Hope and the Flesh

Every four or five weeks since the summer, a group has gathered online for a Heart and Lingam Circle. In the midst of the pandemic, we've gone on buidling erotic community with the creative energy, imagination, and playfulness that queer men have manifested through times of oppression, health crises, anxiety, and isolation since--well, since queer men have been queer. (I send the invitation out a couple of weeks in advance. If you'd like to be on the blind copies list, let me know by e-mail.)

We've taken as a touchstone the words of James Broughton: "The penis is the exposed tip of the heart, the wand of the soul." What happens when (instead of just getting off online) we use our erotic energy to expand our consciousness, and to speak and listen more fully from the heart? What happens when we bring our heart energy to our erotic expression?

Can masturbating together, while we share the traditional structure of a heart circle in virtual space, make us more open-hearted, more compassionate and generous toward one another and toward ourselves?

We've found out that it can, and does. Without being able to reach out through the screen to touch one another physically, we've reached through the screen, and across continents and time zones, to touch each other's hearts. It's been sweet and rich. And sexy. Did I mention sexy?

Still, it's not the physical touch of another's hand. It's not skin on skin--the contact that all primates thrive on, and which we alone of all higher primate species live in want of, even in ordinary times, for the sake of civilization and its discontents.  It's what we can have, for now. Paradoxically, it's brought the gift of connection despite distances that would keep us ever from being able to do this face to face. We aren't just settling for second best. Like everyone whose lives have moved onto the Web since March, we've discovered new modes of community.

It's what's been possible in 2020--a year that nearly all of us will be glad to see the end of. It's a sign of hope, like the final words of the Passover Seder, "Next year in Jerusalem." Like the words of the Passover Seder, not an expression of a desire to move back to what we've known, but forward into something yet to come. A hope lived out with, through, and in our queer flesh.

At the Return of the Light

The darkness of 2020 has been all-encompassing. 

But the Sun always returns.

A Cernunnos Litany for the Return of the Light

I sit before this altar

in praise of the Horned One.

I light candle flame

in praise of the Horned One.

