woman is inside him. Presumably she sleeps his sleep – not her own. As she is his bone of my bone, so is she dream of his dream.

In deep sleeping, the Beloveds are in embrace. One of intention as well as attention. It is a form of intercourse. It is intending to venture forth on the Moon’s journey as they do on the Sun’s journey.

Okay, you say, but how?! And even if we do deep sleep, how will we know it? Honest questions. Like the Sexual Sense, so deep sleeping is something which has no current language for expression. Yet, you know as the Beloved knows their Beloved. It’s hard to say it any other way.

That is why it is a Practice. You develop your intimate rituals. You create a body of images and words. You Intend deep sleeping. You Attend to the other during preparation.

Unfortunately, at this historic time, there is no non-Biblical, non-Scientism methodology with which to explore these issues. We look at Biblical culture and ask, How is its Dream sustained? We observe how its Dream has transformed into Secular forms, and how the epistemology of Scientism presents the world to us. Either we accept the fact that we are only fully human when awake, or we ponder what function and purpose sleeping and dreaming provide to the Biblicalist. We look at technology and reflect upon not only what is does in terms of Sun imagery but why it is, in the main, Awake and Consciousness devices. Why don’t most of us hear about these topics in school? Why aren’t there PBS shows on these themes? On the disappearance of the Moon? On the disappearance of sleep? On dreaming as a collective and communal therapeutic tool?

The Sun and the Moon. Work and Sleep. Male and Female. Sacred and Sexuality. Topics which are not only intellectually related, but are the basis for how we Practice, right now.

2.

Deep sleeping. It is more than what we know as dreaming. It is individual, collective and a communal act, experience, practice. Again, you can ask me, How do you know this? And, again, I go back to Prison. The presences made to the Captive. The presences of one’s self. Having to see yourself – to peer: observe yourself as you present the collective and the communal - as others do: offender, out of law, criminal, or, as our judge stated, “You gentlemen are worse than the common criminal who attacks the taxpayer’s pocketbook. You strike at the foundation of government, itself.” Yes, the foundation. Of a government whose foundation is a “holy secularity” … one which enfolds a Biblical “sacred sexuality.” One of a Manifest Destiny. A “New World.” Optimistic. Forward-looking. Ever youthful.

The latter, and a host of others, are the product of deep sleeping. For how did the Colonized and the Slaves and the Dominated look at the Manifest Destiny of these warriors except as manifestation of their dreams, their visions, their Truths … their beliefs. But whence come these beliefs? From conscious reasoning, alone? That one man could look at another and by sight of skin tone – the sun’s reflection! – denote him non-human, not free, not worthy of family and a stroll down the street and a fair wage for work done? Black Elk and others sought within their own deep sleeping, their own sacred visions to see from whence this whapiti had come. Black Elk attempted to meet this vision head on with his vision in the Black Hills … but his hoop was broken! (See, “Links” on www.earthfolk.net )

Hoop. How is the hoop created? Again, just from the direct, conscious, aware desires of humans? No. Rather, from their collective deep sleeping and their communal dreaming.

When the Hoop was broken, Black Elk’s people no longer could dream. His descendants wander, lost in consciousness, abandoned in historical time … Captives. Individuals who live collectively on The Reservation which is not of their communal Dreaming.

Prison. Again, what is it? Bricks. Steel bars. Iron-fisted discipline. Correction. Rehabilitation. Coddling. School for Crime. Hell? … In the cathedrals of old, so it appears to me – and St. Patrick’s in New York City can suffice for us Americans – the peasant and any individual could enter a sacred space and could become present to his or her God. Christian God, here. Jesus Crucified and Father Almighty. … Over in the corner there was a smaller place wherein anyone – rich, genius, idiot, peasant, office worker – could go and be saved from the clutches of Hell’s fire: the Confessional.

As this medieval vision faded – and it has faded despite its relics and remnants still museumed in Catholic churches – the Protestant vision emerged. The spectrum spans from the two “Catholic” Protestant sects: Lutheran and Anglicans who retained all the theological and liturgical pomp and ceremony of the Romans, down to the imageless, bodiless Cross-not-scourged-Crucifix “mainline” sects, all the way down to the Meeting House of the Silent Friends: no images and no Word! … till it ends in the Bible-only-needed, Bible inerrancy, Spirit filled “community churches” and Pentecostal all-afire-tent-of-Yahweh events.

Basically, this Protestant vision segues at many points into “secularity.” Each sect down the spectrum has sprouted some secular variant of the more baroque and visually cluttered medieval vision. All accepted both the birth of the Nation with a Manifest Destiny but not directly under God or God’s agent (such as a King), and the fully secularized penitentiary system.

In this vein, We the People have shifted “divine right” from monarchs and dictators into our own hands. As a collective “we” we have appropriated all the powers of governing. Our history shows that as a People we readily define these powers of governing as moral. We are a moral Nation – where “moral” stands for everything Biblical.

Okay. Unless you listen to non-Americans talk about us, what I’ve just said doesn’t either seem right or I’m whining! Ha.

Since I was a foundational violator, what did I violate? Either my judge was reaching for flowery rhetoric or he was giving me a clear message. If you were there, you’d rate him as a quite unflowery person. Let me be kind and simply say that he meant what he said.

Being against killing is “killing the dream.” The Biblical dream. Being against killing means saying that, “No, he/she is not our enemy. Rather, he/she is our brother and sister. We are one human family.” Snickers and guffaws aside – “You’re so innocent!” … do you realize how incensed We the People becomes when you try to kill that dream?

It wasn’t the property of the Selective Service Office that mattered. The shattered window. The locks we broke. The files we destroyed. No. No. A thousand times No! … They tried to make the trial about “breaking and entering,” but it didn’t work.

Everyone knew what the trial was about, but no one wanted to say it! It was just after Kent State and Jackson State: 1970 - 1972. Sure, it was not difficult, as the Vietnam War escalated and more and more middle-class white guys got inducted or put into the lottery, to get people to “say” – “This war is wrong.” After an hour of discussion – and this was true of returning vets! – people would say, “I agree with you.” Okay. You’re waiting for the “but.” “But what can we do? What can I do?”

I admit it: I never had a really, really good answer. Nothing on a short piece of paper which I could whip out of my pocket and say, “Do these three things.” In fact, no one could give anyone on either side of the pro/anti war argument, three things to do. Returning vets who came to the campuses – those early Vietnam Veterans Against the War – couldn’t give you three arguments for staying in Nam. But they also lacked a long term, strategic plan. Everyone – and this is pretty universally true – just wanted the war to STOP!

But I did what I did with seven other guys. They went into prison. Most are still living as I write. Did we all do the same thing? Have the same experience? … I don’t know.

For me, when I was inside the Draft Office it was an intensely spiritual experience. I didn’t have this perspective then, but I knew that I had to be there. I was being drawn by the deep sleep dream-vision of the State Director of the Selective Service’s office. In his chair he sat and acted as the direct vehicle of the Warrior God. No bishop on a throne, here or abroad, had the direct-link to God’s Will that this man had (humorously - or appropriately? - he was named Colonel Knight!)

