The Illusion of Romance
Part of the fun of watching a movie is that you’re watching the movie, you’re in the movie. You don’t have someone sitting next to you telling you the director cuts and the fact that actually that guy’s just got really good makeup on. You actually wanna be in the movie.
Part of the movie of relating is this dance of duality, this dance of polarity, this romantic bubble of wholeness that comes through relating. So if you don’t want that bubble popped, then maybe you should go. Because you can’t undo knowing there’s no Santa Claus.
Sometimes there’s a part of us that wants to keep the illusion because the illusion is fun. So what I’m gonna try to do today is like the Wizard of Oz, just take away the outside, so the architecture of relating reveals itself a little more. And in that architecture, in a way it changes because it means you can’t really relate from the old way anymore.
Or if you do, you’re conscious that you are. And then what love is changes. Because mostly on the planet love is this beautiful energy that brings together polarity. Eros fires its arrow, and polarity begins its dance. But to get beyond polarity, you can still play with it, but you’re no longer in it.
The Personal Journey
This has come from a life of doing my own relating. It isn’t just theory, it’s actually wrought out in the chamber of my own heart and relationships. I’m married, I’ve been married twice, the last one for 16 years. And we dedicated that union to what would it be really like to have love and freedom, really, between a man and a woman? Is that possible, even? Is it an illusion?
What is it to be deeply, intensely committed to one being, to love them all of the way through to the core, not just for this life, but forever? And at the same time, be totally free?
What is it to hold the part of our heart that wants the one, that truly wants to be seen by one, to be met by one, to meet another human soul at the deep core? And what is it to be totally free to be met by everyone? And how do these balance in the heart?
Love Is Not Tender - It’s Fire
One of the illusions that we have about love is that it’s this really tender thing. It’s like Marilyn Monroe, candle in the wind, you know? That I have this really special thing here that I’m saving and nobody else will ever be able to meet it. And it might be blown out.
So I have to keep it safe until the right one comes along and then I can let you see it because it’s so tender and it’s so precious. And of course that’s true. But also love is a raging fire. It’s the most powerful thing in the universe. It’s not a candle that can be blown out. It’s a wild, raging being that is the entire universe.
This moving from the protecting of the heart, the keeping love in our inner sanctum for the special one, and the opening of the heart, it doesn’t just happen overnight.
The Heart Must Be Developed
Just like you don’t grow up your mind by just awakening. You develop your mind through discipline and study and meditation so that you can direct your mind with your awareness. The heart doesn’t start mature.
Follow your heart and you will break your heart over and over and over until we find out what the heart’s for, which is breaking and healing and kneeling for the great love to move through.
So that love doesn’t just happen. It’s not a fairy tale. It’s the work of the heart. It’s the deep work of the heart to be a lover. A lover just doesn’t happen. A lover is built and worked.
The Hima - How The Heart Works
There’s this concept in Islam of the Hima, which is the energy of the heart that’s thrown out in images. The heart doesn’t work like the mind. It works through metaphor and image and projection and it throws out a projection into the world and then it longs for that projection and it goes into relationship with it.
It’s the mystic yearning for God, for God, goddess, for polarity. It’s the yearning for what is missing inside us, even though we are it, to go and unify with it so we can bring our heart into wholeness.
When we know that that’s what the heart’s for and it’s its job to fall in love, to throw out everything that’s in here that has not been integrated into the world and then call us into connection, then relationship, we refuse to make relationship this thing that the ego can own.
Relationship is a sacred journey into the heart of the temple. And that sacred journey is one that’s best undertaken with very deep reverence.
The First Split: Gender
The first thing that happens as we come into incarnation as love, as pure awareness, is that we hit this body-mind experience and this world really likes us to make choices. What body am I in? Do I have a penis or a vagina or maybe both? Are you a boy or a girl? So already there’s a big split.
The soul mutinies at polarity because the soul in its deep core is not masculine or feminine. It’s whole, it’s love. It has the capacity for both those. So the soul’s hermaphrodite. The soul is everything. It’s not an identity. It’s pure awareness and love.
So when it has to choose between boy or a girl, either one has to go into the shadow or it refuses to incarnate fully.
The Second Split: Spirit or Matter
The other choice that is a really powerful one that makes this cross is: Am I a material being having a spiritual experience or am I a spiritual being having a material experience?