Before this altar I slip deeper into trance

in praise of the Horned One

become one with my cock

in praise of the Horned One

gaze down into the eye of my cock

in praise of the Horned One

as it points upward toward heaven

in praise of the Horned One

as though gazing into a candle flame

in praise of the Horned One

eye gazing down into eye gazing up an endless circuit

in praise of the Horned One

beholding it from above as the God beholds it from above

in praise of the Horned One

wind the mala around the base of my cock

in praise of the Horned One

touch my chest, awaken my body

in praise of the Horned One

hold the Lingam to my heart

in praise of the Horned One

begin to pass beyond the veil of speech

in praise of the Horned One

lose the power of speech, possessed of breath and animal sound alone

in praise of the Horned One

vow that my seed will be an offering

in praise of the Horned One

after long lingering at ecstasy's edge

in praise of the Horned One

not my seed but seed of the God present in men's flesh

in praise of the Horned One

not my seed but sacrament of the God's presence in my flesh

in praise of the Horned One

to be lovingly, slowly, patiently milked from my body

in praise of the Horned One

to be collected in reverence

in praise of the Horned One

to be poured over the Lingam

in praise of the Horned One

to be drunk

in praise of the Horned One

to be shared with my brothers

in praise of the Horned One

to mark our foreheads and hearts

in praise of the Horned One

to be worn on our skin

in praise of the Horned One

affirming our animal mortality

in praise of the Horned One

celebrating the power of cockpleasure to open the heart

in praise of the Horned One

teaching us humility before the power of Nature

in praise of the Horned One

recalling that beside the Great God abides the Great Goddess--

all praise to them both, together and apart--

Womb of Creation, Cock of Life Longing for Itself--

all praise to them both, together and apart--

Cock whose seed falls into the earth and dies

in praise of the Horned One

Cock whose seed brings forth new life

in praise of the Horned One

Cock whose seed unites all men in one great brotherhood

in praise of the Horned One

Cock whose seed flows through the three worlds

in praise of the Horned One

the realm of this world, of ourselves and our brothers

in praise of the Horned One

the realm of our fathers now departed

in praise of the Horned One

the realm of our sons and  of the heavens and of galaxies not yet born

in praise of the Horned One

Milky Way and great Ganges of cum

in praise of the Horned One

OM NAMA SHIVAYA CERNUNNOS PAN SACRED COCK OF JESUS PRIAPUS LORD OF THE DANCE NAMA OM

Rinzai and Sōtō

One of my all-time favorite New Yorker cartoons is a drawing of two Buddhist monks sitting next to one another, one young, smooth, and puzzled of face, the other wrinkled and clearly cranky, snapping at his junior, “Nothing happens next. This is it.” 

The further you burrow down into the joke, the further its petals will open out to embrace you. I keep coming back to it because I feel in myself, all the time, the urge to find out What Happens Next. Somewhere deep down inside, I’m after the next big splash, the next peak experience, the next shattering revelation. When things just move along as usual, I easily take on the puzzled, naive expression of the younger monk–and in doing so, run the risk of missing that what’s needful is right under my nose. (In fact, probably is my nose.)

In the midst of the Covid winter of our discontent, we're all learning that nothing happens next...

 “This Is It” is a fair approximation of the oversimplified understanding of Zen teaching that’s insinuated itself into North American pop culture over the last couple of generations. But ironically, along with the stress on what’s right in front of us, the discourse of spiritual self-improvement tends to emphasize the big, cathartic, singular experience that will get us there: we’ll fully embrace the ordinary, just as soon as we get our money’s worth out of our Instagram-documented trip to the mountaintop. We want a dramatic opening, a flash of intuition that bowls us over and makes everything different. Then we’ll settle down to accepting that everything’s just the same as it was before–except perfect. 

The paradox of wanting it both ways is like being the young monk and the old monk at the same time. It’s also in a sense the paradox of the relation between the two main schools of Zen Buddhism, Rinzai and Sōtō. It’s Rinzai that long held sway in the American imagination, thanks to the formative influence of D.T. Suzuki. Rinzai is the Zen of long, rigorous training and radical breaks in consciousness, of going nuts over an insoluble riddle and getting hit by your teacher with a stick when you get it wrong, over and over and over again; of the kenshō, the opening, that cuts through illusion and reveals the inherent Buddha-nature of all things as they are. 

Sōtō is the Zen of quiet contemplation, of just sitting by a lake, or in front of a flower, or over a cup of tea. The distinction in Japan is a class-linked distinction: Rinzai was long characterized as the Zen of the samurai; Sōtō was the Zen of ordinary people, of farmers and shopkeepers. 

The Rinzai impulse as it plays out in New Age workshop culture can turn into the macho pyrotechnics of extreme spiritual sports, up to and including incompetently conducted sweat lodges that participants leave feet first. The capitalist appropriation of the Sōtō impulse is people at high-end spas passing around tacky polished stones with words like TRANQUILLITY carved into them. 

Holding space for others as a teacher and a sacred intimate, I work to balance my expectations in one direction or the other. To facilitate a place of calm where people can respond to the still, small voice. But also to make room for the altered consciousness that can come with intense interaction, the jolt of surprise that something profound and exceptional is opening up. The fact is, in striving for either, I’m also playing out the disparate desires I have for my own life.

A Prayer Before Meeting

God be in my ears and in my listening.

God be in my heart and in my loving.

God be in my cock and in my desiring.

God be in my mind and in my understanding.

God be in my lips and in my speaking.

In the name of Creator, Enlivener, and Sustainer.

In the name of Shiva, Shakti, and their endless Embrace.

In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the name of Adonai, Shekinah, and Chesed.

In the name of Mystery, Wisdom, and Compassion.

A Moment of Grace

When I was two and a half years old, my mother found me on the kitchen floor, the refrigerator door open behind me, the cottage cheese carton at my side, and its contents slathered all over my face. Smiling up at her, I announced, "I shave."