Little slips of paper: 1-A cards. Small jots of a pen. Men died. Men slaughtered. Children screaming and terrified. Old people shattered. Countries fall. … Pieces but no Peace.

Here I am, telling you that the sacred places are no longer open to the public! That’s what defines the shift of sacral power from the Cathedral to the Government Office.

At this juncture, a review of the penitentiary’s transformation of the notions of private and public will be useful – if you pardon the repetition.

Private. Originally, the penitentiary became a private space. Old jails were more ramshackled and run quite inefficiently to quite corruptly. One aspect of the Penitentiary Movement is its reformer’s face. On one hand it does make some things better. Cleanliness and not squalor. Separation of hardened criminals from first-time offenders and youthful offenders. Instillation of middle-class virtue by a ban on sex and alcohol. A discipline based upon secular virtues of work and education. An education grounded in reading Holy Writ and talking with the upright citizens of the Pennsylvania Prison Society.

Public. Executions were moved inside the walls. No public humiliation at the stocks. No crowds watching in awe and horror at lashings. No dunkings in the common pond. No public punishments of any sort. One of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s first papers is on the need to do away with public punishments.

Interior and Intimate. The move “inside” was both interior and intimate. Others have commented on this “bodily” shift, most notably, Michel Foucault. As previously stated, I believe there is a level even deeper than he plumbs. For inside the penitentiary is “where” you find God in the conscience of the criminal. The physical house Dr. Rush called a “House of Terror.” The scale ranges from Cathedral to House, but what happens inside is common. As befitting the Protestant movement to remove sacred and human images from the church, so is the psyche rendered bare. Locke was about, back then, calling the mind a “tabula rasa.” Theologians were finding the “conscience” to be that which is betwixt thee and Thou … a “conscience” (which like the soul of yore) could be reformed. Cleansed as the body itself is cleansed in this interior space. A very private interior “organ” which each human possesses in like manner (not defined by socio-economic trappings) … and that which can “rise up” and accuse the sinner. Nothing could terrify – and so force recantation and reform – as one’s own personal, private, interior intimate conscience.

The conscience is where you meet God.

Your most interior intimacy.

Though not all the Christian sects involved in supporting the penitentiary would have voiced it as follows, what has been set down, here, is the basis for the Proof of Faith through verbal profession: “Jesus is my Lord and Savior.” This is the absolute eradication of the Pelagian heresy (still laid against the Romans and other catholic Protestants) which stressed “good works.” Good works which are public: visual, able to be evaluated, measured, etc. No. No. Salvation is effected by your personal, intimate act of conscience – which is the spiritual act. When “conscience” becomes muddled with “moral judgment” then we have the situation we do today where, in my analysis, morality is confused with spirituality. This is a theme worthy of an extended discussion which we must reserve for another time and place.

The point here is that your “act of conscience” is your spiritual testimony. Nothing anyone else does to you, nothing from the outside, nothing you do in the outside, public realm has any spiritual significance.

Now, you can see why certain “historic Peace churches” such as the Quakers and Mennonites got Selective Service deferments or assignment as “Conscientious Objectors.” Reflect on that word: “conscientious.”

Yet, their Witness predates the founding of America, so they are more an accommodation than a defining characteristic of the American Way. Actually, I want you to look at this in a startlingly different way. When I plundered text and Tradition to ground my Roman Catholic pleas for Conscientious Objector status, well, there was scant I could claim inside the Roman Tradition. When I looked at America, I also came up empty-handed. Why?

In America we have no “dissenting Tradition.” No “loyal opposition.” No category for “political prisoner.” Hmmm. We’ve a two party system, but not a two system political tradition, meaning, it is not “American” to advocate socialism, communism, anarchism or personalism. There is no “other Dream.” How can there be to a People who only Dream War? They do not know how to Dream Peace.

We the People dream only one dream. Share only one Vision. Because we are the Biblical People. Scions of the Puritans in secular dress … but one in conscience and intimacy.

So, back to Prison. Sure, the ideal and vision of the early penitentiary reformers was quickly destroyed … most historians claim “overcrowding” as the pivotal factor. Meaning too many immigrants! All those shanty Irish and depraved “free” Negroes and other lowly sorts were beginning to clog the system – even before it could fully manifest itself. Ah, a Nieburhian “Irony of American History.” While this early vision faded, the architecture of that system prevails. Meaning, that the penitentiaries built in the 1800s up to and through today are modeled on the interior and intimate vision which failed, namely, that of solitary confinement in architectural warehouses.

The “cell” was originally intended to be individual, but then it became multi-bunked. “Separate confinement” slips into the torturous practice of “solitary” confinement. The whip and the lash and all the “evils” of public punishment return, but they are only seen on The Inside. “Unseen” by the public.

But despite all this – even more than because of it - what remains Inside is the individual confronting his conscience as he deep sleeps. As he comes into contact with that sacred presence which only interiority makes present.

I know that you have to be thinking that this is nuts! Okay. But consider what is “not” done Inside, today. You are just warehoused. You get make-shift work (some places have “prison industry” and meager earnings). “Educational programs” range from absent to pathetic. You can join a self-help group, but most see this as part of their probation strategy. So, if cons aren’t being “scared straight” … and if they aren’t being beat senseless ... and if they aren’t all locked up in solitary confinement in hopes that they go certifiably crazy: well, what is happening?

It ain’t happening on Cartesian time! Man, let me tell you, if you aren’t beginning to “get it” by now ….! At the core is the Prison as Warehouse. Out in the World is the Factory, now termed the Work-place.

Battlefield war is like a bad dream. Guys come back and say, “It’s unreal.” But they know it is Real. Nothing as real as slashing a gook’s throat … or dropping a bomb and watching the fire plumes tickle your underbelly … nothing like the thundering silence of those heavy guns rocking the boat as they blast off … nothing like knowing, feeling, being in “unreality.” Because it is ultimately fulfilling. “You’ll come back a Man.” Amen.

If We the People have given up on reforming the captive in Moral Man, then what are those who run these prisons doing? I’ll make this simple – and unsatisfactory, I’m sure – they create the Ultimate Warrior who seeks to slay himself. … That’s prison, in a nutshell.

Guys leave prison like battlefield vets coming home. They just don’t. There is no Home.

There is no way back into the Normal World. No way, ever again, to be Moral Man. Oh, yeah, you play-act. Put on a suit. Grab your carpenter’s hammer. Pick up a book. Whatever. But you know that they don’t know that poof! – just one thing and you’re “off” – back again into that Sacred Space where you can kill, are a murderer, face the Terrifying God as his Terrifying Son!

The collective dream becomes the communal dream. You can’t be without it.

Once more and finally: it’s not just the Commands, the Orders, the in-your-face mad-as-hell Sergeant (or Abbot) screaming, “Jump into Hell!” … and so you go merrily your way toting firepower to go slay … No. It’s when you’re with the collective, and the collective talk of the day seeps into your dreaming, and you are captured by the communal dream. You lay down a weary, scared, confused, boggled-minded grunt and you wake up as part of We. The People. The People of God. Warriors. And you go forth slaying in the name of ….

