From today’s Citizens’ Voice (Key West Citizen): Why are there objections to a nude beach where only a small area would be used for that purpose, when during Fantasy Fest our island is full of nude and semi-nude people? The size of the crowd at the parade tells me no one objects to that.”
And this: “Sorry you had to again endure the sight of fat, old, naked tourists during Fantasy Fest. Many of those fat, old, naked people are longtime Key West residents and even some true Conchs who are friends of mine. There were also some great-looking, young, slim, naked people who were tourists and locals. Sleep through the week next year.”
Received a variety of replies to yesterday’s ”The Dark Twin” post, which played off this comment in Citizens’ Voice: “Calling all liberals, let’s unite for a naked, gay beach.” My replies are in italics, followed by the next installment of the book the fourth replier took serious issue with my sharing, although he — we’ve been correspondents for years – doesn’t seem to take serious issue with the content. Ironically, not all that long ago he tried to talk me into leaving this small pond’s politics and running for the Oval Orifice on the Green or Independent ticket. Sloan
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While all liberals are not gay, gays are more likely to be liberal than conservative.
A conservative.
Wasn’t Mark Foley a conservative? What was St. Paul – liberal or conservative? Every woman around him knew he was gay.
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Sloan:
In a survey I conducted several years ago at two beaches, Playalinda and Haulover Beach, two of the questions asked were the following:
Do you consider yourself a Liberal or a Conservative?
Response: Over 60% considered themselves Conservative.
Are you a Republican or a Democrat?
Response: Over 60% responded Republican.
Richard Mason
[Co-founder of Haulover Beach - Miami's naturist/free beach]
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“Calling all liberals…” was undoubtedly contributed by an opponent of nude beaches. Hardly anyone, regardless of political leaning, identifies himself as a “liberal” today. Decades of demeaning sneers by right-wing ranters succeeded in degrading that once-honorable label to a synonym of weak, cowardly, queer, and naive. Nor would a bona-fide nudist choose the peculiar combination of ”naked” and “gay” as adjectives to describe a clothing-optional beach.
You may be right, however, the angels signed off on what I published today, before it went out. Sadly, I have run accross gays here that are capbable of sending in something like what was in Citizens’ Voice today. Racism, bigotry, seems to know no bounds. Maybe I’ll use your take tomorrow. We’ll see what the Editorial Board sez.
The vicious hypocrite Roy Cohn comes to mind as the archetype of someone who would be capable of sending it……although he’d have been cleverer.
I don’t think I know Roy Cohn, but I know people capable of sending it. I also know a lot of people who call themselves liberals and are proud of it. They don’t give a shit what Republicans say about liberals, in fact they like for Republicans to talk bad about them, take it as a compliment. But then, when some liberals came to the head of our local Democratic Party chapter, Bill Estes, upset about the prospects of a nude beach in Key West, Bill got mightly upset when I said his unnamed constituents were not liberals but were conservatives –worse, they were religious right or Puritans; that being a liberal and being against a nude beach was an oxymoron.
Be that as it may, if your take on the writer in Citizens’ Voice is correct, if he ior she is a religious righter/Puritan, then I’d sure as hell hate to live with the karma that cute little Citizens’ caper might bring home to that chicken roost. Karma that might not be associated with the cute little remark, or with karma at all. Karma that might seem hysertically funny (cosmic) to someone like me, but I’d never say it, if I wuz smart, because that would create even worse karma for myself. Gloating is an automatic karma magnet, as is writing in a Citizens’ comment pretending to be someone else. “As you sow, so shall you reap,” is how Jesus said it in the Gospels.
Sloan, Roy Cohn was counsel to the McCarthy Committee in the 50s, a crony of J.Edgar and Cardinal Spellman, and —the ultimate irony— an early victim of AIDS.
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Sloan two points come to mind after reading today’s post.
First in your opening paragraphs you mention liberals and conservatives and make a great argument that one should never paint with a wide brush when talking about any specific group. Another idea I feel is important is the relativity of the terms liberal and conservative. Using an example, someone who may be considered quite conservative here in Key West would be a screaming liberal in most of the South. The point being, local culture and custom can have a huge affect on how people view things.
Second, in Chapter 4 you make mention of Jesus and how Judas warned that miracles would be a distraction and take away from the real message. I must point out that Thomas Jefferson’s edited version of the bible basically deletes all the mystical references and what is left is the philosophy of Jesus Christ. We have discussed this before and I am curious because what you posted today seems to be more in line with my take on things last time the subject came up.