Her reaction was one of the many reasons I have for deep gratitude toward her, one of the things I wish now, nearly twenty years after her death, that I could thank her for. She responded with utter delight, and then went for the Kodak Brownie camera that documented much of my childhood. (The sense of being on display is decidedly not one of the things for which I'm grateful.)

It could have gone south so easily. If my Aunt Esther had found me instead, there would have been hell to pay.

My mother gifted me that day with a moment of originary grace. With a moment of assurance that it was alright to play, to experiment, to make a mark in the world.

I'm pretty sure that most of us live our lives in a tension between internalized trust in the delight of those around us and internalized fear of their reprisal. The birthright of our own creativity, nestled within the curious, experimental, playful child who still lives inside us, no matter what our age, poised tenuously between loving acceptance and brutal repression.

That tension plays out in our erotic lives. It plays out in our creative lives. We live in hope of the welcoming delight we deserve. We live in fear of the condemnation that could come from stepping out of line. When we gift ourselves with as much compassion as we'd gift a child in front of us; when we give permission to the child within, we soften into spontaneity and joy. And softening into spontaneity and joy, we soften into offering others as well the acceptance and encouragement they need, just as profoundly as we need it ourselves.

On a Wall in New York City

 ...by way of my friend and fellow traveller Fluffy.

Crossing the Threshold

Photos by Andrew Graham

 

Day of the Dead

soypoblana.wordpress.com

No, not the George Romero movie. 

As I walk around my neighbourhood during one of my favourite times the of the year--when every day the street looks new because of the leaves that have turned colour overnight, or fallen--front yards are sprouting creepshow-style Hallowe'en decorations. Reinforcements of our culture's pervasive belief that life and death are absolute, mutually exclusive opposites. That life and death, or at least death in its daily guise as change, don't continuously permeate one another. Death is hideous, repellent, to be feared and avoided at all costs, those bloody, severed plastic hands hanging from the bush by the sidewalk tell us. On the morning of November 1, when the pumpkins go out with the garbage, we can all go back to the safety of being on this side of the divide. 

What a contrast with the traditions of the Día de Muertos--the Day of All Souls. The veil grows thin, becomes permeable. The dead visit the living, the living visit the dead. Connections are renewed. The dead live on in the ways they've touched our lives. Their life flows through us, even as we live, and will live on when we cross over, in the lives of those we've touched. The dead aren't scary. They're beloved. And we're reminded that we're on our way to join them, as mortal as they are, not to terrify us, but to bring us together.

To be whole ourselves, we need to pass through the veil. We need to remember. We need not to suppress grief for those we've lost, however we've lost them. For some of us, above all and most traumatically to AIDS. Or to violence. They're with us, they're within us.

Welcome to Bhutan

Photos courtesy of the well-travelled Hoppergrass. 

A Sutra: The Fivefold Path

When our erotic energy becomes a means of dropping down into heart space, we begin to dissolve the divisions that trick us into believing we're isolated beings. We start to intuit more vividly that our life flows into us from outside, flows through us, flows out again to others. Thanks to the wisdom of our bodies, we start to understand more deeply the infinite web of interconnectedness that gives our life its deep meaning. We dwell in that web, in that web we live and move and have our being. Some of us might choose to call that web God. Others not.

For some, the cultivation of erotic energy becomes itself a spiritual path. For some men--for some, though not for all--it's more specifically a Phallic Path of mindful self-pleasure. Those who have ears, let them hear.

And this Phallic Path then opens into a Fivefold Path.

A path of awareness that time can fold over on itself, space can fold over on itself. That we can be united in love with those far distant, with those we may not have seen face to face in years. This is a shamanic path of consciousness altered by eros, leading from fantasy into Real Presence.

A path of union with those who have gone before us, and with those of generations yet to come. A vision that we are united with them in a universal stream, from which we emerge and into which our lives pour themselves. This is the flow of a Great River through all time and space.

Painting by Philip Gladstone

A path of compassion for all in need of comfort and fulfillment. This is the path of intercessory prayer, of dedicating the merit of our practice to the happiness and healing of others. 

