But that remains vague when I need it to start evolving into greater specificity, sharper edges, clearer resolution. Enough with the mystical poetic terms, how ’bout something hard-nosed and practical to anchor it to?

I was actually inspired by something a bit random. I was doing a little reading about the magical practice of evocation. Invocation and evocation are both means of contacting spirits, but the difference is that invocation means to draw a spirit or force into one’s own being, whereas evocation involves attracting that spirit or force to a separate location, having no connection to yourself, in order to interact with it.

The reason this interests me right now is that this sounds a lot like an analogy for what I’m going through. Essentially, I’m practicing invocation, I’m invoking Divine consciousness or the quality of Beauty by drawing it into my being and allowing it to contact and nourish me deeply. All well and good, but, one, the world doesn’t always work that way, and two, even if I’m in bliss, I’m still in bliss by myself and that gets lonely. I’d like to share the experience. Which means interacting with external beings. Which has a direct, if imperfect, analogy in evocation.

Well, in a Hermetic forum someone asked why do any evocation, what’s the reason for it. And part of the discussion centered on how many people approach evocation:

The average evocationist will likely try to force an entity or cajole an entity into serving their needs. It is possible to get some results by these means but it always! comes at a cost to the evocationist, because they are demanding something which they have not truly merited. It is not something freely given by the entity, thus an indebtedness results.

What is this if not simply the Golden Rule, which plays out in mundane as well as esoteric relationships?

So this got me to realizing that a lot of the way I relate to the beings of the world — human and otherwise — is similar in attitude: If I’m not trying to seek power or force a result, I’m in the opposite role, being a victim of power plays. And that’s actually the way a lot of ordinary conversations are, they’re power games people play on each other, trying to look better or cooler or one-up or just get attention. So if one asks why evoke beings, one could easily ask the question, why relate to people?

The answer is the same.

With [a mature, balanced form of] evocation, the point is entirely different. However, this does not mean that the [mature] evocationist would not have hoards of entities eager to help. In fact, it’s quite the contrary. The evocationist creates positive relationships (friendships) with the entities they evoke. The result of this simple fact is that these friends give their aid with love (THE most powerful force). The evocationist has absolutely no need for coercion and therefore, no lack of friends in an hour of need.

At the root of all this is the fact that consciousness doesn’t expand ItSelf through conquest. It expands through love, through empathy with ‘other’, through becoming-at-one-with ‘other’. ‘Other’ then becomes a part of Self and Self has expanded ItSelf. The evocationist who hopes to conquer, has no chance of achieving this expansion of Self. Ultimately this sort of evocation is a dead end.

So there’s an answer. Why relate to other, external beings, rather than just dissolve myself in self-invoked bliss? Because there is just as much to learn in expanding outward to meet some Other as there is in drawing in to harmonize the Self. And since it’s to the highest principle of spiritual growth that I submit my life, participation in the world in a way that’s consistent with this principle is another important process along this path that I must acquaint myself with well.

But if I do it, I’ve decided that I’m not going to train for it in a conventional way. Instead I’ll follow a qigong way of training. I’ve been inspired by these stories.

I just ran my first semi-competitive event since I stopped jogging/running for a year. I had stopped because of a serious sinus problem that practically paralysed me. Basically, each time I got a cold, I would get severe complications in the sinuses. The last time, it took me out of commission totally. This was when I really began to look at qigong in earnest.

To get back to the topic, I have confirmed the link between qigong and stamina. Though I had not even jogged for a year, I finished the run at a faster pace than I would have run a year ago without even breathing hard. That is quite amazing to me, considering I used to require 2 months to get into form.

Over the Thanksgiving Holiday, I went to Indianapolis, Indiana and spontaneously took place in a 4.5 mile race for charity. I was not aware until that morning that I was going to run, and when I was asked to I simply said, “Why not.”

With over 2500 people in attendance I took 230th place and ran the 4.5miles in a little over 30 minutes.

