Adam Clay, Lazarus Mouse and the Kingdom of Eros

Thank you for your insight and kind words, monkeyblood. Managing the response to the piece has been emotionally draining. A dream showed it like this: I stay up too late and get cranky. I apologize to someone for being too tired to be respectful. We lie together non-sexually.

In my responses I was duly respectful, but I could have been more so, and apologize for being less than. I want to be perfectly respectful at all times. It’s hard to do when you are not feeling respected or understood – and feeling that no matter how much you explain your POV, you are still not going to be understood because you are simply not calibrated to where others are at and vice versa.

That said, I would like to give it another try: All habitual and harmful attitudes and behaviors can be metaphorically transmuted into an inflexible erection numbly and uncaringly pounding a hole. Morbid female consumerism is an erection pounding a hole. Female encouragement of harmful male attitudes and behaviors is an erection pounding a hole. (Or if it is a form of Vagina Dentata then the erection has transmogrified into the vagina’s teeth closing on the penis, unfeeling and uncaring, complementing Adam Clay.)

Women could have as easily been the ones lying supine and receptive in the dream from the essay. Let’s add a penis to them for the sake of clarity: There are six women with penises lying supine on tables. None is allowed to move, at all. I am one of six gleeful women wearing lingerie and satin gowns. At the same, we each mount one of the men for a few seconds. Then we simultaneously dismount and move on to the next, and so on to the next and the next, having sex with all the women. Meanwhile the women are meditatively still.

The dream is about balance. Its message of receiving rather than taking is non-gendered. For shopping addicts, for example, the message of the dream would pertain to learning to find value in things themselves, independently of their purchase.

Just because the men in the dream are supine and receptive does not mean they are not erect or without powerful feeling. Being okay with being supine and receptive in this context is meant to strengthen, not weaken. It’s telling man, “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to outdo other males. What you want is yours, so let yourself have it.” For me, it is an expression of intensely personal compassion and caring, deeper than what norms allow a man to ordinarily experience. It increases the spectrum of existence.

I can’t speak much to the experience of being a woman as I have only identified as one for eight years, and I have been revirginized. I have no sexual identity to speak of. I am like a girl more than a woman still. 

Being so singular however I hope and feel and that I may somehow participate in the missing link, monkeyblood, of these dilemmas, perhaps in a way that does not directly involve discussion of gender. My role has to do with translating psychic wisdom that will help weave the world-tapestry, the fibers of which are gender inclusive.

Last night Brian George had this dream: 3 critics of "Adam Clay" had been swallowed by the flow of debris-laden lava on a volcano. Lion was among them. Then, halfway up the slope, I saw Lion, on foot, pulling another version of himself behind him in a wooden cart, of the type they used to transport witches to the stake. I thought, "How can he still be alive when he has already been swept away by the lava? He must like getting burnt."

The volcano is erupting with monkeryblood’s emotion – the raw, righteous emotion of the feminine, of Earth. You, Lion, are shown sacrificing the part of yourself that demonizes women. It may edify you to sacrifice this, to avoid generalizations; or at least to delicately qualify them.

Or perhaps say nothing at all about women, and instead just say, “Men are compromised by the scarcity of sex, so x y z need to be done…” You don’t want to alienate the people needed to service men.

I recently dreamed: A woman says, “Women kill. They don’t need to hunt.” Feminine power, feminine yang need to be as respected as masculine power, masculine yang, or your cart is not going make it to the fire.

1) a) LK, you have given a brief history of evolution, focusing on the primordial violence still echoing into the present. The Gnostic story, “On the Origin of the World,” depicts the various characters at play on the stage of primordial violence, and does so without judgment. It is not saying he is bad and she is good. It is saying this is the way it was. It is a history – a collective, psychic history retold as a drama – but a history nonetheless. You can call history bad no more than you can call 2 + 2 = 4 bad. 2 + 2 = 4 doesn’t suck.

