Masculine-Feminine Polarity and
the Principles of Sacred Sexuality
DAVID DEIDA is regarded as one of the most insightful and provocative spiritual teachers of our time. Born in 1958 in Cleveland, Ohio, he wrote his first book at 5. He took up sexual yoga by 14 and was committed to a lifelong meditation practice by 16. After excelling as a scientist in academia, his focus shifted to spiritual sexuality, and in 1997 he published the much-discussed best-selling classic The Way of the Superior Man, based on his own practices and findings about masculine-feminine polarity. Other Deida titles, which have been
Masculine-Feminine Polarity and the Principles of Sacred Sexuality
published in over 25 languages, include Dear Lover, Finding God Through Sex, Blue Truth, and Wild Nights, an autobiographical novel about his unconventional spiritual training. These are considered transformative source texts used in men’s and women’s groups around the world.
Though known for his unique and rousing workshops, Deida has been living almost entirely in meditative retreat for the past decade. Common Ground is grateful and proud to publish the first interview David Deida has granted in over 10 years. We caught with him over the phone in advance of an upcoming Bay Area visit.
BY ROB SIDON
Common Ground: I wonder if you recall doing an interview with Common Ground back in 2002?
David Deida: This is the first interview I’ve done in about 10 years. I know Common Ground but haven’t seen a recent issue.
Biographically speaking, could you just say where you were born, what it was like growing up, happy childhood? That stuff? I’m not really into that stuff, to be honest. I’d rather not talk about my past. It’s not a secret, but I’d rather just dive right into the work. I don’t really want to be a character or want people to think about me. That’s why I have been on retreat for the last 10 years. I would rather just offer people the work they could use to help themselves.
Is there any part of your childhood that would have forecast your getting into this kind of relationship work?
I wrote my first few books by age 5. By 8, I had done a lot of past life age regression hypnosis, recorded on audiotapes. At about 14 I began sexual yoga, and by 16 I was fully committed to meditation and yoga. I’ve been cultivating it both with teachers and on my own ever since.
You had a big academic and spiritual background.
All of that I think is a distraction and totally irrelevant. I mean, I have a scientific background. I used to design computers. I worked at the Pasteur Institute. My background is neuroscience. I published papers in mathematics, neuroscience, immunology. I trained very heavily my whole life in both science and spiritual practice, but it would take a while to recount all of that.
The Way of the Superior Man is a classic. Congratulations! Many men have reread it and bought copies for their friends. I know stories of women who, after finishing the book, were literally sobbing and waving it, saying, “This is what I want.” What has been the effect of the book’s success on you?
I have no idea, I live in retreat. I just leave and I teach people and I come back and I don’t pay attention to any of that.
You effectively describe the nature of polarity, particularly sexual polarity. Can you say what that is?
Sure. The basis of my work is the capacity to be present in the moment. The first step is learning to be relaxed and open and coincident with the entire moment without stress, without fear. This takes practice, but in this practice there becomes an obvious split in the moment. Most people describe that split as the observer and the observed. Or the sense of an empty masculine self perceiving full feminine experience. In Vipassana and some forms of meditation invented by men, that is about being the witness, letting thoughts come and go, letting bodily sensations come and go and noticing that who you are is consciousness. Consciousness simply “is” and never changes; that‘s the masculine. Everything that changes—the body, mind, and world—is the feminine.
When you are consciousness, you are aware of all the experience: light, sound, motion, taste, everything. All that moves and appears—that is the feminine. Your thoughts are your feminine; your body is your feminine; everything you see, hear, and taste is feminine. Every human can notice both their masculine witnessing self and their feminine radiant shine. You are beyond masculine and feminine.
You are the entirety of this moment, including both masculine and feminine. This moment divides itself on its own. For the sake of experiencing reunion, it divides itself into masculine and feminine, the Self and its own light appearing as everything. We are walking around essentially dying to reconnect with that part that in every present moment seems to separate itself from the rest of the moment into the masculine and feminine. That’s why bringing masculine and feminine back together through two bodies is so ecstatic. We yearn to realize the unity of conscious light that is this moment. We enjoy reuniting through two bodies, one identified more with consciousness, one identified more with light, to realize the passionate play, in oneness, in the sexual moment.