A path of union with the natural world, affirming in joy and humility that we ourselves are part of it. That we arise and flourish and pass on like flowers in the field, like trees sending our roots into the earth, like shoals of fish, like flocks of birds and swarms of dragonflies. We blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree. 

A path of non-duality: I am my penis. I am my hand. I am the conscious attention that brings them together in mindfulness. My penis is not my hand. My hand is not my conscious intention, and yet all three are me, and I am all three. I give, and I receive. I am the dance among these three, each flowing into the others. This is an image within me of the universal web that I might choose to call God.

OM NAMA SHIVAYA PRIAPUS PAN LORD OF THE DANCE JESUS ATUM CERNUNNOS NAMA OM

The Main Thing

 

"The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all."

            --Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav

A Call to Compassion

Do not forget that the ashes falling from the sky are all that remains of the pine and grass and thistle and bear and coyote and deer and mouse that could not escape.

Scoop some up in a sacred manner. Take it to you altar. Offer prayers for these beings.

Honor their death. Pray for life. Call in rain. Remind Fire that it is full, has gobbled enough, and can rest.

May all beings be safe. May all beings be loved. May all beings be remembered. May all beings be mourned.

           --source unknown

A Sudden Opening

"Magic is a sudden opening of the heart and mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited beliefs that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us;  that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts."

                --John Welwood, as quoted by Shakhti Ganeshan

The Path of Phallic Awareness

Deep in your soul, eros and spirit, arousal and prayer are both manifestations of the sacred Energy that moves within you and flows through the whole world. Sometimes they run parallel. Sometimes they mingle in wonderful, complex, surprising ways. 

I invite you to share with me a six-part, one-on-one guided exploration into deeper self-awareness. For now, our meetings take place onscreen. When the pandemic is over, in-person sessions will also be possible.

Session 1: Taking Stock    

Session 2: Creating a Sacred Space

Session 3: Being Witnessed and Blessed

Session 4: Deepening Your Practice    

Session 5: Transpersonal Eros

Session 6: Creating a Sustainable Practice

You can read about the series and the details of each session's focus here.

A Deep and Simple Insight

"God comes to you disguised as your life."

        --Paula D'Arcy
        Quoted in Richard Rohr's daily meditation for August 17

Naked, Empty and Alone: Reflections of An Erotic Mystic on the Mountain

This beautiful extended meditation on the cultivation of mindful autoeroticism is a guest post by Michael GVamos. Michael describes his experience of a retreat into the wilderness in the time of Covid as "a precious brush with seeing and wanting the devastating, delicious, ecstatic, and painful presence of the Divine."

The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced massive change for all of us. Since my spouse works on the front lines of health care, for me it has meant living alone in a log cabin on a large swath of land in the Alaskan mountain wilderness since March 21, 2020. I call it living “the Frontier Life”--wood stove for heat, outhouse, no running water, sporadic cell phone service. Literally drawing water and carrying firewood enveloped by the unspeakable beauty of Nature. My mantra during this time has been from Barnaby Barratt: “Naked, empty and alone.” 

As someone who has had a daily Tantric self-pleasuring practice for over six years, this sojourn quickly became for me an opportunity to let myself fall into the rhythm of Nature; to let go of my ego and resistance, and allow myself to respond to the invitation of Eros. Ego versus Eros. Whenever and as often as I am called. Eros summons. It is visceral. I can feel it in my pelvis. Stirrings in my genitals. “The god wants my life” as Jung said. Letting myself be swept up by it, taken over by it, “letting go.” Touching my body. Massaging/soothing my torso, thighs and abdomen with oil. Caressing my genitals, stimulating my nipples, stroking my cock. No goal in mind, no time in mind; with the simple intentions of postponing ejaculation, getting into my body and GETTING OUT OF MY HEAD. 

“Self-pleasuring is our sensual source that enables us to set aside the tyrannical governance of our judgmental minds and moves us toward divine bliss.”  

