emerging visions

Scooter's Discovered (c) Jamie Burton




Directions from dreamtime:

Go to the same address
then down 1,000 stories.

Going back to the Beginning
before the beginning
when Nothing had a name

but everything had voices
for singing,

stumble upon a boy
alone in the forest
playing guitar
revealing such intimacies
you can only
watch sideways
hidden among leaves
as the music
takes you into
his whole.

Then run
deeper and through a violet door
between pine and stripped oak
and enter a gingerbread house
of lovers no longer in cages
where at birth they were welcomed
by a witch so hungry to eat
sweet innocence
but children can be tricky
so for thirty years
she's been slow cooking
on the flame
and the children are grown now
yet linger among the cookie crumbs,
holding hands, awaiting
the main course
and dancing circles
around the oven.

Then open the door slowly
and enter through
the hot embers,
clinging to your robes,
your conical hat burning away.
Skin and fat bubble
and burst, juices flow,
basted in your blood
made savory.
Through particalized eyes
watch as the Children
of Light wipe you from
their lips with kisses.

Back again
to the beginning.

There was a flute
and a mermaid playing
and her lover praising
her Beauty.
And everyone took turns
sitting on a golden ball
that bloomed petals
while each Buddha beamed
and miles away
a single voice
balanced on a precipice
not realizing
he was smiling
as he fell over the edge
scattering coins.


(c) Kala Snowflower

Green Feet copyright 2007 by clancy cavnar

Shaman Girl (c) Jamie Burton

O C C U L T U R E
"The Secret Marriage of Art and Magick"
© 1993 - 2005 Antero Alli

Someday, in the not-too-distant future, certain drugs will be made available to the public that have the effect of increasing intelligence. Given the opportunity to partake, what would you do ? I'd probably ask the pharmacist: "What kind of intelligence will your pill increase ?" Like many others schooled in public education systems, I once naively assumed "intelligence" and "I.Q." were synonymous with "intellect" and "intellectual achievement" alone, until further research suggested a more plural definition of the terms.

[For further extrapolation on my use of the word intelligence please refer to my book, ANGEL TECH (New Falcon, 1987) which reinterprets Dr. Timothy Leary's "Eight Circuit" whole-brain model for re-mapping Intelligence as eight interactive centers, or "brains" within us: physical, emotional, intellectual, social, sensory, psychic, mythic and spiritual.]

Ever since the emergence and deification of the species' own "genius of intellect" over the past several hundred years (Newton, Descartes, the "Age of Enlightenment", etc.), our faculty of imagination -- and its latent "genius of intuition" -- has all but been systematically devalued, demoralized and destroyed. From kindergarten through university levels, students are well-trained to posit a priori status on knowns over unknowns and, are rewarded accordingly; the highest grades are granted to those minds retaining the greatest volume of known data. Those who survive the public education systems with their imaginations intact are fortunate souls, indeed.

Outside traditional learning institutions, somewhere between the global mythologies of Joseph Campbell and the iconoclastic Illuminati conspiracies of Robert Anton Wilson, are "invisible colleges" espousing hybrid forms of art and occult knowledge, referred to hereafter as occulture. The academic credentials of its teachers are questionable; some have no degree, others never graduated grade school. Most are self-taught in the School of Life after passing the prerequisite tests of survival in the real world; more often than not, this has meant psychic survival, as well as economic.

As a result of competing political and ideological forces, many of these teachers remain anonymous or assume the camouflage of pseudonyms. Many find solace as poets, artists and musicians (especially those who do not call themselves "poets, artists or musicians.") Yet, all seem to share a fierce alliance with the occultural driving force of an enraged imaginative intelligence, rebellious to the over-literalization of traditional culture, while adamant about nurturing its own microcultures and subcultures into existence.

When Data Became Dada

Intelligence thrives on new information. Before the twentieth century the most widely accepted and scientific definition of the word "information" refered to literalist processes of accumulating known data; knowledge as inert, predictable, and easily categorized. The universe, or so it was thought, could be mapped out with surgical precision like some deux machina that followed understandable laws. How many of us still think like this ? This very spirit of imagination demands the redefinition of intelligence, if only to begin thinking like twenty-first century brains, instead of eighteenth or nineteenth century ones.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schroedinger, amongst others, turned the world of intelligence on its ear. The universe, according to the new physics of quantum mechanics, is infinitely more mysterious and strange than previously imagined. One outcome of this revelation was the redefinition of what constituted "information." In light of a universe expressing greater uncertainties than certainties, the definiti0n of information has been updated to: the unpredictability of a message, meaning, the more unpredictable the message, the more information there is in it.

Imagine information as fresh experience -- spontaneous, unknown and alive -- rather than the perpetual accumulation of dead data. This breakthrough in creative thought eventually found its assimilation in twentieth century culture. What the scientist discovers through experiments, the artist experiences through new ways of perceiving, hearing, feeling and sensing. While Einstein made scientific history with his theory of relativity and Heisenberg with his uncertainty principle, the Surrealist "dada" revolution (Dali, Cocteau, Satie, etc.), James Joyce's omnicultural Finnegan's Wake, and the music of Jazz brought the living experience to the people.

