Transformational Experiences

Speaking as someone who has been both sexually active and celibate over the course of my life I would like to talk about sexual intercourse, orgasms and abstinence.  For me, my spiritual practise lead me to understand that we have only so much energy within us, physical power, and spiritual power.  They are linked.  My monthly regime of fasting on the day of the Full Moon, also meant I would be abstinent when it came to, well er, cumming, too.  I was lead to believe and found it very true that if you can manage not to orgasm for a week beforehand that you will have a far more rewarding and powerful experience when taking psychedelics or entering into a spiritual time.  I would not orgasm for up to a week before the Full Moon, would fast for at least 6 hours before the moment of taking my sacrement, Magic Mushrooms, Liberty caps to be precise.  Then in the light of the Full Moon my eyes were opened.  I would say a prayer, in thanks to the mushroom, asking for guidance and protection, requesting that I be shown what it was necessary for me to see but only what I could handle.  Then I would take my dosage and walk out into the night, following the setting sun into the west to watch it leave us, then hiking back east to where I could watch the Moon rise.

By then twenty minutes or so later I would start to feel the onset of the magical transformation.  My eyes would start to see the true nature, or at least more of it, of the environment we live in.  Reality would now consist of the energy fields of the plants, grass, trees and animals around.  I've described it as being very similar to Avatar in that I could see the way in which the life forms merged into one another, their energy fields overlapping.  We have an energy field, it is produced by our hearts, it is what some call the aura, it does not merely cover us as physical beings, it extends far beyond and when we enter an environment, when we walk into a room we can feel the tensions, feel the energy of the space.  I can sense what is going on, the body language which came first long before we learned to make and understand each others mouth noises, speaks volumes.  Often people hope that what they are saying loudly with their body will be enough.  It is often necessary to actually say what you are thinking as these days many are incapable or unwilling to read what we are expressing with our physical form.

Sexual intercourse, or as I prefer to call it making love, is for me the ultimate expression of mental, physical and spiritual union between people.  I have a female brain in many respects and have had to learn to access my masculine side.  I would find it very difficult to just turn on or off how I feel about someone, and that goes too for arousal.  For me, as much as men are simple creatures when it comes to their sex organs, that is just because we have a long history of needing to and finding it easy to become aroused and ready for sex when in the company of a sexually active and fertile woman, testosterone helps us in that way.  Women too are lead by their hormones to a great extent.  Our patterns of sexual desire go in waves that dont always match up.  Women tend to have times of the day, week, month and year when they are more receptive and desire sex.  Men tend to be able to do it whenever they feel like it and they feel like it a lot.  However there are of course variations on this theme for both sexes.

The range, the scope, the spectrum of differences that abound between a man and a woman is wide.  There are manly men, womanly women, manly women and womanly men and everything inbetween.  Some men are effeminate but are straight, some women display male traits and yet are straight too.  You only have to look at the way things have changed, and the way that they have always been.  Some women wear the trousers, some men wear the skirt, it's a crude analogy but its true, some women are dominant some men are submissive.  To generalise is lazy though because we all have different areas of our lives where we like to be in control and areas where we like to take a back seat, and even more areas where we would like to work in partnership together.

So as complicated as all this is, it's not surprising that within the rigid rules of society that were there was a lot of tension and  it's not difficult to see that those old ways are leaving us and new ways are becoming more widely accepted.  We can all be who we really are, if only we have the courage to express that, we'll find someone who is better suited to us.  Anyway, I've heard it said that there is no such thing as a perfect person, just someone who is capable of putting up with our imperfections. ;)

For me I have to love someone or else I don't want to be that intimate with them.

I love lots of people though, so it isn't that much of an issue. Or wouldn't be.

What has been an issue is that I am not good at communicating what I do want and how that fits in with the ways other people behave.  I have tended to repress my sexual side as it is a strong and powerful force within me that I know once let loose can become greedy.  Orgasms are addictive, they're moreish.

When I have been celibate in the past and that extends to losing desire, the longer you go without, the easier it gets.  As soon as you pop your cork, I'm struggling to put all this in a nice way, you want another bottle.

Making love, sex, fucking, it's for me something to be shared with someone you care about, the intimacy required, means sharing your naked self, with the lights on, looking into each others eyes, not some drunken fumble in pitch darkness.  Why do you think porn stars don't look each other in the eyes?  Because there is a robotic act in progress, there's no passion, just lust.  No love, just sex as a functional requirement.  No real connection, just a physical act.