Prison’s like that. The words. The dress. The discipline. All exterior. The gangs. You enter the collective. But you are not part of it. “I’m innocent.” Makes no difference that you’re not. You are innocent, until … the dreaming gets to you. Every night. Laying down as one eager not to be here, to be out “there” in the Free World, to be Home … and rising a convict, a captive, a Slave of the State: one whose conscience is now depraved. Never able to be Free or Home or “out there” … always and ever to be Inside: interior, in intimacy with your God: Warrior God: Biblical Yahweh.

This is why deep sleeping and dreaming are core to Sacred Sexuality.

VII. Intending & Attending

The topics of Intending and Attending have been more fully discussed in SilverSex: an erotic spirituality for Earthfolk on www.earthfolk.net.

In working “towards,” the matter of Attending is what many think “Sacred Sexuality” is all and only about. Or, as a friend said, “Marin County, hot tubs, naked people with glasses of chardonnay.” Hmmm. It is true that the first step is that of simply discovering the body of your Beloved: Skin. Discovering the sexual sense. Discovering the goddess and mother in ourselves and your Beloved. The first step.

In the Biblical mythos, there is no Attending to the goddess, Mother, feminine, female or Beloved. There is solely the Lone Male male satisfying himself (as we’ve discussed, the female is also inside the Lone Male in the Biblical mythos). Attending, then, is itself a thunderous and calamitous change. Intimacy is the mythic space and moment.

Attending most often starts with sensuality. Two who want to become Beloveds working on making an approach. Of coming to an intellectual agreement to, Let’s try it! … Then, they move on to that most important first aspect of Attending: looking at each other. Working through space with their eyes. Looking at the whole image of the other. Looking at the details. Peering: in the macroscopic and the microscopic. According to how each communicates, this is conveyed to the other through word, gesture, sigh, dance … shared silence.

There has to be lots of talking. There does not seem to be any way around this at this historic time. Two talking about what they see. Talking so as to discover, question, probe, find the right directions. There is very great risk at this point. Mainly because males and females have not been talking with each other in an Attending way – ever! The Lone Male in each of us has been content to soliloquize. Plus, in Warrior culture talking has become an externalization of the power relationship. Verbal sparring; warring; sarcastic swords. Where words are used to overcome and imprison. War is not Poetry (though it is so for the Iliadic Warrior.) Consequently, there has to be a terrible amount of Trust for Attending to occur. How you and your lover get to this Trust, no one can say. There is an element of jumping off into the darkness. A scent of brave Hope all about. (Truly, a radical and revolutionary leap of faith!)

Attending. First there is the name of the other. Speak it. Hear yours spoken. Unpack it by looking at the form and Skin and motion of the other. Use every sense. Sniff the other. Do so blind-eyed. Lick the other. Touch. Press. … You get the drift.

Once you begin Attending, you soon come to realize that it is an unending task. See, in the Warrior world, each of us is readily “packaged.” Cocks and cunts. Not much else. Fuck one, you’ve fucked ‘em all! … But once you begin to Attend, you become amazed by the endless looking you can do with your intended Beloved. You can become overwhelmed by simply looking at a foot. Touching it. Talking about it. Sniffing and licking. Feeling it. Then Attending to all that it “knows.” Where has it been? What is it when in high heels? In track shoes? Watch it lift her upwards. Spy it dangling and just wiggling as he watches the TV. Things like that. Now, you could spend weeks simply Attending to each other’s feet, and all that feet can say. What are the feet of a pregnant woman like? The feel of his feet in the bathtub? If Attending to feet doesn’t tickle you, well, what can I say?

Those of you who are into the visual arts know that you can go to a museum time and again and look at the same picture over and over and be inspired and amazed. How so, then, is Attending to your lover, to your Beloved?

Attending also takes itself into comforting. It is easy to laugh at ourselves when we realize how certain things really bug us which don’t impact others. Some of us hate doing the dishes. Or the laundry. Or making coffee. Or getting the morning paper. Or making the bed. It goes on and on! Yes, sometimes each of you dislikes, is dis-comforted by the same things. But most often we are not. Seek ways to comfort your lover. This is one very clear sign that you are Beloved, and have found your Beloved, namely, that you comfort each other.

It is the myriad amounts of little things that make living comfortable. Having the car washed by Monday morning. Bringing her a cup of morning coffee. Drawing him a bath. It goes on and on. But this is what Attending is all about.

Attending is not simply aromatherapy, massages, incense sticks, high priced spirits, getting stoned together … or meditating, praying, working on building a home for the poor … it is all that, but its foundation is in the minute, peculiar and particular comfortings of your other, your lover, your intended Beloved.

Attending wends its way into Intending.

Intending is practicing the presence of your Beloved. In fact, when you find yourself Intending, you have a good sign that you are Beloved.

Intending is not simply “thinking about” the other. Not just that midday phone call to say, “I love you, Sweetheart.” Again, all such things, but more. Intending is a defiant act. It is the practice of living forever. It is the effort to live your fuller self, as a Beloved. Always in Embrace.

There are aids to Intending. Pictures, rings, necklaces, pieces of clothing given to you by your Beloved. Passages to read at the same time each day: harmonizing. All wonderful practices.

Intending, however, is much more creational. In the Biblical mythos we are individuals in a space of Loneliness. It is me and God. Others are almost incidental if not accidental. The message is that you do not need others because they are not you.

Intending your Beloved is being yourself as Other. It is the practice of living both symbolically and mystically. It is the practice of the robust “I.” It is the practice of being Parents, and so of being Family. Such a practice is Holy.

Okay. Sounds like we just shot off the page, here! But be patient. We are all but working “towards” Sacred Sexuality.

Intending is a way of deep dreaming. Deep dreaming is a creational presence. Clear as mud, eh?! What the Biblical mythos says is that there is a Beginning and an End. Intending gives the lie to such a belief. For we have come from deep dreaming, go towards deep dreaming, and the present is deep dreaming. Stumbling here, I know. But once you realize that the world “there,” what we term “real,” is created by you and others, then you grasp how Biblical deep dreaming is sustained today.

On www.earthfolk.net on the “Links” page, explore the “Intellectual Links” of Jean Gebser and his The Ever Present Origin, and Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the “Noosphere.”

In Bodywanderer and The Hand on www.earthfolk.net you encounter the Order of Strict Observance. Their task is to dream the Biblical mythos over and over again. Now, you may fault us here for our Roman Catholic background, but everyday around the world, monks of all stripes (Buddhists, shamans, etc.) deep dream the patriarchal mythos and the Biblical mythos. You can go to a monastery of monks, such as at St. John’s in Minnesota, and observe this creational reality.

The Secularist variant of all this requires a quite peculiar insight. The Protestant Ethic of “Work” is the way we deep dream in American, Western culture. It has been said an insufferable number of times that we American define ourselves by our work. Our occupational titles. Company names. It is more than that, however. We deep dream The Market and The Dow. We live to work, not work to live. Our technology serves us in this way, for we are 24/7 on the job! What with cell phones and email and lights which blot out the moon. This line of interpretation needs a more expansive exploration, but the fact is that there is something quite telling about the phrase “The American Dream.” Nowhere else in the world – in our fledgling understanding – do we encounter another society with such a Dream.