Like push comes to shove. Am I really identified with this body-mind experience or am I identified with my spiritual self? Neither is necessarily good or bad. Both can be argued. Both are true, actually. So the soul also does not like this choice.
The Four Archetypes
Light Masculine
The light masculine domain would be those amazing eye gazers. They can hold Shiva, they can hold this presence. They know about chakra breathing. They know about the divine source, the heavenly father. These are the priests and the Shivas and the presence holders.
“Don’t worry, Kali, I’ve got you.” They’re also the solid marriage guys. Got alignment, keep my word true to my purpose. I said I’d love you, even though you’re a bitch, I’m still here. I’m in integrity.
Positives: Shameless, present, truth, reliable, healthy Shadow: Distant, preachy, rigid
Dark Feminine
These are the empowered feminines. They know about kundalini. They know about the serpent powers. This is the energy that can hit you across the room and make you feel like you thought about going and seeing her.
Positives: Sexy, juicy, erotic, uncontrollable Shadow: Seduction, manipulation
Dark Masculine
The dark masculine is the energy in the world that we’re probably most afraid of, and yet in its power, it can deliver truth, it can destroy your illusions, it can end the things that need to end, and it can penetrate and ravish you to God.
Positives: Passionate, will penetrate you Shadow: Can rape, break boundaries
Light Feminine
She’s compassionate, divine grace, radiatory, pulls her energy down and through everything, welcomes everybody back. She’s the divine mother. Mother Mary, Kuan Yin.
Positives: Open, compassionate, welcoming Shadow: Passive, can be used
The Polarity Dance
Just like the masculine in the old relating world has the Madonna-whore split, then the feminine often has this split in their own being between the safe guy that they want to trust and will hold alignment for them, but actually, then there’s the guy that wants to bend them over the back of the Harley who you know is not gonna be around, but he is somehow erotic.
The Dynamics
- Light Masculine + Dark Feminine: The temptress and the priest. The more Kali rages and the more presence is held. This is Shiva-Kali dynamic.
- Light Feminine + Dark Masculine: Beauty and the beast. Great for the dark masculine. Scary for the light feminine.
- Light Masculine + Light Feminine: Chakra breathing and divine grace. Heart unity energy. But does it last long? Not really. Sex death happens.
- Dark Masculine + Dark Feminine: Hot. Dangerous. Does it last long? No. Is it hot? Yeah.
The Ship Called Relationship
Once you decide you are somebody, you’re not pure awareness. You’re actually someone here. You’re a light masculine guy, let’s say. You go to the Byron Bay Spirit Fest and somehow someone from dark feminine has slipped along. And you meet her and sparks fly.
The thing about a ship is a ship is going somewhere. And the ship is amazing because it actually has love at the center. And it has the void at the center. So love happens, but you still have identities.
On a ship, how many captains are there? Only one fucking captain on a ship. That’s a bit of a problem, right?
The Honeymoon Dies
At first, there’s the honeymoon because love has fired this arrow and brought polarity together. And the polarity is in this amazing experience of, “Oh my God, you complete me. Without you, with you, I’m funnier, I’m more myself.” It’s like I’m connected to this amazing thing called love.
But then the battles begin and then the power struggles begin because you’ve got an identity that now starts figuring out what’s in it for me and what have you done for me lately and how can I actually get you to love me and still love someone else or how can I actually make you a subset of my script?
Marriage Means Death
They could be solved if both people realize that the idea of bringing polarity together was to kill you both, really. Because what love demands from you is that you surrender to love, not to the other person because then that’s two identities forming a contract between them.
When love is really present, then your identity dissolves mutually with the other person. It’s like simultaneous orgasm, but better. Where both of you realize the jig’s up that if love is gonna take you on this journey, then you have to die together to this idea of identity.
Marriage, deep union, is a dying of your identity. Till death do you part. It’s more like till death unite you.
Real Love Is Not Contractual
Real love is not contractual. It’s not like I’ll love you forever until two years goes by and then the divorce courts come and then we fight over the children and the money. Like that was never love. It was never love.
Might have been a nice projection and love might have been present, but it wasn’t mature love. It was a transactional trade of mutual projection for the masturbation of the self.
But it’s all good training and that training develops us to the point that we’re willing to really meet love on its own terms, which is not something that our identity can have. It’s the end of our identity.