Now, most men are not conscious enough to simply be consciousness. A stepped-down version of consciousness is a sense of purpose. You cannot know your life purpose unless you can rest as consciousness. One of the steppeddown versions of masculine sexiness is a strong sense of purpose. Men or women who have a strong sense of purpose in life have developed their masculine essence and attract somebody with a strong feminine essence—one of radiance, somebody who wants to be seen as love and the light of the cosmos. Men and women who are effulgently radiant are sexy in the feminine style, and men and women who are identified with their purpose and consciousness are sexy in the masculine style.
You distinguish three stages to describe our human experience and our relationships, for both the masculine and the feminine.
There are an infinite number of stages, but I simplify for speaking and use first, second, and third stages as a lens to talk about this. The first stage operates from fear. For the masculine it’s a wanting to succeed and the fear of losing. In the first-stage feminine, he or she is afraid of not being loved. In the second stage a man often cultivates his feminine in relation to music, nature, and drugs. A second-stage woman cultivates her own masculine sense of purpose, often through a focus on career. A classic second-stage relationship is where the woman has a stronger sense of purpose than the man, and the man has a stronger flow than the woman. That could work if both people are happy with that. By the way, this also applies to same-sex relationships—every kind of relationship. It will work if people are happy with the way their love plays passionately in polarity. But most second-stage people are denying their authentic heart in a more tepid balance.
Most second-stage flow boys, if I can humorously call them that, wish they could find a woman who would trust and surrender to them, but few women would surrender to a flow boy if he is not clear in his purpose. Her purpose is stronger, so she shouldn’t surrender to him. This is very black and white, but women in the second stage have struggled to succeed. When they have succeeded more than their men, they can’t trust them because the men don’t meet them with a deeper sense of consciousness than their own. If a feminineidentified human does not find a masculineidentified human with a deep sense of consciousness, she has to trust herself more than her less-purposed partner.
So, in the first stage you live in fear, not trusting yourself or your partner. In the second stage, you share respectfully with your partner, but trust yourself more than your partner. In the third stage we relax beyond any roles, any identity, and simply live as conscious light. As man or woman, we are free to be pure light or pure consciousness or both, moment by moment, to play that out through our bodies sexually. In the third stage, flow boys realize that their depth of consciousness is their highest masculine value. The second-stage career women eventually realize that although it is essential to be independent and successful, there are steps beyond that involve surrendering and opening their hearts, and trusting another partner more than themselves—at least in certain areas.
The third stage is about finding and cultivating partnerships of depth, trust, and vulnerability. Work in the third stage is about your partner seeing and showing you the parts of you that you cannot see. In the second stage, you might deny and say, “You’re projecting; I am not seeing that,” but at a third stage you realize they can see you better than you can see yourself. Like when you wear glasses, you don’t see the glasses, you just look through them. But everyone else can see the glasses you’re wearing.
Basically, it is the practice of surrender and acceptance that distinguishes the third stage?
The third stage it is about the total surrender and trust of whatever is already living you. All of us are being lived by an infinite force that is living everything. If we can surrender to that force, our lives and our destinies appear. We no longer struggle against our destiny. We no longer struggle against the Tao or the form of our life. We allow the universe to live us. Part of that is allowing our third-stage sexuality, our sexuality beyond roles.
You spoke about the importance of mission and purpose, particularly for a man. That’s a tricky subject because it seems that most people are constantly searching for that.
You are your mission, and if you don’t know it, you are not relaxed in the moment. So you don’t have to find your mission, you need to relax in the moment to discover it. It is being shown to you right now. You are being lived by a force deeper than you. What masculine practice is, is intuitively feeling and identifying with that force so that when you wake up in the morning, you are lived by your mission. If you don’t know what that is, it is because you are thinking. Your mind will never know your mission. You will never feel your mission if you are attending to your thoughts, hoping to see what your mission is in the future.
A classic exercise in The Way of the Superior Man is to set up a place in the living room or a tent in their backyard to just go and sit and not move. At some point you have to pee, so your mission, in that moment, is to stand up and pee. It is very clear. After you pee, if you don’t know what your mission is, you just sit down. Maybe it will be a week or two weeks, maybe it will be a month. At some point, if you stop watching TV, attending to your thoughts, talking to people all day, attending to your mind forms and all the forms of the feminine—which is everything that changes—and if you allow your attention to stop seeking feminine fulfillment momentarily and allow your attention to resolve into its heart source, you will be living your mission, in that moment.