I thought it a bit funny because I was running in dress shoes and baggy sweatpants, I had not prepared at all for this race, and certainly haven’t run 4.5 continuous miles ever before in my life. Except for perhaps in soccer or lacrosse matches.

I was goofing around at the begininng, just playing and such, I jumped over a car hood, and the 1 mile marker sign (around a meter high). I was laughing and playing, enjoying my morning and my state of mind. Definitely freaking out all the super serious runners, and I enjoyed it!

I deduced that if I was going to do such a spontaneous run, I might as well enjoy it! And I did.

This is just one small example of the benefits of our training. Just drop into a chi kung state of mind and enjoy, just our fundamental training is enough to give us the endurance and relaxation necessary to perform such physical performance and well beyond.

I have a work colleague who is very externally fit. He trains at the gym three times a week, goes running and eats well. He is interested in what I practice and often asks good questions.

One day recently, we discussed how I can achieve the same results (stamina, speed, agility) from the Shaolin Arts. The conversation continued as we walked home. As we reached a long set of very steep steps, he asked if I fancied a race to the top.

We ran to the top full speed, and he beat me by about 10 inches. However, once we reached the summit I continued to stroll and chat, while he sat down on the pavement, panting and wheezing! My breath was silent, slow and still!

We were both shocked, surprised and pleased.

Here is what I did -
1. Tried to stay relaxed, upright and open.
2. Gently aware of my Dantian.
3. Did not try to control my breath. Forgot my breath.

It definitely worked!

The Shaolin arts are indeed marvelous beyond imagination. The past few days living in a busy city environment I still find that even if I spend a whole day walking and sight seeing I am generally energized. It is indeed a blessing to have a practice such as Lifting the Sky and One Finger shooting Zen, both of which are fairly short but can keep you going the whole day sometimes.

… I find that stance training is especially good for developing stamina, and I am less affected by long walks and hikes than in the past. I think I’m starting to smile from the heart more. Events are turning to a point where I’m getting a better sense of who I am and my own way of doing things along with what direction I want to take in the future.

Links here, here, here, and here.

When I first started school, my health had been going downhill since I did my year in the woods. I slept long hours without feeling rested, I was tired during the day. I had to eat constantly to keep from getting a headache. At the end of every week of school I was pretty exhausted, and took the whole weekend to recover. On a scale of 1 to 10, my fatigue was generally at about a 7.

Today I have had only one free weekend in the past month. I’ve been going nearly seven days a week starting at the end of September when I took and passed a board exam. In addition to classes and clinic during the week, I’ve gone to seminar after seminar and have also traveled to visit a friend, and am still trying to study for my next board exam. I’ve slept an average of five and a half hours for the past four days.

Fatigue? It’s at a 3 out of 10.

I’m miles better than where I was three years ago. Still not quite where I would like to be, but instead of lying half-dead in the gully, I’m clinging to the side of the cliff climbing a rope solidly attached to the top.

Internally, my goal is to continue to build my energy, to the point where I can maybe start to have a little more latitude in what I eat, without having to be quite so strict in my diet. That’s going to be a long haul, but I’m pleased by how I’ve progressed.

Externally, I can now actually begin to think about my next goal, which is to be able to stand for an hour and walk a mile without any discomfort, without even thinking anything of it. It’s really encouraging. A few years ago I could barely stand, let alone consider stepping foot outside the house except to go to the car. Now I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I’ve had a lot of help and a lot of tools made available to me, and of course I’ve worked a lot in myself to reach this point. I’m proud, and hope that in my healing practice I can pass on the good fortune and experience.

I’m tired of always worrying about whether there’s sugar in what I eat. I’m tired of always dismissing the idea of a walk or a bike ride or a hike in the mountains because I know I wouldn’t last a few miles. I regert that my friends went on a hike last year and I didn’t go partly because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I want to at least consider the possibility of doing things like I used to do, like go to India and hike in a Himalayan valley, or things that my friends do, like go work in Antarctica. I’m ready to change, I’m ready to start keeping up, and more importantly, I finally have the energy to spare and the tools to grow in that direction.