You noted the “sick” and “disgusting” epochs of antiquity. The story dramatizes these. It is saying primeval society was ruthless and violent, and that this alienated Sophia/wisdom. It is saying the ancients were foolish. You said yourself that this foolishness persists today: "Humanity has kept it at bay (we think,) but it's there in the back of our minds, in our fantasies, and it's there in the porn stories." Why not elucidate the foolishness with a mythical diagram of its roots? If you answer that is it biased against men, I will reply that it is biased against imbalance in general.

If I rewrote it to include the feminine as one half of the Authorities would it suit you? I really will do it, if it will make difference.

The gender of the Authorities is not once named. They are non-gendered, parasitically living through both men and women. They are said to rape, which may seem to masculine them. But women can rape, too, not with the penis, but existentially in the ways you have generalized in your writing, which in sum are existential rape.

b) Calling the man an “abortion” means that his behavior did not edify his belonging as a man on Earth. Rather he was more like an animal than a man. Again, that is not value judgment. It is fact. It is not saying that man incapable of educated and upstanding.

Today, as mentioned, the "abortion's" animalism still echoes. Some behaviors in practice today won’t survive; behaviors like making snide remarks in community forums. These behaviors will be aborted like the ignorance of the primeval man. (But his vitality will self-perpetuate, which is what you want.)

c) As we have discussed, socialization perverts and deforms masculinity, resulting in rigidity and numbness. Rigidity and numbness do not need to be castrated. They need to learn to feel, which is what I see happening in the women-on-top dream. The men are learning to feel. They are not being castrated. They are being exorcised of rigidity and numbness – not of their exuberance. Their exuberance is being edified; edified by stillness and receptivity. A seed cannot sprout if it is in motion.

The reason men are less attuned to feeling than women is that the better part of their feeling collects in their genitals. It is forced down there through male socialization. The penis is the only area of feeling some men have. I devolved into such a man.

The libido of young guys such as yourself sometimes has so much momentum that any suggestion of slowing down is perceived as a tyhreat to manhood. This is because men earn their manhood by fighting through restraint. So to give in to any kind of perceived restraint is counterintuitive, and uncalled for unless harm to self orothers becomes an issue - yet harm is being done ever so subtly day-in and day-out.

It is a harm called age, caused by the inability of the cell to reproduce because the mind has too much momentum. It is caused by the mind/body split. Were mind and body one, a human being would be an immortal being.  

Women-on-top therapy is priomarily for men at a later stage, for whom greater feeling is needed to edify doing. In contrast, for the young guy, doing has not yet diverged from feeling.

2) Healing depression provides a correlate to man’s relearning of feeling.

Perhaps you would say depression ought to be avoided with medication. I would reply that depression is the soul’s way of saying, “No, forget it. I am not participating in this world.” As such, muting depression with medication is to forsake one’s own self, a part of oneself that has too much feeling to participate in an unfeeling and ignorant environment. Charles Eisenstein writes brilliantly of this in his Reality Sandwich essay, Mutiny of the Soul, which I highly recommend for its perspectives on depression, fatigue and anxiety.

The black hole you intuit before you, before the world, is either a black hole of violence or one of depression. In material reality, a black hole cannot be survived. In metaphorical reality, it can be – you say by going through it. I say by feeling it, experiencing it till is disappears. To neutralize the metaphorical black hole one allows oneself to feel it. This is depression. When one fights the black hole, there is anxiety. When one refuses to confront it, there is ignorance.

3) You wrote: So by this picture, "the way out," suggested, is to stop having sex, to make chastity the social "enlightened" practice, or to genetically re-engineer the human being so as to not need sex, or perhaps to give robotic sex partners to everyone, or whatever.

But the way through is to take sex head on. To say, "This thing of darkness, I acknowledge as my own," and to look deeply into what it is, and so on. Other metaphors are to delve, to dig, as well as to accept. And here we get into the intelligence story.

It is not necessary to be so extreme. A little abstinence can help an individual find the way out. A little abstinence is one way to take sex head on – to ask, “How do I feel when I am not having sex, for awhile? – not a lifetime.” This is a way to repossess sex from habit.