Both scientists and artists recognized this dynamic shift from a world view that was "predictable, solid and fixed" to a new vision of the universe simulatenously wilder, more plural, malleable and unfathomable. To those minds awakening from the slumber of nineteenth century "certainty" trance, so-called "reality" became a realm of immeasurable possibilities with countless interpretations. Any culture, or person, failing to assimilate this transformation into their perceptions and lives, remains in the past; it never enters the twentieth century let alone, the twenty-first.

Wanted: Marginal Men & Women

After the bombing of Hiroshima, every American decade has seen and felt consecutive shock waves of occultural rebellion: the fifties' beat generation, the sixties' hippies, the seventies' punk rockers, the eighties' entrepreneurial new agers, the nineties' neoanarchists and cyber-artists. These movements trickled in from the peripheral fringes of mainstream society, propelled by occultural revolutionaries unable and/or unwilling to conform to the sociopolitical standards of their time. As "outsiders", they thrive on the fringes of their local cultural gene pools, where the new forms, the new rituals and the new traditions spring forth and find expression.

These fringedwellers cultivate their own idiosyncratic microcultures, no matter how short lived. Temporary Autonomous Zones. With enough meaningful interaction between kindred spirits, microcultures form and,
with commitment, develop the momentum and the critical mass necessary for the germination of larger subcultures. Marginal men and women contribute to the subculture of their times by their very placement at the grassroots levels of society, working in the secrecy ("occult") necessary for their occultural survival in a world of competing ideologies.

For the sake of metaphor, let's assume that the "intellectual genius of humanity" has dominated euro-american thinking and its world view since the eighteenth century and that humanity's own latent and oppressed "poetic genius" has risen up against its tyrannical other half. Imagine now, such a conflict in your own mind and one might get the impression of insanity or, a brain at odds with itself; paranoid, schizophrenic even. Now, picture the world at large. Sanity, on an individual and group level, may depend on how "quantumized" our thinking and world view is. This amounts to the degree a given individual and/or group mind, is:

1) flexible enough to permit more uncertainty and
2) imaginative enough to handle the inherent anxiety, creatively.

The Time of Your Life

So much money was made and spent in the eighties that the economic crisis of the nineties turned into a virtual crisis in consciousness itself, if only because Reaganomics made it too easy to become a little -- or a lot -- crazy about money. If the eighties had "money on the brain" then the nineties were about getting our brains back, again; before it's too late. This is why I'm calling this "post-information age" nineties era, a consciousness revolution. Perhaps the most insidious pill our individual and group minds have swallowed whole is this Dead Data assumption that time and money are synonymous. Is time really money ? That probably depends on whose watch you're on, what model of Time you're living in. Did you know there was more than one ?

On one end of the chronological spectrum, time is not money; it is the measure of your life, as in "the time of your life." The measurement of nature -- the thirteen lunar cycles, the solar eclipses, the seasonal shifts -- is as close as it gets to "galactic" time, the time which knows no beginning or end but a metamorphosis of duration. At the other extreme, there's the 60 second/60 minute/12 month manmade organization of available time into measurable bits and pieces, usually connected with the punch-clock of employment; time as commercial regulation.

To the extent we have identified with the latter "Gregorian calendar" as the only model of Time, yes: time is probably indistinguishable from money. The five-day work week -- with weekends off -- is more of a "smokestack economic calendar" maintained by participating governments as an economic incentive for social control. Like money itself, this calendar is a man-made mental construct. It is symbolic; not real.

Those who have lost touch with this distinction have already lost their minds to some extent. International advertising moguls and mass media geniuses have also effectively conditioned the public/collective mind into becoming a little -- or a lot -- nuts about the purchasing power of money. From the commercialization of Christmas to the neuroelectronic Nintendo warriors, the minds of adults and children alike are starting to belong to the most successful advertisers.

The occultural revolution -- spearheaded by the species own poetic genius and the artists unleashing its forces -- is striking blows and dents in the bloated consumer mind; first, in small pockets and then, infiltrating greater media outlets (more on this later) effecting change by the gradual reclaiming of our collective consciousness from its misplaced identification with rampant consumerism. If that sounded too idealistic, how about this: After science cures cancer, AIDS and cardiac disease, the ailments of the future will be -- almost -- entirely mental. Are people ready to openly suffer from information overdose ?

Can a mind close down and die from INFO O.D. ? A mind does not get sick from the oversaturation of information but oversaturation of the wrong kind of information. The mass media's appeal towards the trivialization of all things force-feeds the psyche increasing dosages of arbitrary "facts" which, regretfully, assures its over-literalization and early imagination death. As depth psychologist James Hillman points out (BLUE FIRE: Selected Writings) without the play of an active and world-involved imagination, the life of a soul is not only severely limited but questionable at all; imagination death precedes the death of the soul.