Upon rereading and considering what’s taught in that school of qigong, I realize that it’s best not to take things too far out of context. Even they advocate some strengthening exercises, such as squats, although they put strong emphasis on performing those exercises as qigong.

The reason this is coming up is that I’m still having trouble standing and walking for long periods of time, even after a few years of qigong that focuses on healthy flow of qi, and even after building up my overall physical energy, and even after a few years of Alexander Technique lessons that assists in freeing blockages.

Recently I got my hands on Let Every Breath …, by Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the main teachers of the increasingly popular Russian martial art of Systema. It’s a book about correct breathing, which is fundamental to their martial art. It comes at it from a somewhat different angle than other things I’ve read and learned, but isn’t completely inconsistent with those things. What I like about it is that, like the qigong I’ve learned, it teaches to focus on breath and relaxation as priorities in the midst of physical exertion. But one thing that’s different is that it teaches to actively train these things while in the middle of extreme physical exertion, and gives the simple, well-known strength-training exercises of pushups, squats, and situps to do, essentially, as qigong.

In confluence with this, in doing some other research on developing my ability to stand, I’ve realized that despite all of what I’ve been doing to improve my health, in pure muscular terms, the part of my body between my diaphragm and pelvis is just weak. It’s what Western exercise experts call the core, and simple training methods such as pushups, squats, and situps train it directly.

My goal is to stop hurting when I stand or walk. I think this could be a good place to start, a good intersection between the metaphysical world of qi and the nose-to-the-grindstone reality of the hard-physical world.

The deeper level of meaning in the statement, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, is revealed through consideration of Paul Case’s Trestleboard statement for #6 (Tiphareth, which means ‘Beauty’ in Hebrew): “In all things, great and small, I see the Beauty of the divine expression.”

Here, Beauty is described as a divine expression. This is the essential meaning which each thing expresses through its form (its thing-ness). When directly perceived through a form, essential meaning has the same affect upon the perceiver as does the mundane perception of Beauty. The direct perception of essential meaning touches you at every level — it uplifts your thoughts and emotions and stimulates the response of appreciation, happiness, etc. Even though it requires emotional detachment, the direct perception of essential meaning is not mere passive observation — it is an experience and you become at one with that quanta of essential meaning.

Yet it is up to the perceiver to directly perceive essential meaning and in that sense, the power to perceive the Beauty that is expressed through all things, lies “in the eye of the beholder.”

When we perceive something (and this doesn’t have to be a concrete, physical thing — it can also be an idea, an emotion, sensation, etc.) which we feel at an emotional level is Beautiful, we feel that way because the essential meaning that the form expresses, comes in a form through which we personally can more readily perceive it. The reason is because the personal filters of perception that we see things through at the mundane level, are in greater harmony with *that particular form and we can therefore harmonize with the essential meaning that form expresses. To our eyes, the form harmonizes with its essential meaning and we can therefore perceive that essential meaning more clearly. [Sorry if that's unclear -- it's hard for me to put in words at the moment.]

Ordinarily, we do not see the Beauty of the divine expression (i.e., its essential meaning) in all things, great and small. But when we do directly perceive essential meaning in all things, we discover that the forms of all things harmonize with their essential meaning. In other words, Beauty is, quite literally, all around us and all within us. All we need do is see it.

… At the mundane level, when we perceive something that we feel is Beautiful, it means that we are perceiving more of its essential meaning (its divine expression) than we would perceive in a thing we feel to be ugly. Essential meaning nourishes us (this is the Divine Water principle of All-Love) and one way in which we receive that nourishment is through mental, astral and emotional perception. In most of our perceptions, the essential meaning is minimized by our personal filters of perception, but when we perceive Beauty, we perceive a greater quantity of this nourishing essential meaning or divine expression. We are affected by this perception to a greater degree than we are by the perception of an “ugly” thing. Thus the mundane perception of Beauty is especially nourishing.

