This
is apparently poetry morning for three lines
from the poem, “I love You” by Roy Croft
also come to mind.
I
love you for not only what you are,
but
for what I am when I am with you.
I
love you for the part of me that you bring
out.
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I
certainly like that part of me that came out
yesterday.
I’m also thankful that I took
Jezebel’s advice and scheduled this day as a
day off from my usual routine.
Between
sips of coffee, I drift and shift between that
invisible world that exists behind my eyes and
the physical world I find my body experiencing.
As
I sit, calmly, peacefully, enjoying the warm
sun, my coffee, and the aromas that float into
my nostrils from the kitchen behind me, my mind
is neither here nor there, neither busy nor
still.
For once, I just am.
I close my eyes, intentionally breathe
deeply and listen to the bustle of the street
and the restaurant.
I float above the noises and just enjoy
being.
In
my physical stillness, I hear Jezebel’s words
in my mind.
“It’s not a place we seek to go to.
It’s not external things that we seek
to have.
It’s not even the physical sensations
we seek to experience.
It’s the internal feelings, the
emotions, the sense of who we are, the sense of
unity with everything that we desire to
experience.
It’s a joy-filled state of being that
we are after.
Our minds tend to wrap those 'feel good'
feelings in numerous words such as love,
happiness, peace, and contentment.”
In
my mind I continue to hear her words.
“We are Spiritual beings having a human
experience.
Remember, joy is an inside job.
So is love, peace, contentment, awareness
and enlightenment.
So too is God and all those other
internal intangibles that we attempt to label
with external words.”
I
specifically remember one of her more profound
questions,
“If you choose to connect to the
invisible part of reality that we call God,
where in the physical world do you go to do
that?”
I sit contemplating the answer, or more
accurately, an answer. I
think “Anywhere!
Everywhere!
Nowhere!
In a church.
In a cave.
On a mountain top.
In my mind. In your mind.
All of the above.
None of the above.”
How do I answer a question when every
answer is right and, at the same time, at least
partially wrong?
I just let all that thinking stuff go.
At the moment, at least, I just am.
With
Jezebel’s excellent tutelage, her delightful
sensual and sexual self, and the profound
experience I shared with her yesterday, I am not
the man I was just two days ago.
I am today in a joy-filled state of being
that I cannot even begin to put into words.
In
terms of its profundity, yesterday’s
experience is on par with my sixteenth birthday
with Susan.
It seems, however to have taken me beyond
interpersonal intimacy as a physical experience
into an expanded level of awareness of who I am.
I have shared with you, dear reader, some
of the highlights of yesterday’s experience,
but I cannot really touch the essence of it with
words, nor can I even begin to explain what
changed within me.
What I can say is that, through my
remarkably loving and intensely intimate,
sensual, sexual sharing with Jazz, I sense that
I have received my first real taste of God as an
internal experience.
Even
as I write this, it sounds weird.
Sexual sharing as a spiritual experience?
A few weeks ago I would certainly have
placed that idea squarely in the lunatic fringe.
Now, I am not so sure.
Once again, I find myself at one of those
crossroads of life where an either/or decision
seems to be called for.
Is sex a spiritual experience or is it
not? For most people, such thoughts sound crazy,
but now I’m wondering if that concept just
might also describe the future of humanity.
Today,
part of me feels similar to how I felt at age
six, when I overheard my older brother talking
to a friend and saying Santa Clause wasn’t
real.
My mind was in turmoil.
Of course I wanted to believe Santa
Clause was real, but my sense of certainty was
profoundly shaken.
Today, I sit again with shattered
certainty, this time, uncertainty regarding the
nature of who I am.
Using Love and sexual excitement to alter
consciousness, to create a spiritual experience,
to transcend our limited view of life is a
concept that, until very recently, was not even
in my awareness, to say nothing of it as
personal experience.
If
all this doesn’t make any sense to you,
that’s OK.
My mind can’t grasp it either, but
somewhere inside, I just seem to know that
whatever it is, it’s right for me because it
feels right.
It feels good.
It feels really
good.