The collapsing economy -- the recession, the loss of wages, jobs, and homes -- impacts us, personally, to the extent our time and consciousness have been invested in money; the more nuts about money you are these days, the greater the shock to your consciousness. Economic recessions are catalyzing not only an economic crisis but a crisis in consciousness itself by forcing people to rethink money and perhaps, how to not think about it so much. During times of overwhelming consumerism, cultural survival may depend on minimizing and even avoiding commercial appeal. How does one continue to nurture the life of the soul -- that is to say, the "real" life -- amidst the surrounding signals of advertising images and slogans promoting the contrary ?

The "New Age" Occultural Revolution

The notion of "living a real life" is a philosophical quandary. As one searches long enough, it grows apparent that there is no one absolute truth or formula that fits all sizes, shapes and colors of people; any teacher selling one, is selling ontological pantyhose ("one-size-fits-all"). What constitutes a real life ? The enigmatic dance master and philosopher Georges I. Gurdjieff devoted his life to it. Gurdjieffian turn-of-the-century mystery schools have attempted to continue "living the real life," through the writings of E.J. Gold, Claudio Naranjo, Robert Augustus Masters, Charles Tart and Timothy Leary. These latter 20th century philosophers and their cosmologies are all given to greater degrees of imagination and humor, two traits conspicuously absent not as much in the person of Gurdjieff but from the numerous followers attempting to carry his torch, post-mortem. Despite this, Gurdjieff's work has managed to lay down significant ground for widespread occultural seeding and germination. It is my perception that these seeds, along with those planted by Alice Bailey, Madame Blavatsky, and other western followers of Tibetan Buddhism, contributed to the hodgepodge spirituality of the New Age occultural revolution of the eighties.

The eighties' "New Age" movement expressed the most passive side of the oppressed poetic genius. With its sit-down visualization approach to life and its inspired, albeit dead-naive, idealism, "New Agers" were easy targets for cynics and skeptics alike. Yet, their fundamental, and somewhat fundamentalist, innocence suggests more than meets the eye. Like other occultural movements, the "new age" emerges as a reaction to a collective crisis or, shock. When I see millions of new agers groping for ways to leave their bodies -- via channelers, UFO cults, the so-called 11:11 "call" -- my stomach wrenches. Is this some genetic migrational signal alerting the race of emerging mass extinction? Or maybe it's just a delayed reaction of watching too much television. The New Age movement was slippery in that way.

The New Age apex came and went in late 1987, as millions of people responded to the mass media coverage -- from Doonesbury to TIME magazine -- of a grassroots celebration of the earth coined, "The Harmonic Convergence" by Dr. Jose Arguelles (an art historian turned "intergalactic emissary"). Its precepts were simple: go outdoors and create rituals to celebrate the earth. The swirling cosmology surrounding the ritual, however, cast a compelling spell...

The Planet Art of Jose Arguelles

Harmonic Convergence, no matter how it was perceived, enacted the most far-reaching two-day global occultural ritual since Woodstock ended the sixties; a planetary art form was born from some kind of magick with Arguelles as the master conceptual artist. Having worked personally with Jose and his wife Lloydine between the years of 1984 and 1987 -- when we were neighbors in Boulder, Colorado -- I witnessed its accumulating momentum from its inception. One of the things I learned from Harmonic Convergence was how the mass media convoluted Arguelles' original meaning of the Harmonic Convergence by "advertising" it as another "end of the world" prophecy. This dampened Arguelles' already wavering academic credibility by labeling him another apocalyptic guru thus, successfully sensationalizing the event for "televisionary" consumer mentality.

Similar to the mass media reaction to the emerging sixties' hippies, in 1987 the established networks of news services opted cynical, condescending attitudes about "those flaky new agers and their wigged-out guru." So when Harmonic Convergence came and went without so much as an extraterrestrial invasion or a cataclysmic earthquake to swallow up the unfaithful, the mass media triumphed and the so-called New Age turned belly up. Its occultural epitaph was written by selling out as a commercial publishing and commodities genre. By this time, I had my first book ("Angel Tech"; Falcon, 1987) pubished and saw how the occultural powers of advertising were not to be underestimated.

Unknown to media coverage was Arguelles' seed vision -- which he told a handful of his friends and supporters, as early as 1985 -- of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence being only first of two "gateway" dates, the next of which was the "Time Shift" of July 25th, 1992. The media naturally sensationalized the 1987 date and somehow completely overlooked 1992. Jose went on to say how these five years (`87 to `92) would herald a simultaneous "campaign for the Earth" and "an era of unprecedented chaos"; pretty good call, considering the massive ecological campaigns alongside all the wars and revolutions that took place during these years. The intention of the "1992 Time Shift" was to change the way people relate with Time. Specifically, the "time shift" from the twelve month calendar year to the thirteen lunar cycle year. July 25th, 1992 was targeted as the date to get the most people aware of Time Shift as possible.