The Fast Way
The fast way, of course, is to realize all of this, find a polarity and agree to die together into love. Of course, that normally doesn’t happen. Most of us leave a bit of a trail of wreckage behind in that journey because we believe we just chose the wrong one.
The Wounded Child Zone
In the middle of union is the divine child. This is us as Christ or Buddha or love itself, come to earth. But around the divine child is this wounded part.
The core of the wound is the rejection of ourselves as love. So the core of everyone’s heart is this deep abandonment wound. Because we came as love and we came to a civilization and a planet that didn’t recognize love, that wasn’t in their own love, then they reject that and demand us be something.
Then we try to get away from that core sense of inadequacy by filling it up with someone who will one day love us the way we should have been loved when we came into incarnation. Not gonna happen because we just keep proving it.
The Divine Child vs. The Wounded Child
Every couple has two children. One is a wounded child and one is a divine child. Who will win? Will the wounded child cause so much drama that the relationship ends or will the divine child break through and help them surrender together?
The wounded child, if we don’t want to face those core wounds, that will stop the relating. We’ll get to that trigger point and we’ll believe that the partner caused it. It’s like you are causing me this suffering but the suffering was there before the partner arrived.
Instead of thanking the partner for “you love me enough that I can actually experience in our connection my core wounding,” now it’s like “you’re causing this, you bitch.”
The Short Path
If you know the short path, it doesn’t actually matter who you choose because it’s about coming to love together. And when you come to love together, it’s not even my love and your love. Love is.
And that love isn’t just for you and me now depending on how we are and how you treat me because I could change it at any moment. It’s like, “I love you forever no matter what you do. I’m with you forever because it’s not me and you, it’s we’ve discovered ourselves as love.”
And it’s not just us. It’s all of us. So once you marry one, the process comes to keep marrying until group marriage comes, till soul marriage of the planet comes, till love appears as one being through all of these beings that know themselves as love.
The Core Wound by Gender
For Men
When a man goes back through his shamanic body awareness, he finds woman, which is at the core of homophobia, and also at the core of men always needing initiation rituals. Cut off my foreskin, scar me, make me dance around a tree forever, but somehow turn me into a man because I don’t know how to be a fucking man because if I go back through my body, I go to woman.
Most men have an identity issue. Am I a man? Is my cock big enough? Did I please you? Have I made enough money? Some version of an inadequacy around identity because they don’t know how to be a man in their shamanic self.
For Women
A woman comes from a woman’s body, so when she goes back through her body, she finds woman too. So the difficult thing for a female body is to relate to men, and the first relationship she often has is with a father.
For a woman, it’s: “Do you love me? Do you love me, really?”
Critical Advice
For men: Don’t ever try to be the love that she needs. It will never work, ever, because she is love, and she will only find that out through betrayal of any outer love so that she can discover she is love.
For women: Don’t ever try to make a man feel bigger than he actually is because he will hate you for it. Let him discover that he already is enough. He doesn’t have to prove it.
The Four Feminine Wounds
The Princess (Wins father in light)
The apple of her daddy’s eye. Matures into the queen. Really good at pleasing men. But underneath: anger - “Why the fuck can’t I live my own life? Why do I have to be something to you?”
The Rebel/Tomboy (Loses father in shadow)
“Fuck men, don’t need them.” Great independence and courage. But underneath: grief - “Why wasn’t I lovable? I really wanted my daddy’s love.”
The Waif/Lover (Loses father in light)
The poster Twiggy models. Big eyes, please love me. Caters herself to men’s projection but never feels satisfied. Underneath: powerlessness.
The Seductress/Temptress (Wins father in shadow)
Wins father’s connection but in the shadow. Uses energy in the shadow lands and lower chakras but not in the light. Great capacity to spin the sacral center of a man. Underneath: fear of rejection.
The Slow Way vs. The Fast Way
The slow way: Peel the onion. The core wound is like the core trauma. Take off this layer, then this layer. This can go on for 30 or 40 years. Lots of money in therapy.
The fast way: Realize that at the core of the onion is our invincible spirit, clothed in love. We can either go through the wounding to get to the core, or we can call the call.
Once we become conscious of this, and we know that it was love that brought us together, even though now I think you’re a fucking asshole, I never wanna see you again - from my bloody mind, not from my soul. I can call on that love. I can bow before that love. I can put myself on my knees before that love.
You’re calling the inside to come out. You’re calling the inner side of the onion to emerge, rather than taking off another layer.