Note: Jefferson contends he did not “take out anything” but rather separated the original text from the additions which had been made over millennia.
I agree, conservative and liberal are relative terms.
I had no problem with Jefferson leaving the miracles out of his version. I wish the Gospels had left out the miracles. However, I had a BIG Problem with Jefferson leaving out the reports of Jesus’ interactions with the Spirit and the Devil. As I think I said about this before, it made Jefferson’s presentation secular, and secular Jesus was not, even though he certainly lived in and had to deal with it.
Something came to me yesterday that I felt moved to share with you and ….., concerning the view that Jesus was trained by yogis in India before he began his ministry in Palestine. In yoga is what is known as siddhis — what appear to be supernatural powers that some, perhaps many yogis develop as they evolve in their spiritual discipline. Advanced yogis, real masters, view siddhis as distractions and their use as juvenile, and they do their best to discourage their students use of those “hat tricks.”
Meaning, if Jesus actually had gone to India to be trained, and if he actually had encountered and studied under an advanced yogi or advanced yogis, they would have done their darndest to get him to not use siddhis — make miracles — when he returned to Palestine. They would have taught him to teach people how to live correctly on earth.
So while I have been told by my Editorial Board and agree that Jesus did not go to India (or nearby) before his ministry in Palestine, that he used siddhis during his ministry seems also to say he did not go to India beforehand. He did go there afterward, and perhaps he met advanced yogis and they swapped tales and expanded each others’ perspectives. For surely Jesus had had experiences they had not had, and vice versa.
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Sloan! What have you done?! You don’t see that “regular” people will see this as a revelation about YOU and that they will either dismiss you as a crackpot looking for attention or worse, fear you as someone that’s unstable… a potential son of Sam!
I don’t see any point in publishing something like this… no upside… not even a guideline to maneuver the mental/spiritual maze you are inviting people to travail in the name of sanity or wholeness… Sad!
Ces’t la vie, la guerre, l’amour. Maybe you should put your objections/questions to the angels who put me up to it, after I told them pretty much the same thing you told me. Like I give a shit what people think of me, as long as they don’t come at me in white coats again. This lastest book should have the desired effect of making sure I never make another serious run for office, no? It put me squarely back into the line of work I was in, trained to be in. That it seems bizzarre, which surely it is to this world’s perspective, might have more to say about this world than it has to say about me. Oddly, yesterday someone down here told me to check out elcollie.com, which I did. Darn, she passed over in 2002. Darn, maybe she was someone I could have run a few rivers with, talked to without having to explain anything or get any dismay back. Oh, well. Somewhere in the new book, toward the end, as I recall, I wrote maybe it is a sort of Last Will and Testament. That’s what El Collie’s writings turned out to be. I should be so lucky as to be given an exit. Tell you this, Sancho. If what has been getting applied to me, if what was applied to El Collie, is applied to you or anyone you know, or more interestingly, to the entire species, what she and I lived and and then wrote for posterity will be survival manuals for human habitation on this world. Don Q
It is sooo sad that we, humans, cannot truly share what we experience with others except by language, symbolism, mythology! We are so lonely, all of us, and yet we fear to let people in, to open up… lest we be judged!
Here we stand a child
of wonderment turned
inside out…
a homemade scarecrow
a mask of clay
a joke
Sancho
Well, I share no matter what,
Because I’m not a homemade scarecrow,
not a mask of clay,
not a joke.
I’m me,
Turned inside out by God,
And upside down too –
Trying to be someone else is fucking suicide.
Don Q
CHAPTER 5
GURUS
Jesus taught his disciples about three and one-third years, according to the Gospels. Then he left them to fend for themselves with the Holy Spirit. They were still monkeys when left them. Children arguing and bickering and posturing among themselves. Outwardly, they had learned nothing. Inwardly, deep seeds had been planted in each of them. Seeds the Holy Spirit nurtured, sprouted and developed after Pentecost, taking them into spiritual adulthood, spiritual adepthood. If Jesus had stuck around, they would have clung to him and never made this leap. If he had stuck around, they would have weighted him down, been like heavy anchors around his neck, and held him back from doing what he next needed to do.
If you want a role model for a human guru, this is about as good as it gets — Jesus. Me, I never had one — a human guru. I was seized directly by the Spirit, God, angels of the Lord, whatever, and hauled kicking and screaming to places I never would have agreed to go if I’d had any say so.