Mass media twisted Arguelles' message into a promise that could never be kept; in other words, an "advertising failure". Soon thereafter, Wall Street and Procter & Gamble chewed up and spit out the image of the whole earth everywhere in massive advertising campaigns promoting everything from organic lipstick to energy-efficient automobiles to biodegradable toilet paper. For awhile there, it seemed that the earth itself was for sale. Less than three years after Harmonic Convergence, mainstream society began assimilating the fringedwelling new agers' "earth surrender rites" by adapting the image of the whole earth to promote Earth Day, 1990 and continues to do so, today. (Remember, the image of the "whole earth" was photographed and circulated by NASA back in 1969; it took twenty years to commercialize).

Advertising is a genuine occultural phenomena. It is an art form and a form of magick that casts its gorgeous spells onto the high seas of public imagination and for the most part, continues to transfix its bounty of minds. Every advertising CEO knows well enough that before selling the public anything, that public must first be convinced their lives are inadequate and unworthy -- the way they are -- without their product and that by purchasing and consuming it, their lives will be complete, again. People with low self-esteem naturally identify more rapidly with television commercials that promise "security, status, smarts and/or sexiness" by consuming the product advertised; memorize these four "S" words and you may begin to see how real advertising works, while seeing through the commercials themselves. (For more information on this, see: World Entertainment Warriors)

Moons, not Months

The occultural phenomena predating most others are the various nature, or goddess religions: wicca, witchcraft, paganism, neopaganism, and the countless forms of pantheism. It does little justice to clump these spiritualities together, as their depth and complexity of styles can differ wildly. Yet their one binding element is the relative secrecy through which all have had to learn to practice their craft over the past two thousand year reign of Christianity (alongside its historical and incestuous marriages with the State).

How many nature religions rely on the thirteen natural cycles of the moon to measure the passage of time, rather than the twelve month Gregorian calendar year ? Besides being a "bad luck" Christian superstition, the number "13" also symbolizes lunar power, the power of the feminine: of the women who are in sync via menses with the moon every day of their lives. Basic math shows us how thirteen cycles of twenty-eight days each equals three hundred and sixty-four days, the time the earth takes to orbit around the sun, plus a day.

Twelve months or thirteen moons. On paper, there isn't much difference. Yet, in the lives of the people who live according to each "calendar" extraordinary distinctions exist. The twelve month year was invented by Sumerian and Babylonian priests based on the Egyptian 360 degree circle as a scheduling device to control local commerce; no matter how efficient, it is still a mental construct. The natural cycles of time, measured by the moon and the tides, have been recognized by indigenous people for ages past as "the time of our lives" model of Time.

The Truth About Evil

Goddess religions have always been a formidable threat to the "one and only true male God" of fundamentalist Christianity. Both male and female Goddess worshipers have been persecuted, burned and murdered as "evil witches possessed by the Devil" for centuries on end by the more militant executioners of the Christian faith. This massive persecution has done more to associate the word "occult" with "evil" than its actual meaning of "beyond the realm of ordinary knowledge" and "disclosed only to the initiated" (courtesy of the Random House dictionary). The real truth is that the truth itself has never been that popular. Advertisers and journalists stay away from truth for this very reason and push promises, fantasies and wish-fulfillment, instead. Truth does not sell well.

The reason truth generally hasn't sold that well, is it's too obvious, too ordinary and too plain to see AND/OR: it's just too strange, too shocking and too miraculous to believe. Even the so-called "reality" shows on television are vapid simulations of reality produced by its programmers and their bankrolling advertisers. The truth about the life you are living is that it's transitory; as life happens to you, it happens for the first and the last time. Impermanence is a basic truth. How often have you said something to the effect of "I can't believe this is happening" ? Often, the most difficult thing for us to believe is the very thing that is happening to us. Why ? Once again: whatever is happening -- here and now -- is happening for the first and the last time; it is alive and beyond belief, period. Life (and its parenthesis death), require no dogma to occur. Life and death happen; the measure of our ignorance is in how much we need reminding.

World Entertainment Wars

The competing realities of Christianity and non-christian dogma make up just one battlefield in a massive occultural war occurring at the level of mind; if heaven is in the mind, as many philosophies proclaim, there is a war in heaven. Warfare between "the intuitive artists" and "the materialistic advertisers" -- a kind of World Entertainment War -- has grown confusing and complex with countless world-class artists selling out to the advertising corporations.

In military warfare, spies and intelligence agents work in enemy fields as "field operators." As part of the training for entering the World Entertainment Wars, artists eventually enter the esoteric and occult world of advertising not only to survive economically but to sidestep the commercial boobytraps reserved for uninitiated consumers. Advertisers are also initiated into a kind of Art Boot Camp training for staying abreast of the latest hit movies, pop songs and fashion statements that could lead to the next hot image accompanying their product.