“America” is many things, but one of the most telling is that it is a society and culture of work as identity and fulfillment. The Dream is realized through work; not through being or by right. In America you work you way to the top; to achieve the Dream.

Intending is working your Beloved. In the sense of the artist working his/her materials. Working so that they are present in the materials. The artist is his/her painting, sculpture, novel, cake, healing touch.

SilverSex’s work, labora, is deep dreaming. It is making your Beloved present. Present so that you are fuller. So that you never shrink back to the narrow individuality of the Lone Male. Present so that you are always Parent and always making present the Family: Holy.

Intending weaves with the mechanistic clock. Time is a tool; again, artful. In the Secularist view, time is the measure of all things. The measure of value. Compensation. Life, itself. There is, however, a leak in the more religious view of time, wherein they pray the Divine Office and have a spiritual sense of Hours. In the work-a-day world, hours have their own spirituality. Working 40 hours a week is considered good and healthy. Not working is considered bad; slothful; evil; the plaything of the Devil. Putting in a Good Day’s Work is said proudly. There is a recognition that one should take a break – lunch or whatever. This “break” validates that the work day has a numinous base. For there is a weightiness to work from which each of us needs a break. But what are we breaking into or for?

“Take a break.” To get back in touch with yourself. With your “other” self – a phone call home; going to the gym; dropping by the kids’ school. However, not too long a break! Consider the resistance to the growing Family Leave legislation. Hey, we don’t want to get too much like those (decadent? self-indulgent?) Europeans, ya know, those non-Puritan Old World folks. They simply don’t know how to work! … too tribal.

Intending is a way to break away from mechanistic time and work. It is a sustained effort to deep dream. To be in the creating moment. Understand that in this historic moment, the great task is to Intend your Beloved. Just doing this undoes the Biblical mythos. Shatters the Scientism variant.

Just this preliminary orientation to give you a sense of how horrid Sacred Sexuality is to the Biblicalist and the Secularist. For it will directly impact what you consider “work” to be. For your work is to Intend.

Hopefully, some day, the Intending moves from Beloveds as family into Beloveds as social Family. In time, as Family: Holy.

Just a final note about deep-sixing Intending and getting back to Attending. Yeah, we understand, believe me! Attending can be totally engrossing. Sensuality. Pleasuring. It is easy to fill up your whole life with that. But we feel, believe, have experienced that just Attending doesn’t get you much farther than Hugh Hefner gets you: You feel good, but you don’t do much good.

Intending is about creating: evoking from the literal that which is symbolic which issues in the communal. It is about moving to another level, dimension of living. Hard to call it “better” or “higher” or “more evolved.” There really is no need for worrying about those types of evaluations and descriptions. Call them the Noosphere or whatever, the fact is that we presently exist within Biblical Intention and practice Biblical Attention. So, the “hard fact” of the existence of these dimensions is inarguable. What we must do is to begin Intending non-Biblically and see what emerges! We pray and labor with the artist’s openness to wondering imagining.

Once you begin to Attend, you begin to leak Intending. See, Adam had to Attend to Eve. And so there is the leak of Intending. They did create family – despite the efforts of the Lone Male god and the Shade Mother goddess!

We feel that there is a more robust life to be had by all. Many, many sense this. It expresses itself in dissatisfaction. With pollution. Poverty. Child abuse. And so down the list. Many get dissatisfied and then fall into depression. Again, there is much more to be said about this, but realize that the Biblical myth intends you to get depressed! How else can you feel after reading Genesis? You are basically at war with the Wrathful God. … But we’ve been there.

Intending is a practice which works against depression. When the Beloved is present to you, you are not depressed, you are impressed. Impressed with their presence. You have their mind and heart, longings and comforts, yearnings and desires. Oh, please, please understand, this is not an Egoism of Two. Rather it is the one plus one which issues forth in a three: a third, novel presence wherein the new whole is greater than the sum. Again, Egoism of Two is what you get from the Biblical Story. Where two become one flesh. No. Not that. In Sacred Sexuality two become a third flesh; another presence; they create that which lives and is living forever, eternally. Intending is where the experience is greater than all that the two Beloveds can bring. It is where you break-through to eternality.

Attending and Intending are the practice of creating eternal presence.

Again, Evil. Evil is not Attending and Intending. Evil is the denial of the other’s presence. Not just the objectification of the other but the denial of their creational power – of being a loving being, of being a Beloved.

Evil, then, is more often than not, not on the grand scale. Rather, it is made present more often by our many small acts of non-intimacy. Of our non-Attending. Of our non-Intending. The evil way is to walk the Earth not seeking a Beloved or to be Beloved. Not to be your godding self. Not to be Attending and Intending the creation of the Family: Holy. Not to be present, here and now which is everlastingly and eternally.

VIII. Elements

There is a growing list of books which present rituals for increasing intimacy, sensuality and sacred sexuality. Margo Anand and Starhawk are just two widely known authors. A search on rituals or sacred rituals or sexual rituals, etc. should bring up links to numerous sites. Tantra.com is, again, just one which has a load of links. (See, “Links” on www.earthfolk.net)

The fact is that rituals need to be developed, and, again, this fact leads to you. Your venture towards sacred sexuality will require that you ritualize. Now, you say, How do I do that? For most of us: professional priests, ministers, mullahs, monks were and are our main source of rituals. They have the manuals, the sacred spaces, loads of candles, incense, holy water, etc.

We’re going to take an alchemical approach. This means that we want you to look at yourself as an element or a swirl of elementals. We’re specifically not defining elementals. As with most of our work, here, it is a term which you will help define over-time as you manifest the fuller swirl which sacred sexuality evokes and conjures.

Alchemy seeks to transform dross matter into precious matter. For some, lead into gold. It is, among many things, a collection of ways of approaching transformation and, ultimately, transubstantiation – a term of little meaning to most - which is somewhat happily understood as a breaking into other dimensions. The alchemical preparation is that of venturing; of experimenting. It is a preparation which is tremblingly aware of the manifold dimensions all about of which we are scarcely aware – yet, which our language, actions, dreams, visions: all our senses are harbingers.

For some of you, the movement into ritualizing will be relatively easy. You are at home with external expression of internal thoughts, moods, as well as your skin. Others – this is a terribly difficult step.

It might be helpful to understand how we already ritualize ourselves. If you’ve been agreeing with our views, in the main, then take a step back and look at your day. What do you do when you wake in the morning? Are you silent? Do you greet your lover? Or greet the day? Walk over and open the window, take a deep breath, and smile? Or do you rise like a slave? Cursing the daylight. Trudging off to the bathroom. Ever so reluctantly turning on the shower?