That act is being played out, not a fulfilling performance, a role only, actors.

However when you are being yourself, with another.

That is living, that is loving, that is the truth.

Can't remember where this was going.

All I know is I want that intimacy.

I don't want sex for the sake of it.

When I make love, I lose myself.

And become everything.

We are love.

Love
Jon
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Learning Curves

I didn't realise that it was natural to have friends you can rely on, you can ask a favour of, all the good stuff really.  It's all been quite eye opening for me, the last few years.  I'm still not entirely finished working out where I went wrong, I think a lot of it was fear.  Rather than make a prat of myself, because I didn't know what I was doing, or go ahead and get used to rejection, I just sat things out, avoided confrontations, sidestepped opportunities for growth and in many ways kept myself well hidden when it came to getting out and about.  I just found things to do that didn't involve lots of social situations, chances to get on in life.

I'm finding out that it is actually quite normal to both want and get sex, when what I've done is been an incurable romantic.  I suppose if things had worked out differently, if I'd gone on to try out a few different people after my first long term relationship faltered, rather than falling for friends and then not doing anything about it, my learning curve would have been a lot shorter.  Putting up barriers around your heart to prevent yourself from getting hurt, isn't a good idea, but neither is wandering round with it out on display for anyone to come along and steal away...

It's been wonderful to spend so much time with amazing people, some really wonderful women and some pretty amazing men too.  My views on women have changed a lot, they're much dirtier when you get to know them.  They're worse than men in many respects, and I thought men were crude beyond belief ;)

Women can do anything a man can do and loads of others too, confirming my long held theory that women are better than men, and as I said before, worse too.  Their range is wider, if 'All the worlds a stage' then women make by far the best players in the game of life.  More devious, but kinder.  More aggresive, but more forgiving.  That's why a world in which women are true equals will be ultimately a far fairer place.

They'll have the edge as they always had before male dominance took over, when we were merely animals, as much as the Stags show off and rut to choose who gets to mate with the females, it has been shown time and time again, that the dominant male has very little real power in the group.  When the decisions that affect the entire herd are made, it's the consensus that wins out, the group makes the choices on direction and the alpha male follows.  For one thing, he's not that bright, he has to be strong and have stamina, yes.

In our society, the human animals have been ruled by one man at the head of a family group, at the head of a larger population.  Kings said that it was their god given right to make the rules up as they went along.  If the next monarch was a madman then so be it, there was no other option but for us all to follow their lead.

With the advent of time, men and kings in particular have lost their right to be the sole person in charge, nations brought together into unions under violent despots and warlords are now breaking apart and this trend will continue.  It is likely that without anyone being capable of commanding the respect of entire landmasses or getting away with using force to do so, that all of the countries of the world will gradually turn back into smaller and smaller groups, not massive nation states.

You only have to look at the way gradually and accelerating in some areas, the peoples who were divided in the distant past by the differences between them, either religious, ethnic or just plain geographical reasons are deciding their own fates more and more, whether that has been through civil war or the democratisation of their political process.  Bringing democracy to places like Afghanistan actually makes that country worse in the short term, because the tribal history of the land has always been very feudal.  They had a way of coping with their differences, it's just that we have insisted on picking a fight with a religion in that region.  Not Muslims not Islam, but the religion of hate that exists in consequence to our actions of hate and misuse of military power, that's what we are fighting, we are creating situations for us to go and resolve.

The majority of people however, do not want war.  There is a struggle going on between those people who still believe in a god and those who pretend they do but actually have very little faith left.  The actual fight these days is between different groups based on a need to get resources from someone else to keep your own unsustainable lifestyle going at least in the short term.  Try to sell that to a population of overweight, unhealthy adults, who would rather kill each other than face the fact that they are no longer a respected power in the world, if they ever were, without using force.  I talk of course of America.  They are hanging on by a thread, and that thread is debt, China owns the States, The Middle East less so, Europe even less.

So when will we resolve this awful timebomb?  Ultimately the people of the world will need to unite.

Not on lines of faith, or creed, but with a shared purpose.  Do we want to evolve not just survive?

Sure we do, most of us do.  Most of us are not extremists, most of us are not radicals.

Most of us are moderate.  Most of us do not want violence to proliferate.

So when will the majority actually rule?
When we stand up and be counted.