What you do is you allow your body to be animated by that mission, but it is very specific. So if you sit there for a week or two, suddenly you might feel, “Before I die, I have to form a business to sell this product that I am interested in. I just keep thinking about it.” So you get off the cushion and form the business. It might take 10 years, 5 years, 1 year, but you form the business. You sell the thing you feel you have to. When that no longer moves you, that mission dissolves. That sense of purpose dissolves. A man living his mission has some years of highly focused purpose followed by a resolution of his mission, the accomplishment of his mission or the evaporation of his mission, and then he is back to no mission, to no purpose, to being.
There are concentric circles, so the first mission that most men come upon is the most superficial, such as things inherited from their father or what society tells them to do—or how their fear directs them. Most people are looking for mission out of fear, for money, for how to make their parents happy, or their wives—whatever it is to convince themselves they’re worth something. That has nothing to do with your mission. Those are childhood issues that you deal with in therapy.
Once you no longer pay attention to your thoughts, once you realize that 99% of your thoughts are essentially random notions (there are useful thoughts, but not for finding your sense of purpose), then you just allow your attention to rest in this present moment, and it will be empty. When you rest in this present moment, it is wide open. In your masculine, there is nothing happening.
Now, if you allow your body to be okay with that feeling of “I don’t know” for eternity, that is as close to an enlightenment as you can speak in words. Be wide open to the manifestation of existence through your being, living in a state of “beginner’s mind” as people call it, acting with precision. You don’t go, “I don’t know, I will go to Bali.” You go, “I don’t know, I will sit in the perfect yoga asana without disturbance until I know.” You don’t distract yourself with oceans, searching things that are merely delicious. All of those things are why most men don’t know their mission. They are basically chasing the attractive possibilities of mind, of sensuality, of adventure, seeking the feminine as a form of entertainment.
I think people misunderstand what mission is and what purpose is. It is not something you have or don’t have, it is something you are ignoring or not ignoring in the present moment. Finding your purpose is fully sinking into the present moment and letting reality manifest through you as a gift to all.
You describe an example of a man heading off to war and his woman imploring him, “Don’t go.” While she fears he will die in battle and doesn’t want to lose him, she ultimately understands that he has to go and wants him not to fail as a man.
Because the feminine partner (I’ll say “she,” although it might be in a same-sex relationship) feels deep trust in you and feels your clarity of consciousness, what she does—and this is where it gets interesting—is sabotage your purpose. The best feminine partners—really all feminine partners—will continually undermine your capacity to be conscious. They will emotionally undermine it, physically undermine it, possibly lie to you, anything so you give up and say, “Fuck this.” Because if the feminine partner can collapse your consciousness and get you angry, then she should not trust you. Paradoxically, even though a feminine partner essentially wants nothing more than the depth of her masculine partner’s consciousness, she will do everything to prevent that depth from manifesting. She is the greatest ally he can have to realize true love and consciousness.
If she can play with him, insult him, lie to him, test him, sabotage him, try to deflate him, call him a bad practitioner, and he still does not collapse but laughs and stays wide open, then she can really trust and surrender to the true nature of reality. He has demonstrated a relaxed and open depth of being. To a firststage man, her complaints feels like nagging. To a second-stage man, her words feel like growth-oriented feedback, to share in safety. To a third-stage man, her provocations feel more like the last temptation of Christ—a divine, even humorous, loving test. Will you surrender and open to reality, or collapse in fear as your feminine partner playfully tests you? That is why the feminine in most male-gazing spiritual traditions is considered maya, or Eve who gave the apple to Adam. The feminine is blamed for the downfall because her tests are perceived as a threat to the masculine firststage need to avoid loss of self-worth, instead of as a gateway to conscious light.
Let’s say you are that guy sitting in meditation and instead of getting up with a mission to pee, he stands up with a pressing hard-on. Can’t his mission then become “I need to go get laid”?
That would be a first-stage mission. That is most men—the first-stage, untrustable man who wants to relieve stress. If a man wants to ejaculate, he is in the first stage, treating his sexuality as something to be relieved. What a man needs to do, and this opens the whole topic of sexual yoga—I’ve got 10 books that just scratch the surface of that—is take that sexual energy and conduct it, for the rest of his life. You shouldn’t ever involve another human being unless you have another human being that you love and trust and want to develop a practice with.
Most men are raised in adolescence to learn sexuality by getting stimulated with pornography. They learn how a heightened sense of intensity in the nervous system is followed by ejaculative orgasm. They go, “Ahhh” because they have depleted their sexual energy. Then they are relaxed and go to sleep or something. To me that’s just animals spilling their tension. What all beings need to learn to do is realize that same sexual energy is moving the universe, literally.