If you live by yourself, try and go through a day with this split awareness. What is it that you eat for breakfast? How do you eat it? Sit and gulp it down? Seeing food as fuel? Or do you pray? Read the morning paper? Want to find a joke before you read the Op Ed pieces? How do you arrange the table – if at all? … Are you grateful? Idling in neutral? Waiting for that first cup of caffeine to kick in?

Do you wait for the world to wake you up? Or do you wake up the world?

When you dress, how do you do it? What is your focus? On how you look to yourself? Or, how you look to others? Are you painting and grooming yourself to express yourself or to hide yourself? Putting on visual armor to go forth into the world of work?

If you live with another, it might be helpful to observe them as a way for you to observe yourself. Not only what they do in terms of waking, etc., but in how they respond to your presence. How do you both begin your relationship? Intentionally or accidentally? With a tacit agreement to just let the other one have their space until they are ready to leave – and then a kiss and a hug … silent departure? Or do you Attend and/or Intend?

We’ve mentioned the curse of work in the Biblical tradition. Certainly, you can begin to observe how you prepare and launch your work relationships. How you craft them. Some are personal; others quite formal. Are you at work as if inside a space ship? Just slipping in and out of the hours, being an alien observer? You’ve certainly observed how others form their relationships with you. You know those who will sit down with a cup of morning coffee and chat. Those who are fun to lunch with. Others with whom you are always on your guard because they are distant and “professional to the nines.”

For many, a start with observing the workplace and its rituals is the easiest. Just consider, everyone has eight hours to share, for five days – taking the average ideal work week! – how does it all come together on the personal and symbolic level? What happens when the company reaches for the mystical? Meaning, when they get everyone together for inspiration and motivation? Where they talk about being “family” – Ha! – and attempt to get you to “live for work,” not “work for a living”?

Okay. You might be saying that this is all much ado about nothing. That it is an observation of mundane, boring, trite and trivial matters. But, is it?

Given our Roman Catholic background, we’ll talk about the Mass. It is a ritual formed over centuries. What is important is that every step – every – is Intentional and Attentive. When the priest dresses: each piece of clothing is accompanied by a ritual invocation, prayer, dedication or blessing. The movement towards the altar is a procession. What types of candles are lit and how many is pre-set by official ceremonial rules. Every motion on the altar of all the participants is spelled out. There is no improvisation!

The Mass itself is about how humans sense. The five senses: how one is seen, and how one is looked upon: priest and penitent. Smell: incense, flowers. Touch: ritual blessings; hands upon the head; how the host is held, how it is placed upon the tongue or into the hands of the recipient. Speech: what is said. How what is said is enhanced by other sounds: bells, songs; enhanced by the colors of the Day – strictly arranged and set down. How one is to move. Steps and bows and kneeling: of both priest and attendees. Then it is all about simple fare: eating. The taking of a meal. Of simple bread and wine. Peasant foods. Raised up to transubstantiate all about into a new Body, a new Flesh; a new Skin.

The Mass, then, takes seriously the mundane, trite and trivial. Takes seriously the five senses. Because it respects the linkage of literal, symbolic and mystical. Of the numinosity behind just about everything and everyone. The priest, after all, is supposed to be you. Your representative; so it is you praying the Mass.

It is a long discussion and presentation – but, hopefully, you can begin to see the parallel rituals of Scientism. How the five senses are valued – only if they can be mechanized. Where machines are trusted more than the individual. The ritual of “detached observation” – even though shaken by Heisenberg, Planck and others. Where the approach to others is based upon the ritual of probing – meaning, that “if we can, we should.” If we can probe, then we should. Whether on the micro or macroscopic levels. The approach to you as individual is that you have no right to claim yourself as boundary, as a special “I.” Rather, you are part of the collective – which defines you, not you, it - and as such you can be probed: once redefined as patient or subject or client. Yes, there is some resistance to this probing method; for some even an argument from American constitutionality, namely, that the individual is supreme. But the rights of the individual are continually threatened by the probing which holds that everyone and everything is simply a “field of energy” – not a nexus of numinosity.

Scientism has its own variant of the Shade Mass, its own Black Mass which is a White Mass. White-coated probers and preachers at work and prayer in laboratories, awake from their deep sleep dreaming of reducing What Is to What Is Not – here, humans to inanimate elementals. Visit the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California.

“Towards” requires its own Elementals. Which move towards imagining new wholes, and deep dreaming so that we are awake each to the other as Beloved.

Water

You need water to exist. You are compositionally “carbon based bags of water.” Okay. But more. You are water for others. Your presence either slacks their thirst or drives them to drink – a bit of humor, there.

With your lover as you seek to become Beloveds, consider how you are water each for the other. How do you, presently, slack the other’s thirst? And thirst for what? What is it that your lover drinks when they drink you? When they take the cup of your body and drink?

Water seeks its own level. This is true on all three levels: literal, symbolic and mystical. What are those levels for you and your Beloved?

Practice being water. This is a humbling exercise. For you are satisfying your lover at whatever level he/she wants. To your lover you are as present as thirst. Meaning, you give yourself totally to him/her. Practice being there – without question; without hesitation. When they ask, you drop what you are doing – instantly! - and make yourself totally present to him/her.

Crazy? Too risky?

Yes, you can be greedy as a lover. Evil. There is not a doubt that you can drink too much. Of lemonade or wine. You can get a belly-ache or stinking drunk. There is a risk.

But share your water. Grok – as some say. Sit with your Beloved and explore for water.

What is it that you thirst for? Really, really work on that together. What is the water with which your lover/ Beloved seeks to slake their thirst?

Be not surprised to find that you thirst for the simplest of drops.

There is the wetness of your Beloved. For most, sexual embrace engenders steam. The steaming of desire in kisses, in licking, in the explosion of fluids … the dripping onto the other, the sweat of yourself offered to the other.

Sweating together. Not a delight to some. But for others a way to be water in the most elemental moment. To cherish that we wring one another out! Cause the Beloved to leak, to trickle, to flood! And we mingle with that wetness, that of our own. The sharing, as is said, of bodily fluids.

Earth

“Dust thou art …” Presented as a chilling reminder of the quickly fading bloom of the human Rose which you are. Let’s turn that Biblical boo-hoo around.

Indeed, we are dust. Dirt. Our bodies eat the Earth, and we deposit back. We are this ongoing process. In and out. Spiraling. Mobius.

This relentless cycle can be, however, a celebration. Of our fundamental grittiness. Yes, we are the Earth. Swirls and whirls of magical dust!

What the Beloved sees is the Earth being transformed through his/her Beloved. Aging – that feared demon of the Biblical mythos – most evident as “youth culture.” Every day we are bombarded with commercials touting products and processes which can keep us young – “hide your wrinkles” and mask all signs of aging.

This is a denial of ourselves as Earth.

What is the earthiness of your Beloved? Her weight? His hairyness? The thickness of an eyebrow. The twist and bend of lips. The odd protuberance of an ear, a nose. The oddity of feet and the mangled toes. All that of your Beloved which is the intricacy of how they have been formed.

Over-time our earthiness calls us to insights about our Beloved. You see time written on them. The mottled hand. The bags under his/her eyes. The revenge of gravity. The halting step. This is yourself being formed and reformed by Earth, itself. It is you in every season.