Vibrating Your Divinity
At the core of our heart is something that has never been wounded, that is eternal, that is invincible, that nothing can ever hurt or harm or take down. That’s the truth.
So we can either own that, or we can own some version of a long-term healing project. And if we own the first one, what comes out of the core produces the healing from the inside out.
The Intensity Principle
You can only heal something at the same level of vibrational intensity that created it.
Lots of positive affirmations sitting on top of an intensely painful experience won’t do it. They’ll just sit on top of it. If you want to heal core trauma, you have to be activated at the same level of intensity.
Which is why wonderfully relationships do it for us. They drive us into that core place that we never want to go. And the only reason we would go is because we love this person more than we love our own story.
Get betrayed early, deeply, completely, and then it’s over. Otherwise trying to avoid that all of your life means you miss the journey of love.
The Courage of the Heart
The courage of the heart, has the word rage in it. Courage, the rage of the heart. And the rage comes up from the solar plexus. And underneath that is the erotic energy from the sexual center. And underneath that is the Kundalini.
The courage of the heart to come out as love is the earth itself standing up through a human being and expressing its unstoppable power.
The Heart Is Both Water And Fire
The heart is both an organ of water and fire. And the water is the compassion and it’s the capacity to feel other hearts and to feel the love of the planet. And that water is beautiful, but it’s also fire.
If you walk into the fire, everything that is not you will get burned away. But what will be left is love itself that will never burn, can never burn, because it’s fire itself.
The Two Marriages
The two great unions are:
-
Between the masculine and feminine in everybody’s heart. Not between me, man, you, woman, but my masculine and my feminine have to come back into union here.
-
Between the soul as spirit and the animal. That’s why most traditions have some version of a winged dragon or a winged serpent. The winged is the soul and the serpent or the dragon is the animal. It’s the union of our light and our dark.
The Animal Needs The Soul
Our own animal needs the soul, our spiritual self, our presence, our loving heart because the animal has been deeply connected with another animal and that animal has erotically abandoned it or it feels that.
In the same way you’d stroke your cat at the vet, it doesn’t understand. It’s one of the big problems - trying to turn the animal into a civilized human being when it’s not.
Telling your animal “it’s okay, it’s all good” - the animal’s just going to get more and more crazy. You’ve got to actually meet the animal on the animal’s terms.
When Humanity Awakens
Find one other human and find your way home with them. That’s Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony based on Schiller’s Ode to Joy. Find one other human and find your way home with them. Then love begins.
But then love wants to keep extending itself. You find one human being and you go home to love, then because you are not just you and me, because we are love, that love wants to propagate and it wants to keep connecting.
So you can only really relate to other married people - those who have achieved that inner union - now your lover and you can find them anywhere, more and more.
The Modern Round Table
In each knight and lady being unified in each human being, whether they’re a man or a woman. And the table being a chakra of love that holds and supports itself to allow more love to come through it.
The Aquarian age is the age of group love. Lovers who know that they’re love, know that they’re eternal and meet other lovers from the place of: “I am you, everything I have is yours, everything you have is mine, we’re on this big journey that’s got nothing to do with a transactional relationship between us.”
If Men And Women Truly Loved Again
If men and women started to love each other again, not in this mutual suicide pact or transactional relating or let’s just have a level of management of our relating for the sake of the kids and our security - but if men and women truly found love together again, that would change the planet far more powerfully than just about anything else.
Breaking Identity
The only trouble is we don’t want to live in the prison that we’ve created. So we have to start dismantling the walls of our identity from the inside.
The defibrillator: The identity is an illusion and you can break it with two truths:
- Kundalini coming up from the core of the planet
- Our spiritual invincibility like lightning coming down
So we can crack it from above and we can crack it from beneath and we can call forth the love that’s on the inside out.
The Final Teaching
Each one of us has a unique destiny to fulfill, but that’s not a concept. It’s a living vibration in the core of our heart that when we’re in resonance with it, we feel it.
As you find what allows your heart to open and allow love to pour through you, just keep aligning with it. Keep moving with it, keep surrendering to it, and that love will take away the self as it pours through.
The self has endless work. Soon as you eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as soon as you have a self that then is now separate from love, endless work. 99% of all of our problems are generated from a self that doesn’t exist.
Want to end all of that work? End the self.
Go forth and love somebody.