Let me give an example, which I shared with a woman today, who is still trying to make up her mind if she wants to be like the hapless chickpea in Rumi’s poem by that name, or if she still wants to be in charge of her own spiritual development. Maybe she’s lucky, she still has the choice. Or maybe that’s unlucky. I suppose that’s something to be determined after leaving this world and looking back at opportunities gained and lost.
Anyway, in the summer of 1990 a fellow who’d heard more than a few of my wild tales from the spirit asked if I’d ever heard of St. John of the Cross? Nope. I should read about him, this fellow said. I was living in Boulder then, and in keeping with my learning to follow the leads provided by the Spirit I headed maybe later that day or the next day down to Pearl Street Mall to the local bookstore. In the religious section upstairs I found a single copy of St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul, by Antonio T. de Nicholas.
Native of Spain, also the country of San Juan de la Cruz as this saint is called there, Antonio was or had been a poetry professor at a New England college. The book’s Introduction was written by a fellow with an Arabic name, and after I had read his words I figured he had to be a Sufi. Meaning, Antonio had to be pretty deep himself.
The book contained all of Juan’s spectacular soul poetry, which had made him the all-time poet laureate of Spain. It also contained a good bit of discussion by Antonio of the poems and Juan’s life, as a cloistered Carmelite monk, who was viewed by his fellow Carmelites as a heretic because he dared to go directly to God, rather than through the Church as God’s representative.
For his audacity, Juan was persecuted and sometimes locked up, and eventually he died basically of starvation from the inadequate diet he was fed by his captors. Just before he passed over in the company of close friends, he uttered, “Oh what beautiful daisies!” The room where they were filled with the sweet aroma of flowers. His fingers, toes and perhaps his ears and nose were removed and handed out as keepsakes to those close to him, according to the custom of that time. These keepsakes never decomposed. He had become pure spirit in flesh, pure gold.
After some time had passed, centuries as I recall, it was determined by the Vatican that, essentially, a saint had been murdered and Juan was canonized and made a saint. Before that, of course, he wasn’t a saint, because the Church had not declared it so.
That’s suppose to be a joke, as if the Church determines who are saints and who are not. As if the Church determines who goes to heaven and who doesn’t. Juan proved the Church had nothing to do with any of that, and that’s what got him in the predicament described above.
For me, though, the most important part of Antonio’s book was Juan’s commentaries about his spiritual process, which he said he didn’t want to write because he wasn’t convinced it would do anyone any good, but a Mother Superior wanted him to write it down, so he wrote it down.
He described a dark night of the soul, which was rigorous but doable and would last a while, and after it was over the person who had experienced it was very different, close to a state of grace. For some people this was the end of the spiritual process and they lived out their days in this new heightened state of being.
For others, though, Juan said a second dark night eventually would descend, and woe be unto the poor schmuck that happened to. Especially the poor schmuck who wasn’t in a protected environment being looked after by people who knew what was happening to the poor schmuck. During this dark night all but the most determined perished. It was infinitely more difficult than the first dark night.
Survivors of this one, Juan said, were fused with God and lived out the rest of their days that way. There was no way they could explain what it was like for them to be fused with God to people who had not had the experience, and it was not necessary to explain it those who had had the experience. Juan’s poetry tracked the entire process.
Juan advised that spirit phenomenon would come, and to ignore them all because any or all of them could be Lucifer in disguise, and who could figure that out? Best to leave it all alone. Best to keep turning back into the darkness, keep being whittled down to the bones, then to the molecules, then to the atoms, until there was nothing left: nada, nada, nada. Then, for those who persevered through the second dark night, a Singularity was reached in the darkness, sounded sort of like going into a black hole, and the fusion with God occurred.
Antonio wrote that Juan and others knew some sort of ritual that they used to intentionally provoke this only-fools-rush-in adventure. However, when I read the book the first time, I did not remember that part of Antonio’s book. I remembered the rest of the above, though, and I wanted nothing to do with any of it. Nothing.
Six months later, in my sleep, I was told in plain English, “With respect to St. John of the Cross, you haven’t seen anything yet!” Then, I was covered in slime, pure Evil. I was gagging, choking, trying to escape. Then I awoke, still gagging, choking, trying to escape. I was terrified. And, strangely, I was arrogant. For what a prophesy to be given! Even so, I lived on pins and needles for the next few months, as my life seemed to taking a turn upward. Then, almost over night a dark night fell that would rip me up for four years. I often thought of suicide. I finally gave up that it would pass. Then, finally it did pass.