Why do we only want to live in Spring?

Only the Beloved knows the weight of his/her Beloved. Only you can feel and hold the eternal weight of your Beloved. In your hands cup the thigh; tend to the toes; stroke down the hilly landscape of body: chests, belly, legs, buttock … it is given to the Beloved to be Earth for the other. It is for the Beloved to celebrate the Earth of the other.

Consider that it is yourself as Earth that you most prevent your Beloved from knowing and experiencing. In American society we want to hide our earthiness. We are ashamed of our Dust – as we are told to be in Genesis.

It takes a lifetime to truly be Earth for your Beloved. To share the seasons. To open yourself to be explored.

How have you presented your earthiness to your Beloved? How have you received?

Rituals, here, are all about the seasons. Each calendar year provides us with a ritual key. So many of us let years just roll-by. But there is Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall to each year. Is this not also the seasons of our intimate earthiness? Our interior cycle? The play of our intimacy?

Do you know your Beloved as Winter? Even if only eighteen – are you observing and cherishing the wintering? It is there.

Fire

Fiery breath. Fiery breathing. Our breathing is at its base erotic flame. Issuing forth from our hearth: heart.

How do you breathe the world? As you prepare to meet even yourself as morning awakening? What do you say? Do you heave a sigh? Smile and snort? Jump up and down and bellow your lungs in some callisthenic exercise? You’ve been breathing dreamily; now you are awakening. Notice how you breathe.

For your breathing you take to the forge. Words come. What are your words? Of first greeting? Of looking at your own self in the mirror? Of meeting your lover? Your children? When you enter the work place, how does your breathing express you?

You know the breathing of tenseness. Of anxiety. Fear. Of being late. Of disappointing someone. Holding your breath! … What is the breath of your “just being me”? Of moving through the day? Your morning, afternoon, evening vocabulary? What changes, if anything, when you come home or meet your lover or Beloved?

Once your work on this, how does your Beloved breathe? How do you know your Beloved through his/her breathing? How do they breathe through all the phases of the day? When you come together, what makes for harmony or discord?

This windy fire is also musical. There is a sound to each of us. Lying next to your Beloved, share this sound. Raspy. Sighful. Titters. So many. As you settle in, snuggle. Embrace. What is the breath of your kiss? How is the temperature of this heart air raised? So that you both begin to conflagrate?

As sound, so song. Breathing together. To find that breath of the Beloved. Yourselves as a new presence; fuller body. Not always a tune or in tune! But truly your song as Beloved.

Wash your Beloved with your breath. Breathe upon every aspect of his/her fleshly manifestation. Breathe upon her toes! What is your breath as you so breathe? What presence of you comes through this action? A tingling laughter? An irritable humbling? Move up and down and across. You know when you blow fire across her breasts or his cock … when you playfully catch the fire in her eyes or he hears the heavy breathing of your rumbling orgasm … well, you both know that fire; but what are the lesser fires, the mysteries revealed by a breath upon the back, the tip of fingers, the kneecap? … there is the promise of the Swirl – a word which gulps its own breath! – of a magical, mystifying, befogging breath which will engulf you both … this is what you are working towards; what you assemble these breaths of every aspect, assemble and play them out in ritual, such that the Fire roars up and frightens you, a numinous moment, the elemental moment; facing a fundamental essence of your own interiority and intimacy; here the two of you like logs ablaze, skin jumpy with the itchy desire to burst out of your own skin and jump all over your Beloved like flitting, splattering, popping and fizzing embers! Crackle! and Pop!

When you say, You take my breath away! – well, isn’t it that you receive a different breath? Or, that around your Beloved you are aware that you are breathing differently? That you are both a different kind of fire when together. (See, the short story, “A Different Kind of Fire,” on www.earthfolk.net)

“Fire in the hole!” has a meaning we can steal here. For we put our fires into our holes: mouths, cunnies, anuses, stroking hands: however we can, we form holes; we say, You fill me up! – and we know that we are saying that our Beloved empties us. Yes, it is a play on words but we go from holey to holy to wholly.

Dancing is a special fire. You know those special moments when you are in the arms of your Beloved – whether you are tripping over each other’s feet or cavorting like gazelles – what you feel is that special space called togetherness. You are dancing, which is an exertion, which is a way of swirling together. It is dancing when you are together; not when you expertly enact the steps. It may be elephantine movements or the scurrying of field mice or the athletic swoop and twirl of mating birds … it is not the execution as it is the creating of an intimate space; moving together; as if one breath.

There are many, many ways to breathe. Painting. Sculpture. Swimming. Even passive ways: reading together, silently or to each other. Cooking. Oh, the fire of cooking! (See, the short story, “The Stirring” on www.earthfolk.net.)

It is just that you will especially see Her in her – and the Her in Him and him – when you begin to create your breathing ritual of fire. I burn for you! When your Beloved is about, time flies like newspaper curling into ashes. Consummation.

What is missing from Genesis is this creating fire. The campfire. Missing because it is hearth, and hearth has always been Hers; Earth Mother; Cooking Mom. The Birthing Mother is a cauldron. Her body the fuller body from which comes the Child. So, the Future. So, the presence of the Other which enables Parenting.

When you seek the Fire in your breathing, you both discover yourselves as cauldrons. As hearths. As the fuller body from which Children are born: physical and spiritual children. You experience the Fire as eternal; eternal Flame. Which is yourselves in embrace.

The ritual of Fire is, more than the other elementals, the one which moves beyond words into movement and form; into destruction as prelude to creating. When you breathe with your Beloved you will be present to an intimacy which catalyzes. This, a fancy word which is all change, transformation, transubstantiation – which is all splatter and kabloom and molten eruption and exploding, uncontrollable embers of thought, desire, craving … oh, in Fire we are purified, purged, refined, smelted … freed! Freed to be formed into Beloved.

Air

You thought Air would be about breathing, right? Look at it more as the elemental which connects with Skin. Your skin finds its boundaries in what we call air. Air is that other, that outside, that external, that possibly alien presence which forms us. As Earthlings, anyways. It is the special something which makes this planet unique. Possibly, then, it is the Planet as us in a fuller dimension?

Air is how the presence of others forms you and your Beloved. Others not so much as people or even things but as that something which has been present when everyone else ever lived and – if we believe the present palentological story – even before. Air is what Earth is, as it is present. (See, “Links” on www.earthfolk.net, especially the Gaia theme.)

Hmmm. Let’s air it out! What is really going on here? Let’s get our story straight. Your story. Hmm. Well, when you begin to explore Air you come into contact with collective and communal things, ideas, beings, etc. for which our culture, especially America, is not too keen on valuing. Outside of monumental crises like Pearl Harbor and the recent World Trade Center, there is little everyday talk about our Air.

So, at this historic moment, this type of Air ritual is not going to be social. Like group-sex, there are experiences for which our culture does not prepare us nor for which are we ready. We have a hard enough time with phrases like The Common Good or the commonweal. Instinctually, as a People, we always think that someone is trying to slip one by us when we hear those phrases – ya know, the baddies: the poor, the shiftless, the disabled, even old folks … but that’s another theme; not for right now.