Occulture, as the "secret marriage of art and magick", has remained inaccessible and hidden ("occult") to those unable to afford the technology, talent and imagination for creating it themselves; until now. With the rise of affordable state-of-the-art camcorder and home-editing technology, more people are becoming occultural adepts, whether they know it or not, scripting their own stories and shooting their own movies. Of the millions of camcorder owners, it's highly likely that at least a handful end up changing the course of occultural history by recording the action as it happens, without advertising pressures and budget deadlines. These individuals will revolutionize media-making at the grassroots level by providing our own species' rebellious poetic genius the multimedia outlets for expressing its ever-changing multidimensional nature.

Computer desktop publishing has also inadvertently spawned an explosive revolution in the underground press, unleashing thousands of alternative "zines" offering anti-media output of fresh unpredictable information and unsalable truth. Music industry dinosaurs are sending their own field operators out to scout grassroots talent due to the increasing affordability of recording time for producing cassettes and compact discs; musicians are surviving longer outside of record company control by recording and distributing their own work.

Between words, music, and images, the human species' enraged poetic imagination toils to rearrange the way we see, hear and feel the world: the way we end up living our lives. The efforts of these struggles are immense -- imagine Jacob wrestling with the angel -- and their effects, as fundamentally unstable as the high seas themselves. We are a culture dreaming itself -- ourselves -- into history, with as little as a song, a prayer, and a vision...and are entering that portal where almost anybody with enough commitment, courage and vision can step forth and join history, herstory, our story in the making.

Whether it's on the streets and/or incognito computerized virtual realities, the time has come for the chaotic emergence of the species' own intuitive genius. How will we recognize it ? What will it look like and what will it do ? It transmits a dream more optimistic than the beats, more precise than the hippies, more dynamic than the new agers and more soulful than the bleak cyberpunks. What's "it" ? All these occultural movements make up the groundwork of its unfoldment. What "it" is, however, is now up for grabs which makes IT all the more breath-taking, dangerous and alive.

Fountainhead (c) Stevon Lucero

The Song you Sing

The songs you sing
the songs you breathe
the songs you live
the songs you cry
all exist within
your past.

I cry the new seed
I plant the new tree
I swim the new river
in my home that is my garden.
It is clear and holds discernment
for all my relations.

I have no shore
I come from no land
I have no possession
and because of this
I am free to roam the Earth
in both the day and the
nights dreaming.

I meet you here
but you forget
I do not forget
for I remember
everyone I have loved
since the beginning
of time.

Your eyes are blue
your eyes are brown
your skin is black
your mind is white.
When I visit you...
I see no difference
I only feel what is in your Heart.

Now I am free
a woman who dreams at night
guided by Luna and her mysterious faces
in my Grandmothers Caves
where time has never existed.

Copyright Mary Novak All rights reserved,
use of poetry with written consent by author.

St. Maria Star Gaze copyright 2007 by clancy cavnar

Between the Veil - (c) Alicia Schordine 2006, all rights reserved





Why Love Relationships Fail

Love relationships fail because at no time in our training by society are we given a factual model of what a love relationship is, or how to make one succeed. There are fundamentally three levels on which intimate relationships operate, and our social training only prepares us to deal with one of them – the most superficial one – and even that one ineptly. This superficial level is called the expectations level. It is usually the only level we address consciously.

The expectations level consists of all our self-images and self-importance. When we primp ourselves in front of a mirror, what we are primping is our expectations of other people. It’s the level of our daydreams and fantasies, whereon everyone is as impressed with us as we are with ourselves.

On the expectations level what interests us the most about a prospective partner is his or her physical attractiveness, manner of dress and bearing, social and educational background, future prospects, how “cool” he or she is, how he or she reflects back on us, what others will think of us for having chosen this partner.

On the expectations level a “love relationship” is actually an approval agreement, a contract, To Wit: “The party of the first part hereby agrees to pretend to honor, love, cherish and obey the party of the second part; in return for which considerations the party of the second part agrees not to hurt, betray, nor expose to public embarrassment the party of the first part (see appended schedule of specific acts which shall be deemed to constitute ‘hurt’, ‘betrayal’, and ‘public embarrassment’). Any violation of this agreement by either party shall be considered valid grounds for spitefulness, vengeance, and all manner of carrying on like a big baby.”

On the expectations level we submit ourselves to another person not for love, but for approval. Love and approval have nothing to do with one another. Love is a light, joyous, happy feeling; receiving approval is a tight, clinging, possessive feeling, which does, however, have an ego rush behind it. That ego rush is not joy – it’s glory, self-importance, which we have been trained to seek instead of love.

The expectations level must eventually wear out because its basic premise is getting something for nothing. On this level everything we’re putting out (“giving”) is phony – it’s just to impress other people, or to get something more in return. We’re putting out phoniness in the hope of getting something real (happiness) back. And that’s not how the universe is set up. There are no free lunches or free rides out there.

What fools us is that most of the messages we receive – from our parents and peers, our teachers and preachers, our leaders and the media – are that the expectations level works; and if it doesn’t, that’s our fault and we should be ashamed of ourselves.