What will it take?
Revolution.
Peace.
Love
Jon
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One Vision - Things that go unsaid, things that go undone

One Vision

Of a new earth, the planet fully restored, the ecosystems renewed.

It is my vision of the world, that all will come together with one purpose.

To create the unity, the harmony, the love that we all deserve.

It's hard to go through this life and not get hurt.

Many of us have hurt others.

I see this vision in the not too distant future.

The stress and disorder around us suggests it.

As hard to notice as the changes are at the moment.

They will soon become clear for all to see and no-one will deny.

We live in a world that has altered very little from how it has been for several thousand years.

Slavery still goes on, instead of warlords we have business leaders.

Whose sole purpose is to create profit for their companies.

In a system that does not honour the individual.

It actually demeans them, uses them.

Over time, things will become better than they have ever been.

Currently whether by design or accident this place is getting worse.

This creates a need for a new way of doing things, or a return to the old.

For not always have we worked to create disharmony amongst us.

In the past, although we fought, it was often the case as it is in the animal kingdom, that we were able to resolve most conflicts peacefully or without violence.  When two creatures face up to one another, they will often do whatever they can to avoid fighting.  They will shout at each other from a distance, they will posture and size each other up, only when they are so closely matched that it is unavoidable will they take their altercation to the next level.  We are animals, intelligent yes, capable of great deeds and terrible ones yes, but still an animal.  For me there has been a stand-off between the two groups, which is now leading to an open expression of their true feelings.  I would say that lots of people in this world display behaviour that comes across as either incompetent or evil.  How could anyone look down on members of their own species and decide that their existence is worth less than their own life?  However we have done that, when we see human beings killed in a foreign land and get blaze because they are so far away as we have done in the past.  Now we are realizing how connected we are, now we are seeing that someone on the other side of the world has just as much right to live as we do, no longer can we turn a blind eye to the crimes and misdemeanour's of our fellow human beings.  Lots of days ahead will entail the revealing of truly evil goings on, and we will see a groundswell of revulsion as we have done over the last months in cases I really don't want to bring to mind.  Behind closed doors, often with the support of those in high places or a blind eye being turned by those living in fear for their own lives or those of their loved ones, awful things have happened.  As the days, weeks, months and years go by much more of this kind, many more truths shall be uncovered.  We shall see what this world is really like as I have done, having lived a sheltered life in many ways, with my head in the clouds, protecting myself from the reality of this place, in the past I turned away, I can no longer do that.  I do not know the extent of the darkness, only that we have merely seen the tip of the iceberg.  It will hurt us all, it will open our hearts to the pain of others and we will have a choice.

To feel what they feel or deny it and continue to keep our heads down in the face of so much insanity.

For as we all know, there are those who suffer daily due to the effects this crazy world has had on them.

Unable to protect themselves, they have become damaged almost beyond repair, so many lives ruined.

A process has begun that will sweep this world and wipe it clean, greater attempts will be made to prevent this, but the fear within those who think they can be anything other than they truly are will destroy them.  As for the rest of us, there is an internal dialogue at work.  Within you, there are two instincts.  One to do good, one to do bad.  When you become aware of this you can make a difference, in your life, in the life of those around you and for the entire world as we move forwards in time.  In fact time is immaterial, for there is no future for us if we don't change, and the past is but merely a reflection of our memories, thoughts and feelings.  One day soon, you will face a great turning point, you will see the message clearly and no longer will you be able to ignore it.  For myself I have lived with a great fear inside me, it has held me back my entire life.  It has prevented me from seeing myself as I truly am, or anyone else for that matter.

No longer.

I know that I must make a stand.

I am drawing a line in the sand.

I will never cross it again.

-

Things that go unsaid, things that go undone.

When the Make Poverty History protest was approaching, suddenly the Live 8 concert was announced and hastily organised.  Swiftly all media coverage was of Live 8, how many famous faces, with albums to promote, were performing on the same day.  Many of the promises made by the G8 group were not kept and since then we now have the financial crises causing our own government to look at the aid they give to foreign nations.  They have often given money to governments that kept it for themselves, rulers who got wealthy off the back of donations meant for their people.  So perhaps you could understand why this decision makes sense.  However none of the problems have gotten any better, the talking goes on, action speaks louder than words though, and we are left asking when will the issues ever be resolved?  It's enough to make you wonder if there is actually any desire to do so amongst those that we expect to make our world a better place.