When we work on Air we’re beginning to look at the common spaces, feelings, imaginings we share with our lover or Beloved. Look at the space you share, to start with.

Let’s call it home – even if it is mobile and one we rent; ownership is not the controlling notion here. Ownership of the common space is, however. How do you and your Beloved share space? Sure, you divide it. This is mine. That is yours. That’s okay. But consider something even as simple as how you share the bathroom in the morning. Nowadays more and more folks have two or more bathrooms in the newer homes, but there are still so many times, maybe when at a motel or in a cabin, whatever – how is it that you manage these moments? How do you work yourself so that you fit? What is it that you chip off? Or paint over? Or do you enjoy it at all? Those moments in interior space which can be intimate – or deadly!

When you arrange the furniture, how and why are you doing what you do? You may be into feng-sui but most folks aren’t. Yet how you arrange yourselves: the distancing, the closeness, the adjustment to how the other likes things – like where you put the remote!

See this is an awkward exercise. But you can go from room to room, or into any space you share: a closet, a car … and instead of just letting things happen or waiting for the blessings of serendipitous surprise, take a moment and work on this painting. What colors does your Beloved cherish? Fragrances. What expression of order and organization makes you or your Beloved or both of you comfortable?

Each of us creates our own Earth. When we get together and form a homing space we are creating a world. In a nutshell, but it is there. You know that when others visit, you are acutely aware that they are reading and interpreting your common homing space. How does it express itself to the visitor?

Air is, possibly, the most significant ritual. Once a couple practices it, they often are lifted up to another dimension. It’s like the realization that you and your Beloved are comfortable together. That you do have a home or homing space. That you have so acted together that you are present to one another like no other friend or visitor is when in that same homing presence.

When two are Air, they often experience sliding. A slipping through mundane, clock time into another reality, another dimension. Often it is a tingle of eternality. We are home.

Air is the ritual which makes present the eroticism of the group, the community, of those symbolic experiences which never pass away.

At this historic moment this is a most difficult ritual to discuss. However, let us, again, use our Roman Catholic background. A church, especially a cathedral, is all about the ritual of Air. When you enter, say, Saint Patrick’s cathedral in New York City, you cannot but feel its impact on all of your senses, and on your Air, Earth, Fire and Water. This is not inconsequential. It is intended!

Inside a cathedral, you are drawn beyond yourself into an ageless confrontation with eternity – you are wobbled into a posture of worship. Okay, for some people it is like a museum – but let’s go with what you can observe if you sit a long day in such a place as St. Pat’s … it is a space created by others; past your ability to remember names; back into agelessness, even beyond your own faith – you are in the presence of a fuller, a more robust sense of humanity, such that, for many, they are rendered senseless. They cower. Whimper. Utter pleas for help.

Cathedrals are powerful rituals. In one sense, left here by aliens. Sure, we know when they were built; how, etc., etc. Such are the joys of the Discovery Channel! But, once again, our pride in our knowledge reveals how much we do not know!

When you walk out of St. Pat’s into the moldy light of the City – moldy on the symbolic level – you cannot but be slapped by this change in Air. You know that you’ve just left a strange place. You can call it Holy or you can call it a incense rank museum … but you will not forget the place.

Okay. We’re not into the Air of St. Patrick’s anymore. But we respect it, and we want to learn from it. You can go to just about any church and learn about Air. Though we won’t go on about this right now, one of the characteristics of Protestantism was its cleansing of the church: removal of images, icons, statutes, incense, bells, etc. Visual and sensual stimuli. There is a great lesson to be learned here about the shift of sacral power into what is term Secularism … or which we discuss as Scientism. (See, Chapter 3.) Suffice it for now, we ask you to visit and contemplate the Crystal Cathedral which is appropriately located on the West coast. (See, www.crystalcathedral.org) It is Scientism’s shrine.

As the Air is cleansed, so is the sacramental character of marriage dismissed. Protestant eroticism – not unhappily presented through Puritan American culture – shifts from a focus on coupling activities such as sexual embrace and love, and transforms into the ritual of work. What holds together American culture is not the family but the work which the individual does. Not family work – the old family farm image – but just work. Again, it is a longer discussion, but Secular Air is found in the workplace; inside the corporate cathedrals.

It is not unimportant, then, to explore your Beloved’s Air. How they’ve been formed by the external culture. To know their history. Family genealogy. And so forth. But it will be a while before Sacred Sexuality practices will emerge on the symbolic level. For this historic moment, we focus on the homing space: the interiority and intimacy of the Beloveds.

IX. Towards … Some Conclusions

When you understand that Genesis is all about sacred sexuality or erotic spirituality, then what I have to say makes sense. I know that it is difficult to ponder the what is, is not and what is not, is. Your reaction more than likely is, “Well, that’s easy to say. It gets you off the hook!” Meaning, that if you say that everything is exactly the obverse or opposite of what it appears to be, then you can say anything. You’d be right in challenging me, saying, “How can you justify that? Show me!”

I am acutely aware of the thousands of years of Rabbinic, Catholic and other Biblical interpretations and theologies. (Of non-Biblical and the Eastern Tradition we are but amateur scholars.) Searching this Biblical Tradition describes a great portion of my life. … And, intellectually, I am hesitant in forwarding my interpretation and theology – an admission I’m sure you find hard to believe if you’ve read this far! … There is a lot of cheap scholarship out there today which readily – and headily – dismisses whatever has gone before. In one fell swoop the Tradition is wiped away with some disfiguring adjective: patriarchal, hegemonic, Western, Catholic, and so forth. As you read what I write, you might justify just clumping me with this lot. I can understand that reaction.

One of the difficulties of any endeavor is the reality of Unintended Consequences. Or, Similarities of Differences. Or, apparent homology which is rather an analogy. Meaning, there are lots of folk – scholars and others – with whom my images, analyses, interpretations, etc. appear to jive. But with whom, upon closer examination, I am not in unisonance.

Here’s an approach to understanding what I’m saying. When I tried to understand “non-violence,” I began where most do. Looking at philosophies and theologies – Gandhi, King, John Woolman, the labor movement, Jesus, among others. I drew from them a non-violence which was, in many ways, violent. It was a weapon of attacking others: ideas and people. It was not a new force or truth – as Gandhi and others sought.

The problem in my approach was that I was trying to find the violence in others. Root it out! Expose it! Condemn it! … Ha. … Finally, one day – how? – it dawned on me: the only way to be non-violent was to deal with the violence within my self. Hmmm. Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Because you have to deal with the fact that violence/non-violence is a continuum, not two separate entities. They are dynamically linked, forever. That they exist in me literally, symbolically and mystically. Incarnated as the Jesuitical milites Christi.