For whom is it working? Look around. How many truly happy marriages are you aware of (of more than ten years’ duration, since it can take that long or longer for the expectations level to wear thin)? Sure, there are some, but not many; and usually the people involved in truly happy marriages are very, very special people in their own right.

Isn’t this true? There are also lots of relationships which appear to be happy on the surface, but are actually miserable underneath: both partners have learned to repress their true feelings and resign themselves to unhappiness without showing it. These people never get beyond the expectations level.

The reason the expectations level inevitably crashes – although it can and often does mellow into true love after the crash – is because it is wholly narcissistic: it doesn’t include the other person. It does not permit the other person to be a person, but only a reflection of our own fondest self-images. It doesn’t allow the other person space to be real – to have feelings of his or her own.

For example, is our partner permitted to have sex with whomever he / she wishes? Is our partner even permitted to be sexually turned on by anyone but us? Is our partner permitted to tell us that we are not a satisfying lover? The list could go on and on. Only sexual expectations are mentioned here because those are practically universal; but we have all sorts of other fences we try to erect around our partners to keep them pristine and unsullied for us – expectations that they will agree with us about money, child raising, career, religion, etc.; expectations that they will forego making their own decisions in order to support us.

Love is not something we get; love is something we give – or better said, something that flows through us. We can’t sit back and expect other people to hand us love just because they’re our parents, spouse, or children. True, this can happen on occasion, just as it has happened on occasion that we’ve found money lying on the street and picked it up and it was ours. But to expect money to come to us in that way is absurd; and to expect other people to give us love just because we’ve stuck them in a supporting role is also absurd.

The expectations level must eventually crash under its own weight by sheer exhaustion. When people are involved with one another in an approval agreement, or any agenda that is not love, then everyone has to work overtime in order to convince the other or to convince oneself; and this is painful to bear.

The expectations level would be problematical and contradictory enough if it were the only level on which we relate with other people. Unfortunately, there are two deeper levels which actually govern the course of our relationships; and these deeper levels contradict the expectations level.
The level which underlies and controls the expectations level, which assures that the expectations level will eventually crash, or be maintained in great suffering, is the conditioning level. It’s the level of our basic conditioning by society, which is to hate ourselves. Beneath the glitter and glory of our expectations, our self-images, is the grim truth that we actually hate ourselves. We are taught to hate ourselves by our parents and society: women are taught to hate their looks and their bodies; Men are taught to hate their gentle, tender feelings (as opening the door to homosexuality).

Whereas the expectations level is set up so that people will be “nice” to each other (make the agreement: “I won’t expose you as a liar and phony if you won’t expose me as a liar and phony”), the conditioning level is set up to divide people, to make them fear and distrust each other. We are not trained to relate intimately with one another, but rather to wage war upon one another – to feel hurt, jealous, competitive, critical; to pick at each other and bend each other out of shape – rather than to be happy and accepting. The parent / child relationship is the basic war setup; the man / woman war is grafted on top.

While on an expectations level we tell ourselves that what we want is to live happily ever after, we are conditioned by our society to feel unworthy and ashamed of ourselves, and to deny ourselves the very love which we consciously tell ourselves that we are seeking. We are trained by our parents to hate ourselves in precisely the same fashion in which our parents hated themselves.

The conditioning level is the level which psychotherapy addresses (unfortunately, after the damage is already done). We are so overwhelmed by our parents when we are little – so awed by their divinity – that we are afraid to express, or allow ourselves to feel openly, anger at them, or any other feeling of which they would not approve – which contradicts their expectations. Thus our parents’ expectations level becomes our conditioning level.

Society calls infatuation with our own self-images “love”. On an expectations level we tell ourselves that we are going into relationships to get “love”; whereas, on a conditioning level, we are going into relationships to deny ourselves love – to pinpoint, through the mirroring of another person, precisely how we ourselves are incapable of giving and receiving love.
One might well wonder why people would want to reenact in their love relationships the situations out of their childhood which brought them the most pain and trauma. The reason is that those wounds never healed properly. They are still raw and suppurating, and extremely tender to the touch. Only by tearing those wounds back open again and cleaning out all the dreck, the self-hatred, can a true healing occur. And only by staging a situation similar to the one which produced those wounds originally can the wounds be reopened (actually this isn’t the only way of doing it; there are far more skillful ways of doing it, such as Active Imagination, which is described in my book Thought Forms. However, the locking horns with another person and inflicting pain and suffering on each other is the more popular way of doing it).
Just as on the expectations level our goal is the validation of our images, on the conditioning level our goal is to recreate all the emotional turmoil our parents inflicted on us, but this time around to grab the brass ring of love which our parents denied us.