Can’t that be a third-stage phenomenon?
That is what we are getting to. In the first stage, you want to act on “I need to fuck.” In the second stage, you learn to take care of it on your own. You can say, “I don’t need a partner. I would love a partner, but I can masturbate on my own.” Or you have friends with benefits, or whatever you do in the second stage. In the third stage, the question is, “What is the highest use of my sexuality in this present moment? How can my sexuality most bring the divine into the world?”
For most people sex is so lousy and rarely brings the divine into the world until they have trained their old way out and brought in the new way with the whole body relaxed in the moment. Most people collapse conscious light in their sex. They only know tense, firststage, orgasm-driven sex, through friction, on the surface of the body. You can’t have thirdstage sex if you hold your breath, if you want to want to ejaculate, if you’re looking at nipples and ass. All those things are first-stage animal tension things. They just lead to infinite activity and eventual death; there is no learning in that. Third-stage sex could be in dream bodies, across space and time, as well as having physical sex. Sexual yoga is a whole topic onto itself.
What do you mean when you speak about ravishment?
First, that means that the man has to be in touch with God or with the depth of this moment. We will keep it heterosexual because that is how your questions are oriented, so the first step would be for a man to have done whatever practice in his own life up to that moment before sex so that they were grounded in infinity. Then with every breath there would be the inhale of infinity and then the release in infinity. Their heart would be receptive of love and able to release and give love. When you are a man who is free and can bring that to sexuality with a woman whose heart is yearning to open in love (which of course, every human’s heart is), that is a beginning.
The feminine is identified with love and light as opposed to consciousness, so the center of the feminine’s life is being opened and filled full of love. The impulse of the third-stage masculine is to give her that love she has been yearning for her entire life, usually secretly. In most women’s hearts, they feel like no one has ever met them or fully seen them. She feels like that even if she has been married for 20 years. Most women have never felt they met someone who knows them deeper than they know themselves. Because the third-stage man is vulnerable consciousness, he feels her deeper than she could feel herself. He feels her yearning heart and meets her at a deeper place than she could feel herself, deeper than she expected—that is ravishment.
Ravishment is the capacity for man to “smithereen” a woman, to obliterate her resistance and flow wide open to love, beyond her control, beyond her alone capacity. Ravishment is where she is taken open to the thing that she has intuited as her divine nature—infinite love. To be taken open by a man who is consciousness as a practice, a man who is not trying to fuck her, who is not trying to put his dick in her to have an orgasm, who is not trying to get her to be quiet or to calm her emotions. He is completely accepting her the way she is. And then loving her so deeply she has no choice but to burst open with his full presence. Ravishment is when she has no choice. She has received your depth of consciousness so consistently, through your body, through your breath, your eyes. There are techniques for all of this: for her to receive that depth of consciousness so fully she can’t help but surrender, that even if she wants to resist, she can’t. She feels loved, by consciousness. So ravishment is about opening a woman beyond her own fear into the love that is her true nature, deeper than she could take herself.
Before this conversation I assumed sexual polarity started with a boner.
Yeah. [Laughs] Boners have nothing to do with it. At all.
I imagined the whole Shiva Lingam [abstract phallus representation, aniconic of Hindu deity] thing had to be going on, to initiate sacred sexuality.
Well, you have to be Shiva, but you are Shiva. You have to be consciousness, in the moment, which we already are. We couldn’t have this conversation unless you were conscious, right? You are not unconscious; you’re conscious right now. Most men forget that and identify usually with their mind, so they reduce their third-stage Shiva Lingam, if you will, to their mind, which is a really tiny thing that any woman could crush.
I too want increased masculine polar ity and third-stage sexuality as you de scribe it, but how?
That is easy to do. I could have you do it in 30 seconds, but to sustain it you need to have practiced enough to not be distracted by your mind. Let’s use a heterosexual example, since that’s how you seem to be asking the question, and let’s say you’re sitting in a restaurant, so not even sexual per se. You’re looking into each other’s eyes, sitting close across the table, intimate. Now relax the front of your body. First you’ll notice that the front of your body’s not relaxed. Your temples are crunched, your head is crunched, your throat is crunched, your tongue is crunched, your genitals are crunched. Your belly is crunched. Different people have different patterns, but you are crunched in some pattern you learned in your childhood. You are defending yourself, as your mother/father stuff is all stored there. To get in this pattern of what you are referring to as third-stage sex, do whatever you have to as an individual to open all that up. Maybe it is yoga, maybe it is massage, diet, exercise—every individual is different, so that whole front of your body, the surface of your body, is relaxed in the restaurant.