So, I was forced to grasp that I had no way to positively deal with the war: State-sponsored murder – until I confronted the Soldier in myself. When I was asked by my draft board about my fledgling Conscientious Objector views, I remember telling them that I simply didn’t want to go to Nam, for I feared what I’d do. It took me years to hear myself. (See, “Vietnam Undeclared” on www.earthfolk.net)

When My Lai happened, I did it. Did I think I wouldn’t have pulled the lever on the Enola Gay? Or, that while in battle I wouldn’t kill everything; cross-over every line of decency? Or, that I wouldn’t desert? Be scared. Inside the jungle, moan for Momma?

What this confrontation with my own violence meant was that I had to stop living as if I had an Enemy. Hold on to this for a moment. Not that I was not someone else’s Enemy. Ya know, what I used to throw into the faces of the Feds or cops at protests – “I ain’t your Enemy.” Hell, I certainly was. I was trying to change them! But I had to deal with myself – this is where the “war” was. I had to live as if I was no one’s Enemy. To walk around without violent defense, not just non-violent offense.

In one way, what we created as Is – all the anti-war protests – was actually Is Not – namely, peace. The chant, “All we are asking is give Peace a chance!” would work if I, and the others, took to changing our hearts and souls, and refrained from the business of converting others! We had to unleash a unique erotic energy: Peace and Love not bound to the heart of warring.

So, when I entered prison, I did realize – odd as this might seem – that I was finally free … or at least was being confronted by my Freedom, if I could be bold enough to take it!

In like manner, as I looked back over my life and over my Tradition – Western, Biblical, Patriarchal and American – I realized that it manifested itself through me, and that as I had become what I had not intended to become, namely, a Warrior, so to change that I had to change myself … and relate the interpretations of this Tradition in order to find other Seekers.

See, I was part of a draft board raiding group, “The Minnesota 8.” As a group we all agreed on the same singular act of civil disobedience. However, why we acted, our ideologies and motivations, well, they were as diverse as possible. For me, the draft raid was a sacramental act. (An odd phrase for most of you. See, “Resistance as Sacrament” on www.earthfolk.net) For others it was nothing like that. As I talk about the raid, now, I realize that the seven others might be saying, “Oh, that’s just Frank. He was always mumbling something or another!”

In the same vein, “sex” for many of you will never, no matter what I say, become a sacred act or discipline.

In sum what I found in prison was a way of seeing. I call it “peering.” The pausing for a moment to see – what? The shade? The glint from another dimension? The pain under the smile? The truth under the lie? The lie under the truth? …. I realize that forwarding such a notion of peering opens me to the criticism of “special knowing” and of intellectual arrogance: How can you …? - you say. How can you stand over against the likes of (fill in the blanks: St. Augustine to Locke to Foucault to Daly) or, how can you a white, middle-class, male intellectual ever ….?

Well, I try my best. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Here on my cork-board is a quote from Goethe. He has Mephisto saying, “Omniscient I am not, but there is much I see.” I’d add, I can only see what you share with me. Let’s peer, together!

X. Towards …Invitation of Earthfolk

“Towards” a Sacred Sexuality is an Invitation. One offered by and to Earthfolk.

Why “towards”? Because the globally dominant Biblical mythos has outlawed the imagining of the sacral power of sexual union. It has forgotten and seeks to make you forget how to imagine the sacredness of your body, flesh, cock and cunny.

Those who utter the phrase “Sacred Sexuality” are following a scent, a hunch, an urge. We really do not fully know what we are talking about. We really do not fully sense the feelings which flood us when we attempt to orient ourselves “towards.” We are like the pail into which the child attempts to pour the ocean.

Yet, “something is in the air.” It is an allure. An erotic whiff. An erotic whiff with a sacral pungency. At times, we can hardly breathe.

Sacred Sexuality: the phrase has found its way into private and public discourse. How? When? We have no answers to these two questions. Why? … Why: the Earth has made us aware of its vitality, awareness, consciousness and dreaming. Again: how, when – no answers. But around us is the fact, the scent, the hunch, the urge to live as humans in a totally new manner and mode. We seek to live as Earthfolk.

Earth and folk. As Earthfolk: an oxymoron to Biblicalists. Under the Biblical mythos, humans live as aliens upon the Earth. The Earth is a created entity. Humans dominate the Earth. Full human meaning is imagined as a “life” after death, above the Earth, in an eternal paradise. Time will end, and the Earth will disappear.

Earthfolk. The Earth is us. We are manifestations, presences of Earth. We are its consciousness, its imagining; one of its seed and flower. Earth is home. We come forth from the Earth, flower, bloom, fade and are re-imagined. Earthfolk are eternal presences. As child we are now. As family we are through time. As Earthfolk we are eternally present. Everything which is, has been and will be.

Every person counts. Everyone is a Child: literally, symbolically and mystically. The Earth is alive. We are the consciousness of the divine. We live in the Now as individuals; in History/Time as symbolic, ritualized beings. In Eternity as the communal, mystical We of Family:Holy.

The Biblical mythos has found its dominating expression through the Warrior Story. It is a very strange and frightening Story. The Story states that there is only one Creator god who is alienated from humans. He is a Lone Male god without female mate. He is said to have created the world from “nothing.” Females are derivative humans. Born from the flesh of males, while they lay dreaming. Suffering is the lot of humans. Only those Chosen will be “saved.” Ceaseless spiritual warfare against Evil, the Devil, Lucifer – The Adversary; The Enemy – defines and describes “life on Earth.”

Earthfolk put this Story aside. It is its own self-fulfilling, horrific prophecy. A “Good Book” of self-hatred. Of self-abuse. Why it arose – a perplexing question. That it is not useful, is quite evident.

Where do Earthfolk start when they orient and move “towards”?

v You are all that creation has groaned & joyed to make manifest

v You are an eternal presence

v Manifested through others whom you know as family

v You are a child of family in the present

v You are a parent of family through historical time

v You are Earthfolk in eternity

v We put the Biblical “Good Book” aside

v We put aside all Warrior Stories, patriarchal myths

v We put aside the secular variant of the Biblical mythos

v We put aside the scientism variant of the Biblical mythos

v “Towards” begins in the moment you are aware that being fully you occurs within embrace

v Within embrace you begin to hear, sense, smell, touch the fuller presence

v The fuller presence is The Beloved

v The Beloved is you as we; we as you

v Within embrace is where the Earthfolk Story is manifest through the skin of The Beloved

v The skin of The Beloved is family Memory

v Family is time, memory, hope, dream

v Family:Holy

v Within the embrace is manifest and made present everlasting erotic pleasuring

v All that Is and Is Not is a manifestation of the everlasting erotic pleasuring

v Every moment is an embraceable opportunity

v To embrace and create: make manifest the fuller presence

v The fuller presence which calls us towards

v It is blooming, fading, dying, embracing Memory & Hope

v Every action is potent and “counts”

v An artful moment: creating good, evil or “nothing”

v Every thought, breath, sniff, touch, lick, press, movement, dream … is potent

v Every action, thought, imagining of the individual is at the same time a collective and communal creating

v Humans can live as Warriors: have been, will continue to

v Humans do not have to live as Warriors

v We can live as Earthfolk: are, shall, will!

v Inviting you.

v You are the mythic moment!

Embrace!