Up until recently society has had the fifth Commandment and a raft of social sanctions in place against examining the conditioning level too closely. Freud was one of the first to take a good, hard look at this level of human interaction. At the present time there are lots of good popular books available on the subject of toxic parents, how we all marry our father or mother, and seek in marriage the precise same hurt and nonfulfillment which our principle caregivers made us feel in infancy. The problem is that we don’t bother reading these books until our relationships are already in deep trouble. These books should be required reading for all high school students.
“Don’t blame your parents! Just wait until you’re a parent yourself!” they (our parents) tell us. Well, that’s wrong; we should blame our parents, because only by consciously blaming them are we in a position to consciously forgive them. Only when we can see that it was their own self-hatred which their parents laid on them that impelled them to do what they did to us; only when we can see them as people in as much or more pain as we, who really did try to do the best for us they knew how; only then can we forgive our parents. And only then can we forgive ourselves, and let go of our own self-hatred, no longer needing to reenact it or to blame ourselves over and over because we loved our parents, and all they cared about was being right.
The third (and deepest) level of relationship is the karma level – the level of the lessons we are trying to learn from certain people, based upon our experiences with them in other lifetimes and realities. Anything which is wrong or out-of-kilter in a relationship originates on the karma level. Our gut-level, first impressions of people are often good indicators of the kind of karma we have going with them; but our conscious minds often bury such information directly as it is perceived.
For example, it could happen that the reason we are sexually turned on by a certain person is that in a previous life we raped and tortured that person; for some aeons, perhaps, that individual has been itching for a lifetime in which to right matters. That might be the karma we have set up with someone; but all our conscious mind knows, on its level of expectation, is that we are sexually turned on by that person and want the person to validate it by having sex with us. We put our head in that person’s noose; and wonder later on why things aren’t working out as we’d fantasized.

The karma and conditioning levels work in tandem to control the actual circumstances and course of a relationship. For example, if on the conditioning level we decide to reenact a parent’s abandonment of us and we choose a partner who will abandon us, we might select for that role someone whom in a previous lifetime we abandoned. This can be considered a penance; but we can also look at it as a kind of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” – like saying, “I made you suffer in that lifetime, and now I want to know how you felt – to feel the feelings I made you feel.” On the karma level, as on the conditioning level, we try to restage events which will produce a resonance with some unresolved emotional issue in the totality of our being.
The agendas we have set up with other people on the karma level are often revealed in the very first impressions we have of them and which we immediately repress. It’s hard to describe this, and it’s different for everyone, but often upon meeting someone with whom we have a heavy karmic agenda going, we get a FLASH, a conscious feeling or thought, of something we desire or feel threatened by about that person. And then we immediately “forget” what we just felt, because if we have bad karma going with the person, then that flash was of a side of ourselves which we don’t want to consciously face or acknowledge – a side we are calling upon that person to enact openly for us, to ram down our throat for us, until we’re forced to acknowledge it. Thus we “forget” this first impression, and later on pretend we don’t understand why the person we loved and trusted so much could have changed so.

Of course, we can run past-life regressions to check what sort of karma we have going with someone before getting seriously involved with them – sort of like running a credit or AIDS check on a prospective spouse. In India astrology has been historically relied upon for this sort of information. But it's also possible to avoid difficulties just by being alert to our own gut feelings and intuitive impressions of other people, rather than ignoring this most essential information in a relationship.

Thus the basic intensity or emotional theme of a relationship is set up on the karma level; the particular script, the sequence of events which will unfold in a relationship, is set up on the conditioning level; and the costuming, the superficial appearances or show put on for the benefit of the neighbors, is set up on the expectations level.

The glare of the expectations level blinds us to what is happening on the two deeper levels; and the expectations level is a lie. What is actually going on in a relationship on the conditioning and karma levels is always quite visible; but we pretend we don’t see it, we pretend we don’t understand it, in order to uphold our expectations as long as possible.

By “lie” is meant something that we feel, but which we suppress or conceal. For example, if our sex partner is doing something that doesn’t feel good and turns us off, and we lay there and take it because we’re too embarrassed to speak up and possibly hurt our partner’s feelings, then that’s a lie. Any time we do not communicate something we are feeling because we are embarrassed to do so, or because we don’t want to hurt or provoke the other person or become a target for his or her disapproval, we are lying. Lying leads to sneaking around behind the other person’s back. Lies lead to more lies.

We can tell if lying is taking place in a relationship this way: if there is an area in which we don’t trust the other person, where we withhold from the other person, where we are afraid of the other person (his / her disapproval or rejection), where we feel something other than GOOD about the person, then that is a place where we are lying. We are trained to lie to other people; and then to feel betrayed when our lies are exposed.

All a lie is, is a contradiction. Lies must always exist in pairs, whereas the truth – love – just is. For example, on the level of our expectations we might set up the pair: “I want you to be honest with me” and “I don’t want to hear how turned on you are by someone else.” On the level of our conditioning we might set up the pair: “I truly love you, mommy!” and “I’ll never question your love for me!” On the level of karma lies don’t exist per se (it’s repressing this level that makes a lie out of it); but one could say that the basic lie or duality of the karma level is: “You and I are two” and “You and I are one.”