--Barnaby Barratt

Being swept up by Eros, taken over by it; falling into the pleasure, joy, soothing, centering, bliss, and fun. Like the Whirling Dervishes; beyond conscious thought. This is a profound, tenuous altered state. Connecting directly with my Life Force. Surrendering to it. Spiritually connecting with all the other men throughout the world also stroking their cocks at this time; like each of us beating a drum, contributing to the universal vibration of pleasure/joy in the world. It feels like being swaddled and cuddled in the palm of the Divine. There cannot be too much. It is like a well that I come back to over and over. Pleasure-Joy-Bliss = my spiritual food and medicine. Riding the energy; actively, consciously moving the energy to my heart center. Breathing it in. My face and heart smile. I am in a State-of-Being-Loved beyond all doubt. Sacramental. Transcendent. Redemptive. 

But even on this Erotic Mountain paradise, there is resistance. My ego, my “conscious self” wants its say. As James Broughton said, “perverse greed for power is the mind’s ugly doing. The mind is the worst pervert in the world.” The litany is long: shame (you are playing with yourself AGAIN, enjoying your cock too much), hedonism (pleasure is bad, you are selfish, and all you want is self-gratification), irrational (this is crazy, out-of-control behavior, who knows where it will lead?), immoral (you call this spiritual? This is decadent and sinful), not-manly (if you were a real man you would be getting laid; this is the best you can do?) and non-productive (you are wasting time, not getting things done, indulgent!) Our culture has indoctrinated me to shun Eros in all forms. The savage capitalists do not want me playing with my cock or communing with Eros (enjoying myself); my role as citizen is to be a producer (making money) or a consumer (spending money.) I am to worship the god of our Economy, not the god of Eros. It takes diligent, consistent effort to go against the grain of these insidious messages our culture has inculcated in me. They are as much in my head as they are out there in the media/culture. And my ego gleefully takes on the role of judge and jury. 

So, each day is an invitation to let go of resistance, to surrender to Eros, to be Divine, not reasonable. Some days I struggle. Some days it is easy. The invitation is always there to temporarily let go of being constructive, efficient and practical, and let myself be taken over by pointlessness, pleasure, joy and bliss. As I answer the call/desire of Eros; as I respond and open up, it becomes clear: the Divine wants my life. Touching my cock is a touchstone to this altered/holy state; a transformed, spiritual out-of-my-head state, a transcendent state, a mystical state of being profoundly loved by Love. 

“Sometimes you no longer recognize yourself. You want to overcome it, but it overcomes you. You want to set limits, but it compels you to keep going. You want to elude it, but it comes with you. You want to employ it, but you are its tool; you want to think about it, but your thoughts obey it. Finally, the fear of the inescapable seizes you, for it comes after you slowly and invincibly.There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is."

--C.G. Jung - The Red Book Liber Novus

I can go then into my day, into the world with this consciousness; not reasonable but Divine; strong, centered, compassionate. This is a tenuous state – it’s new – like riding a bicycle initially – a fragile state. It takes lots and lots of practice to internalize it – over and over again. I can go back to this place, this state, this center over and over during the day: this state of being profoundly loved by Love.

“To worship a god, one must become a god.” 

– Joseph Campbell

Still the questions remain. What do I do with all of this? How do I do this? What do I do with this when I go back to civilization?

WTF

The world is strong.

I feel weak.

"But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever present. But I'm ashamed of my God. I don't want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous.”

--C.G. Jung - The Red Book Liber Novus

Three Visions

Three times in my queer life, visions of my relationship to the Christian church and to Christ have brought a clarity that's left me with an unshakeable faith in their power and their truth. 

None of them is easy to write about. Each is bound up with complex circumstances of my life. What can they possibly mean for someone else hearing about them? I'll never know for sure. But I have to try. 

I

I was twenty-eight years old in 1983, when I outed myself in the Saturday religion section of the Toronto Star, in an interview about the experience of gay Lutherans. The reporter had selected for his writeup the most sensational sound bytes he could pull from our conversation.