Instead
of making any proclamations about what is or
isn’t real, I’ll pass on to you another of
Jezebel’s bits of wisdom:
“Don’t believe any of this,” she
says.
"And
don’t deny it either.
If you play with the practices I’ve
shared with you,
and the practices I’ve yet to share with you,
and, if you’re patient and persistent,
you’ll, sooner or later, know by personal
experience just what I’m talking about.”
At
one point in our Sunday together, I asked
Jezebel to distinguish for me the difference
between feelings and sensations.
Since we’re talking about feelings,
this seems like a good place to share her answer
with you.
“Feelings,”
she says, “are internal emotions — states of
being — expressions of who we are being in any
given moment.
Although we use countless words to
describe these inner feelings, the bottom line
is quite simple.
We either feel good, or we feel bad.
Our nature is to move toward that which
inspires us to feel good and away from that
which inspires us to feel bad.
Tactile sensations, on the other hand, are
physical experiences that can be sensed by the
body.
Like sight, sound, taste and smell, the
sense of physical touch generates within us
responses we call feelings and emotions, which,
in turn, generate thoughts, beliefs and words,
which prompt actions, which, in turn, generate
more sensations, which, again, generate
additional internal feelings and emotions.
The cycle keeps going, seemingly without
end.”
“OK,
so what?” I say to her.
She
responds with, “We can use our internal
feelings as guides to tell us whether we are
headed toward or away from that which expresses
who we say we are and/or that which we say we
desire.”
When
she tells me this, I admit to her that I still
don’t get it.
“OK,
look at it this way,” she says.
“If you held a strong desire to have an
intimate love relationship in your life, you’d
feel good about those things that brought you
toward your love and bad about those things that
pushed you away.
You could, if you so chose, use your
feelings as guides in directing your actions.
The same is true for anything else you desire.
The feeling may not be as clear or as
intense, however you will feel good when moving
toward what you desire and feel bad when moving
away.
Those inner feelings are that invisible
part of yourself, 1-1
guiding you in every waking moment.
You cannot be aware of every thought, but
you can be easily be aware of how you are
feeling at any given moment.”
“Follow
you bliss,” she says.
“Follow your heart and the universe
will fall into place to manifest you fondest
desires.”
Is
this fact or is she peddling pleasant fiction?
How can I know for sure?
I
sit contentedly and drift between the
physical-here-and-now and the non-physical space
of just being.
More questions come floating in and out
of my mind.
Is it possible to know God by experience?
Is there a non-physical reality?
If there is a non-physical reality, then,
how do I get there?
Where does it begin?
Where in the physical universe do I go in
order to reach the non-physical?
If it is not physical, then there can’t
be any “there” there, so how do I touch that
which is untouchable?
Am I just daydreaming?
Is life just a dream with our eyes open?
Who am I?
What am I?
Why am I here?
Is there really life after death?
Lots
of questions but no answers.
Lots of feelings, but still no answers,
unless, perhaps the feelings are the answers.
I ask myself, “Are feelings the
answer?” In response, I feel good.
I take that as a positive sign.
I
continue to float between the mental questions
and my internal feelings.
Again I wonder, “Is there really life
after death?” and in my mind I hear, “What
do you think this is?”
That confuses me even more.
Then I remember something that I read
somewhere.
“There is no death, only a change of
form.”
Could that be the answer?
It’s a comforting thought, but no
living person knows that for sure, unless, of
course, there are some who do.
More questions. A circle of questions.
Several circles of questions —but no
answers.
I
seem not to know anything for sure any more.
The only thing I do know for certain is
that whatever it is that we connect with when we
use the word God -- that connection is having a
profound effect on me. I feel like I’m on the edge of one of those chasms of
life where the religious people say the only way
across is by a leap of faith.
I don’t jump. I sit down.
Finally,
I drift back to the poem about the Persian
Kitty.
I decide to go home and re-read it.
Within thirty minutes, I am sitting in my
favorite chair reading.
Additional stanzas that seem a perfect
fit come to mind so I move to my computer and
start writing.
I am amazed at the ease with which most
of the words come to me.
Before an hour is out I have created no
less than 18 additional stanzas.
I share them and the original poem with
you now.
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