Now imagine an inner line from the middle of your brain almost down through the back of your throat, through your heart, down through the center of your body. If you are a woman, we could say that line goes through your cervix. As a man it would be through your balls, perineum, straight to the center—actually feel it. Your skin opens up. Now this might take somebody five years to achieve or 30 seconds. It depends on the tension accumulated, by how abused they were as a child, by what kind of work they have already done and how willing they are to relax from defending a sense of self.
With your skin and your body and your mind so wide open, your full attention will be with her, and she will notice, like, “Wow, what the hell is this?” She feels your presence, the most attractive part of a man. Every man ages, loses money, but their presence is their consciousness. When a woman says a man has great presence, it’s because she feels this in his relaxation and free attention, and it draws her attention to him. Again, I am using the word woman, but it could be another man, it could be between two women, but I am speaking about the feminine principle which magnetically draws her energy and her body toward him. She will lean toward him, and her breath will shift, and he’ll feel that. Her radiance, which is natural and spontaneous, lights up in her eyes. Her inner light glows, not just figuratively. Anyone at the table would see this happening. The feminine pays attention spontaneously through motion and energy, through E-motion. She’s laughing or sometimes will start crying when a man is that present because she’s never been penetrated deeply by a man’s willingness to feel, to love. As your heart stays open and relaxed, she responds with in creased radiance. If something comes up, because something always comes up in life—let’s say the waiter approaches—now your measure as a conscious practitioner will be measured by how you deal with these events that come up. How much of life can you deal with and then reconnect to full presence with her with the minimal accretions? So you say, “Excuse me,” and you avert your eyes and deal with the situation, then come back to, “Oh, where were we?” In this example, by continually keeping a thread between your heart and hers, by worshiping and attending to her light, you naturally worship and attend her radiance, and it becomes a mutual adoration. She has never felt a man this present, and you are feeling she’s the most beautiful woman you have ever seen right now. You’re feeling, “I will do anything for her,” and she is feeling, “I would give myself to him.” You are just wide open, and she is doing a similar practice on the more feminine-bodied side. That is one description of a third-stage sexual moment, in a restaurant.
How to sustain that flow for more than dinner, an evening, a year, over life’s hurdles with kids in diapers and money issues?
How does one sustain presence moment by moment? It is difficult. Most people cannot sustain conscious presence for more than a few seconds. You just come back to practice. Things come up in life. Will you get distracted or come back to feeling the nature of existence, the source of love, your free attention, the relaxed front of the body, the relaxed inside of the body, from your balls, heart, belly, throat, the whole thing? You can only sustain a relationship as long as you are free to do so. Once you are involved in these tensions, there is no relationship anymore; there are just two bodies of tension conflicting.
How do you cultivate that? Some people do meditation. I have spent decades and decades of hours a day of practice and by supporting myself and working in the world. I chose not to have children, so far, because of exactly what you are talking about, but I know a lot of great practitioners with active lives who have children. They have learned to come back to their hearts, their source, and to their depth in the midst of all that.
I’ve seen depolarization set in with couples, and it can seem irreparably cantankerous. I wonder when it’s best to just throw in the towel?
Look at your life. It all ends at some point. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is one way that the poet [Dylan Thomas] said it, meaning everything diminishes. Your body diminishes, your mind. When you are young it doesn’t seem that way, but you just have to live long enough to realize that everything is diminishing, including relations. Some last 50 years, but everything diminishes. The Beatles lasted seven years, but then it self-destructed. Should it have lasted longer? I don’t know. Sometimes things are meteoric. Maybe they should end. But if you have thrown in the towel, you have stopped.
Throwing in the towel is your giving up. That’s your weakness—something to develop. The nature of human growth is that you would develop yourself to throw in the towel less and less. It is better to keep giving and die giving rather than shrink back. The generalized reasons people throw in the towel is they have acted not from essence but created a relationship that drifted from core purpose. Everybody shrinks back, but that is their fear. That is their limit, the cliff, the limits of their art. The feeling of “this is killing me,” of wanting a different moment, or feeling that being with a different partner will be more satisfactory than this moment is an illusion, an absolute error in thought. Throwing in the towel has all kinds of tensions and collapses and feelings of failure instead of feelings of fullness.