Starting the next morning, news of it went through the coffee hour of St. Ansgar Lutheran Church like wildfire. Over the next weeks and months, the stalwarts of the congregation took to inviting me for individual chats. The conversation always centered around my grave errors, which Christian charity compelled them to point out. Usually, they ended by asking me to stop coming to church altogether. The Lutheran clergy of the city held an emergency meeting to assure that random homosexuals wouldn't start attending the services of their congregations. One retired pastor reached out to me for dialogue, and then put the make on me in his living room.

I plodded on for the better part of a year. Going to church on Sunday no longer gave me strength or joy to carry me through the week. Instead, it was the source of a metastasizing bitterness and resentment I needed the next four or five days to recover from. And then one night, I had a dream.

I'd escaped from a concentration camp. I'd made my way back home and was sitting at the dinner table with my mother and brothers. (In waking life, I'm an only child. But "Who are my mother and my brothers? asks Jesus in the first three Gospels.) As we sat together, my mother turned to me and said, "Go back outside." I replied that if I did, the Nazis would find me and kill me. My brother turned to me, drove a knife into my forearm, and said, "Do what your mother tells you."

And so I did, resolved to kill myself before I was recaptured. There was a car, and a lake, and I drove the car into the lake. Except that I immediately came up for air. Once, twice, and then a third time. 

Like a baptism that was at once a symbolic death and a birth into new life.

The dream told me everything I needed to know, at that point in my life, about spiritual survival. I woke up and never went back. It would be fifteen years before I participated in another Christian service. 

It was grace that rescued me from the clutches of the church.

II

In 2011, on top of a mountain above the Russian River, a Sacred Intimate midwifed the rage I'd carried, since the age of five, at being shamed for my male body by my narcissistic, fanatically religious aunt. I screamed myself hoarse shouting out over the valley. 

And then we were back in the room where the session had begun, diving deep into a visualization. Jesus was in the room with us. As he had been when I was five. And was blessing my body. Wanted my male energy. Desired it as a gift I could offer him. Jesus wanted me to top him. Beyond any power my aunt had ever had to come between us.

It was what I was made for, what I was created to do. It was a consummation of my relationship to the divine source of my life, a prayer prayed with my body. Blindfolded, I thrust into whatever it was that the S.I.  was offering me. His hand? A Fleshlight? In any case, for the moment, the flesh of the resurrected Christ. Utterly welcoming my humanity into himself. 

III

At a monastery up the Hudson from New York City, a young monk listened to the story behind the first of these visions, when I was feeling stuck and resistant in the middle of a weekend retreat. I was creeped out by the language of surrender that had been running through much of the program. I was trying to explain why. 

He and I were pretty much at an impasse in our conversation when, as we ran out of time, he said, maybe you have to go outside and face the Nazis.

"Get me the fuck out of here now. There are Buddhists I can go hang with just up the road." I thought. 

But then, just a few minutes later,  joined a circle with a dozen others on the retreat, sitting in silence around the altar in the chapel. My monkey mind jumping like crazy, panicked and swinging from tree to tree. 

Then I was alone, outside, waiting for the death squad. Except that Christ was there with me, hanging on the cross. And what I could do was shield his body from the bullets we were expecting together. Perhaps they'd still pierce his flesh, but only after they'd first gone through me. It's what I could do, the only thing I could do. Not a gesture of despair, like my attempt to drive the car into the lake, but of solidarity and love. Present to his suffering, as he was present to mine. 

And both of us together present to the world's. Present to the suffering of the folks at St. Ansgar's, stuck between what they'd believed in good faith all their lives and a new world making new demands of them. Present to my aunt, God love her, with her own life history of unmet needs and longings.

To protect him meant climbing up on the cross facing him. And then I realized that I was his Shakti, his consort in the iconography of a Tibetan mandala, united with him in passionate bliss. Penetrated by him in inseparable embrace. As years before I'd penetrated him. The circle completed. And the Nazis an irrelevant distraction. 

My beloved is mine, and I am his. He pastures his flock among the lilies.