All the lies in a relationship are laid down right at the beginning. By “laid down” is meant: conscious. Conscious for a moment, and then – just as consciously – repressed, ignored, “forgotten.” The basic lies of the karma level may be laid down in the first few seconds of a relationship. The lies of the conditioning level (the game plan of who’s going to hurt whom, and how) are usually laid down at the time the relationship is formalized – when the mutual decision is made to commit, to get serious as it were. And the expectations level is a complete lie from the first pop.

Anyone with their eyes open could see what’s going on. Sometimes our parents, friends, or other people who care about us try to pass us warnings. But we’re “so much in love” and “love is blind” and we’re so “happy” that we don’t want to see it. We don’t want anything to call us down from this lovely cloud we’re on, this lovely lie we’re telling ourselves.

And for each and every lie, the piper must be paid. There’s a karmic law at work in all this, and every single lie, no matter how teensy-weensy, will someday have to be brought into the open and admitted, else the relationship is doomed – doomed to be something other than a love relationship, because in a love relationship there is no room whatsoever for lies of any kind, at any time, for any reason.

All the alarm about the soaring divorce rate in our society, the call for a return to “traditional values,” is a bunch of baloney. Those traditional values were a total lie, and it’s amazing that the human race put up with that lie as long as it did. Traditional values means you get married on the expectations level and you never question it. You learn somehow to live with a lie, with unhappiness, and you bite your tongue because the social sanctions (what the neighbors might think) against divorce are so stringent. Instead of returning to living out lies, our society ought to stop glorifying the expectations level. As is the case also with war, when society stops glorifying infatuation people will stop seeking it.

Love relationships fail because we go into them with a lot of la-de-da thought forms about who we are and what we expect to get, and we run smack into heavy karma and conditioning agendas we had no conscious idea even existed. We are not consciously aware of what expectations we have until those expectations aren’t fulfilled; and we don’t understand what our parents did to us until we find our partner doing the same thing – making us feel that old, familiar feeling in the pit of our stomach.

As long as we’re relating to the other person on one of these three levels, we’re not relating to an actual person at all, but only to our own self-reflection, our childhood wounds, or our deep-seated fears and insecurities. On the expectations level our attention is focused on the future; on the conditioning level it’s focused on the past; and on the karma level it’s focused on the remote past. A true love relationship, however, involves relating to a real, live person in the now moment.

(excerpted from Bob Makransky's book Magical Living)

(c) Leland Auslender 2007

The Dream of Oenghus Mac Og (c) DoAn: Antony Galbraith

The Mouth of the Sacred House 2
(c) Jean Pronovost

(c) Jean Pronovost

copyright Willowdown

Greenpoint-Brooklyn
(c) Jean Pronovost

Acquiesence and Dominance (c) Robert Simon

Hibernation copyright 2007 by clancy cavnar

Our Last Hope (c) Marjorie Kaye

Conduit (c) Stevon Lucero

Dragon's Play (c) Rachel Thompson

Sun in Pisces/Moon in Aquarius

Letting spirit out of body
dancing purified energy
merging into music
outside of law or obligation.
Reinstate the time of bright lights in darkness,
of good cheer and boisterous laughter,
of twirling into ecstasy without reason or rationing.
Reinstate the time of quiet sunrise
smelling of pine and wild roses,
of unending sky and majestic formations of earth,
of unbridled adventure encompassing silent reflection,
all orchestrated in bold tones of exquisite complexity
and simple truth.
Take me there. Let me fly
forever undisturbed by a need to touch down.

(c) Laurie Corzett/libramoon

THE PROBLEM WITH SYDNEY

Hard being poor in this city
but easy to feel rich
as seagulls skim a tablecloth harbour like credit cards.

Heat rises - exhaust of property auctions/
the negotiation of stone & fig.
I try to read the Sanskrit of cirrus -
puzzles of the immense -
seeing the tattoo of a rose on a whale.

I understand the problem
with our need to all do less
but how can Pajeros seem too much
beside profligate sand at all the gateways to deep ocean?
What tile is garish
beneath a sky with flight paths engraved in gilt?

This will never end.
The sun hovers
like a poker-lampshade in epiphany.


Les Wicks




100 DIFFERENT WORDS FOR WET

I've now watched drizzle drop from a cloudless sky.
Verga: rain falling from clouds but never reaching the ground.
Seen that too as the temperature
soars into double digits.

Discussing the weather here is no simple thing.
Deluge fills the throats of worried native grass,
oils the wings of great black swans.

Inclemency ignites the hearth, smothers reason with joy during any absence
(even for a moment).
It ices the lake, inhales the billowed grunts of lumber trucks.

As the air inverts yet again
the reminder -
kills you if you turn your back.


Les Wicks




NEAR END

It took me weeks to tease out the geography of this lake.
The water wasted no time
& was time.

Wild things & humans keep their distance.
In the village there's a nod. I wait with no agenda - eventually
(the only human marketplace that counts)
an exchange of histories.


Les Wicks

Hermit and Mad Train Wine (c) Nicolas Caesar

// 07:21