However, if you can relax in the present moment in a relationship with your partner and you look into each other’s eyes and lovingly realize that it is over, that is different. You might be crying. There may be children to deal with. It might be serious business emotionally and physically, but your heart is present in the moment. You’re soft in front of the body, soft inside of the body, through and through with total presence. With no pulling away and wide open breath you’re saying, “I love you. We just can’t stay together.” She says, “I know. It is over.” That is not throwing in the towel; that is recognizing it is over.
I am enjoying riding with you in this conversation, dropping in at a deeper level.
[Laughter] Part of why I have not done an interview in a long time is that I actually wrote Way of the Superior Man almost 25 years ago. For me, when I write a book, I write about my practice 10 years prior. I noticed it takes approximately 10 years to digest my experience enough to have a perspective to be able to teach it. The contents of Superior Man was what I was working with when I was a young man, but of course I have grown beyond that. Back then I would wake up in the morning and feel, “What do I need to do today so I can die complete, tonight?” I would wake up and feel, “What do I literally need to do today? What at eight in the morning? At 9 o’clock? Do I need to write a chapter? Do I need to work with people?” It worked to get me to the point where all that dissolved. Now I wake and none of that exists. I can’t find the part of me I used to base my life on. There is nothing. I don’t need anything to die complete. There are many mornings when I just open my eyes, and two or three hours go by. Then I will sit for two or three hours, not because I am practicing anything formal, but because there is nothing else to do. I just am being.
In the old days, people approached me more as a therapist, but that is not really what I am interested in. What I’m doing now is the next step; it just turns out there’s hardly anyone ready for it, so I decided to stop. I have been teaching three weeks a year for the last 10 years and have been on retreat in total silence for pretty much 10 months a year because very few people are interested in anything other than first-stage success and finding a relationship that works. It takes me a while to reconnect with that level of self-concern. You are either at one with this moment to some degree, or you are struggling against it. That you don’t like the “is-ness” of the moment, that it is just not good enough, that “I need to get laid” or “I need more money” to relax as this open moment—that is a total illusion. The reason I haven’t taught much in the last decade or done interviews is because that’s not my particular practice anymore. I like to be practicing what I teach, not what I practiced 40, 30 years ago.
What are you doing now?
I’m doing a lot of new things. I don’t really want to talk about most of them, but I am working with masters in different domains, weaving together the sexual processes at the level of art with martial arts, music, ceremonies, tea, for example. Not to fix anything but for the impulse of art, to create love, beauty, being, depth.
This is an awkward question, but how else to say it: Are you enlightened?
Yeah, I know what you are saying. I don’t know what that means anymore. If I modeled what I feel now based on what I used to think, I would say, “Yeah.” The image I had in my head of what I would feel, like openness, no fear, total ease—that you could just be there for days or minutes without thinking or moving—that all came true. That’s just the nature of existence.
However, the actual subjective experience is the same as ever—and it is true for everybody. I’m putting words on things that are fairly wordless. I’ll take poetic license, but I work with a lot of people who have practiced a long time, so-called enlightened masters. Basically, what I see is that when your personal fear dissolves, your personal need for a future dissolves. But you still feel everyone else’s. You still feel pain. It’s not your pain, but you don’t tell the difference. The world is a miracle; it’s perfect as it is, and it is also just fucked. So there is an impulse to serve. In that state you are not aware of anything called enlightenment; you are simply being alive and something is living through you.
So it is impossible to even think the way you have described, though believe me, I understand the question. But I don’t even know what that means anymore. To me there is an open-ended exploration of existence in general. That open-ended exploration of being, of existence, leads toward greater openness and a kind of infinity, an infinite or unconfined sense of self. And sometimes you go backward! But eventually, even if you are identified with the ego, even if you are hateful—that is also God. The universe can hate. The universe can fight. The universe can kill, and does kill, a lot. Yet in that open place, there is just no capacity or interest in saying, “Oh, I am in such and such a state.” That act itself feels like grabbing your dick and pumping it—self stimulation. Instead, you begin to identify more with the kind of cosmic will. You begin to feel like your body/mind is being used. Words fail, or maybe “used by God” or “used by the cosmos, by infinity.” “Used by love” to love.
It sounds like you’re coming from a higher place of service now.
Choicelessly, yeah.
We will see you soon in San Francisco, right?
Yes.