Oddly, this was then my poetry began and when the heavens opened to me: the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. A big catalyst was my receiving a ritual in revelation, that enabled me to summon the spirit realms to me for stuff I was facing. I had not yet re-read Antonio’s book, and did not realize this basically was the same ritual he described Juan had used.
Unlike Juan, I was nudged not to turn away but to turn toward all phenomenon. To accept it all, completelyl contrary to Juan’s approach. And I was with a woman and was not celibate, also contrary to Juan’s approach. And I was in the world, having experiences with various kinds of people, also contrary to Juan’s approach.
When it ended, I felt better internally, even as the spiritual load increased exponentially due to very difficult outside experiences. I suppose I was in post traumatic shock over the loss of that marriage, among other things (like most of my money). Certainly I was not in the near state of grace Juan said people experienced after living through the first dark night. And in two years, now with another woman, of new age-Christian mix, I was in the second dark night. It made the first one seem like a tea party.
But I already told about it in an earlier chapter, and will say no more here, other than I lost contact with the spirit realms and felt as if I’d lost half of my mind to a stroke and I plotted my suicide daily and I didn’t know it was the second dark night until it was lifting and the angels told me, and that the hadn’t told me sooner because they felt I would kill myself if I had known. That was when I did my residency in psychiatry, by the way.
Alas, it was not finished. An entirely different kind of dark night came, along with another woman, this one a dyed-in-the-wool fundamental Christian, which took me into the heart of darkness of Christendom. When that dark night passed, another kind came, along with another woman, basically a white aborigine with no religious history, who would accompany me to Maritius and elsewhere.
Then came another kind of dark night, which had me living on the street and soon to meet yet another woman, the one I would love the most of seven wives, even though she was continually bolting and running away and staying gone a long time. That brought on other kinds of dark nights, where I came face to face with my own dark twin. And it brought on my PhDs in Paradise Mating and Women’s Studies, which I’m sure would have freak out Juan, who never got anywhere close to lying with a woman as far as I know. Each of my wives opened up a different part of me, which might otherwise never have opened. In that sense, perhaps long term marriage isn’t categorically a good thing?
Flashing back to the first dark night, I was able to get a letter to Antonio via is publisher, thanking him for writing his book. He sent back, through his publisher, a new book of his own poetry, which is where I learned about him being a poetry professor.
After that dark night ended and I had left Boulder and done the Nepal and Darwin Australia thing, I was able to obtain from Antonio’s publisher his mailing address. I sent him some of my own poetry, with a personal message to him about the daughter he had lost, which paralleled the loss of my son. Both of us had been moved to write elegies.
He called me. We had a nice talk. He said I had it and “they would try to take it away from me.” It had something to do, he said, with a long time ago in India, but I didn’t understand any of that. About a year later, the second dark night fell. Oh yes, did “they try to take it away from me.” The psychiatrists, the ministers, family members, friends, wives, and even my own drive to do myself in.
What’s this got to do with gurus? It has everything to do with it. God is my guru. Angels of the Lord lead the classrooms. Classrooms in which all assignments are related to life on this world, dovetailing with life in the spirit realms. I live in both places at the same time, all the time.
Is it peaceful? Is this nirvana? Not usually, but sometimes I’m in bliss. Mostly, though, it’s just a lot of fucking hard work. Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it, even if you had no clue what you really had asked for. “Dear God, please help me. I don’t want to die like this, failed.” Pause. “I offer my life to human service.”
The chick pea woman asked me today why did I think all of this was happening to me? I said I didn’t have a clue. After a while, it came to me to tell her that I need to have the full human experience on this world and in spirit, to get it done. And I need to have the full human and spirit experience to try to help others who might be put in front of me to try to help.
I’ve seen many like her. They say they want a spiritual life, but I’ve learned that they don’t know what they are really saying. They don’t know what they’re really asking for. And perhaps if this book gets published, maybe someone will find it and read it, and that will help them in the way Antonio’s book helped prepare me for the dark nights. I can’t imagine what would have become of me if I hadn’t known about dark nights. I can’t imagine
.
Try to imagine what it’s like for me to be around people who hold themselves out as spiritual healers/teachers. Especially those who do it for money or sex or something else of this world. I take them into the nuclear reactor right away. And then we say our goodbyes.
As you should by now have figured out, I don’t have a following.
Sloan