At the other of the spectrum is your proposal, of saying, “Men are defined by sexual scarcity, so let’s give them what they need.” Opposite ends of the spectrum always meet. Abstinence is needed no less than easy-access to highly-ethical sexual gratification.

(What is “the intelligence story”?)

4) You approach these problems as a behavioralist. I do as a mystic. This is a major source of our disconnects.

You call repeated harmful behaviors “what men do/are like” and “what women do/are like.” I call repeated harmful behaviors products of “negative  archetypes.”

Framing behavior as the product of an archetype allows for a whole new range of ways of seeing and managing behavior – ways you dismiss out of hand, I think, to the detriment of your agenda.

5) You have written of your resistance to not using generalization, that avoiding it would weaken your writing. I can’t buy this. Specificity and detail are necessary. Without them the feminine becomes enraged. You have to account for each micron. What do microns have to do with men and women? They are made of them. They are made of both sex and eros.

In favor of generalization, you resisted differentiating these two - sex and eros. The difference is simple. Sex is an act. Eros is feeling. How is this not useful?

6) I also happened across a mention in your writings of pain not being spiritual. All saints and mystics will tell you that pain is a pathway to the spiritual; that a pathway to spiritual is feeling because the spiritual is kept at bay by numbness – the residual numbness of socialization. There are 5 essential pathways to the spiritual: being, doing, feeling, knowing and belonging. Of these pain is included in feeling. Tell me how pain iis not spiritual. Because it is instrinsic to suffering and suffering is meaningless? Suffering edifies knowledge. "Knowledge is individuation" I recently dreamed. The words were etched in stone on a church.  

7) I often illustrate my points with metaphor. The linear mind, the scientific mind, the archetypal male mind resists the efficacy of metaphor. It blows metaphor off because it is untestable. There is no one-time experiement for validating metaphor's efficacy.

Yet when one sits with and studeis metaphor long enough, one will see that its operation has a logic that illuminates the rational mind, partially by subsuming it. Utilizing metaphor as the substance of consciousness is a matter of orientation.

Metaphor is how God expresses his/her/its reality to the evolving human mind. Metaphor is a product of higher intelligence. With metaphor everything exists in the context of something else, and does so in an orderly fashion. As such metaphor is the glue of universal interconnectedness.

Interconnectedness is inherent in the universe, in existence, but it cannot be fully grasped without integrating metaphor as the intellignece in the fibers of interconnectedness.

Metaphor, if you follow its path, leads ever deeper into the structure of interconnectedness, the crown of which is the uninty of male and female.

8) You wrote: I generally reject personal gender integration stories, for the reasons that Sam Keen gave in "Get Over It."

Ouch. Again, that word “generally.” There is a degree of similarity to personal gender integration stories. Mine is utterly unique and dissimilar. Now from personla experience I know why monkeyblood erupted at you.

9) You wrote: This doesn't mean that I reject you, or that I reject metaphor, archetype, dream, and myth, the core of your reality. But those things can be oppressive, rather than liberating, and it's important to see symbols as symbols, rather than as commands from the cosmos;

On the contrary, they are commands from the cosmos, and metaphor, myth. dream, et al, are my liberation. They form the river of my Salvation. I personify the cosmic feminine, being the product of metaphor, not of sex. Reject metaphor and you reject me.

The symbolic will stop being oppressive once it is globally integrated into perspective.

Through alchemy metaphor reconciles the material elements (lead, gold) and spiritual components (love, being, doing, knowing, feeling, belonging) of which a person is made. It is a recipe for the reconciliation of the genders within the individual. Without a reconciliation of gender made strong with metaphor, the reconicilation will never take place.

10) LK: I hope you don’t give up on this process, this discussion. I have written this post with some haste, to keep my end of the discussion moving. Ordinarily, I would take weeks to synthesize such ideas.

11) Hi monkeyblood. Yes, Brian's dream offered us an instance of transpersonal intimacy. So cool, and an example of the relevance of the material LK finds oppressive.

12) I acknowledge your Activiy suggestion, LK, and will wait for others to take it up.

13) It's obvious that you are angry. Why do you need your anger acknowledged?