T.V. damaged the minds of the young by altering the attention span.  The prevalence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is merely the result of babies having been stuck in front of the box, their brains now set permanently to have difficulty concentrating on anything for more than a few minutes.  The scientific results and statistics are out there, let me see quite quickly what I can find ;)

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-04-05-tv-bottomstrip_x.htm

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for children younger than 2 and no more than two hours of high-quality programming for older kids. Many children watch much more TV.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12586-childhood-tv-viewing-linked-to-teen-attention-problems.html

The roughly 40% increase in attention problems among "heavy" TV viewers was observed in both boys and girls, and was independent of whether a diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder was made prior to adolescence.

Have you ever heard about this?  Why not?  Surely your health visitor would have mentioned it.

This is a serious issue and yet I don't see anyone doing anything about it, would you want to prevent your child from having problems when they go to school?  In later life?  Why isn't something being done?

Breast cancer rates in the area around the under arm?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/healthmedical/a/antiperspirants.htm

the most recently published study, in which researchers found traces of parabens, a class of preservatives commonly found in cosmetics (including deodorants), in breast tissue samples from mastectomy patients. The study says the evidence does not confirm a link between parabens and breast cancer, but does call for further research to determine whether there is one.

CBS News published a story in Dec. 2005 citing a 2003 study which found a statistical link between the incidence of breast cancer in young women and the use of antiperspirants combined with frequent underarm shaving. "I personally feel there is a very strong correlation between the underarm hygiene habits and breast cancer," said immunologist Dr. Kris McGrath, the author of the study.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500368_162-57357538/are-fears-that-deodorant-causes-breast-cancer-unfounded/

The new study does not prove that personal care products cause breast cancer. But "the fact that parabens were present in so many of the breast tissue samples does justify further investigation," said Philippa Darbre, PhD, of University of Reading in the U.K., in a news release.
"Although the environmental exposure to parabens as a cause of breast cancer is a possibility, there is no conclusive data thus far to state this as fact," says Katherine B. Lee, MD, in an email. She is a breast specialist at the Cleveland Clinic Breast Center in Ohio. "The study suggests that if there is a relationship between parabens and breast cancer, it may be a complex one."

Skin Cancer and Sunglasses

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/8739/Sunglasses-raise-risk-of-cancer

SUN worshippers are being warned that wearing sunglasses could increase the risk of skin cancer.

The glasses reduce the amount of ultra-violet light reaching key areas of the eye, tricking the brain into believing less harmful rays have penetrated the body.

The result, doctors believe, is that the body produces less of a natural substance it needs to defend itself against harmful ultraviolet light.

...Now all of these things just go to show, whether they have been conclusively proved or not, that despite our best efforts, modernising has been one of the worst things we've ever done.  The way that things are moving, the speed of change in the world is dizzying.  Often without thinking, or assuming that if it's being sold to us it is safe, we have just jumped on so many bandwagons.  Fashions keep us taking up new habits, trying to maintain our sadly vain lifestyles, in a world of our own.

I see it every day, so many people out for themselves, no-one indicates on the road, which is a form of communication.  It lets other motorists know what you are doing, and by the same token it makes sure that you know they know, it makes you safer too.  Without this subtle connection between us, we often find ourselves becoming frustrated and angry behind the wheel.  Driving is no longer a pleasurable experience and I really feel for anyone who commutes every day on the motorway or drives for a living.  So much pressure on the people out there to get from A to B and quickly, as time is money.

Time is Money?  I see the postmen now have to rush everywhere and don't have time to chat to their customers, business has taken what used to be a community service publicly funded and run and made it into a growing sector of annoyance.  We get a worse service from almost every sector of our lives.  The dustbins are emptied later in the day so they are in the way on the roads, the recycling lorries too.  Wherever money and the bottom line is involved our lives have become far less free of the frustration we now feel, our lives are being ruined from cradle to grave and it isn't until someone spells it out that we even notice.

I turned 40 last December so I'm not that old, although I'm starting to feel it, and yet even I look back and wonder why it is that I was so much happier before?  It isn't nostalgia because I don't do that.  It's not rose tinted spectacles, although I'm going for an eye test tomorrow and I may be the last of my family to get glasses.  We all used to be happier, so what's to be done?

Get out of this rat race.

Detox, take more time.

Eat well, sleep well.

Stop living fast.

Slow down.

Breath.

Love
Jon
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