When we intentionally imbibe essential meaning from the cup of Beauty, this effect is magnified still further because it is an intentional and conscious action. We focus upon it and upon the feelings its perception generates within us and therefore extend its effect upon us and increase our nourishment. And … we can consciously inhale that Beautiful essential meaning. This is what I mean by “breathing it in”.

All perception of essential meaning nourishes us mentally, astrally and physically. Which is to say that all perception nourishes us — each use of our mental, astral and physical senses nourishes us. By ‘well nourished’, I mean that we are in harmony with life and with self. In other words, we more clearly express our own essential meaning. The question then becomes one of how well nourished are we?

If all we do is perceive unintentionally and without focus then we have an essential meaning diet equivalent to eating at McDonald’s for every meal. If we surround ourselves in Beauty and perceive it all the time then we are reasonably well nourished. If we add to that the factor of intentional and prolonged inhalation of the Beauty we perceive, then we are very well nourished indeed!

We can quantify it thus:

1. Mundane, un-intentional perception. Barely sustains body, soul and spirit.
2. Mundane, un-intentional perception of Beauty. Briefly stimulates body, soul and spirit.
3. Mundane, intentional perception of Beauty. Briefly nourishes body, soul and spirit and has a temporary harmonizing effect.
4. Intentional inhalation of Beauty. Nourishes body, soul and spirit and has a prolonged harmonizing effect.
5. Direct perception of essential meaning through external things. Deeply nourishes body, soul and spirit and briefly transforms them.
6. Direct perception of one’s own essential meaning (and that of all things, great and small). Permanently transforms body, soul and spirit.

The challenge is to take this beyond the superficial “see the beauty in everything” type of mentality that merely covers up seeming ugliness by distracting one’s focus — which is, perhaps, as far as my supposed sensitivity often goes — and instead to look deeply into the whole reality and Mystery of a thing, a person, an event, a gestalt, and perceive the harmony within it. At this stage, the intent is not even to help others, purely to nourish myself, to foster the inverse of my constant perception of dishonesty. Because, God knows, I need that nourishment so much.

In the absence of a vocabulary and language to discuss an issue, all I have is this vague feeling of being too sensitive for a big scary world. That has in many ways been the central theme of this blog.

I think I’ve found an author that begins to teach me that kind of vocabulary — the one I’ve been quoting so much recently, Walter Wink. It’s funny, too, because he comes from a decidedly Christian point of view.

I did try other routes from worldviews that I would have expected more to say about the phenomenologically mystical. A few months ago I had tried picking up occultist Dion Fortune’s book Psychic Self-Defense, feeling intuitively that that was a route my thinking needed to go to define the problem. But it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Ironically, the book’s focus on the actual existence of negative spirits and psychic attacks distracts from some of the deeper dynamics that underlie the interaction of all beings, natural or “supernatural.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start by providing an anecdote from Wink’s book, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence. I feel that this illustrates the elusive and subliminal yet powerful effect that usually-unnoticed things have on us.

Once I was leading Bible study in an exquisite mansion that had been turned into a retreat house. We were sitting in a circle on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar oriental rug, studying the “Rich Young Man.” I began to notice an odd phenomenon. People simply could not believe that Jesus would say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. They seemed puzzled, confused, irritated. Gradually I began to realize that it was the rug. The rug was saying, at a subliminal level so that no one was directly aware of it, “Not true.”

To me this describes well my experience that everything speaks.

Here’s Hermetic practitioner Rawn Clark from another perspective, discussing “essential meaning.”

EVERY *form* is a manifest expression of an essential meaning. In other words, *form* communicates something of significance to our perceptual faculties. We are always perceiving essential meaning every time we perceive a form of any kind, be it mental, astral or physical. Ordinarily, this perception is an unconscious experience and consequently, we are seldom aware of the fact that we are perceiving this essential meaning. Yet it informs our every perception in significant ways.

As an experiment to demonstrate my point, I set out several small plastic figures in front of my [visitors]. These were toy caricatures of different dinosaurs, a Godzilla, King Kong, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and so on. Each one of them expressed a unique and easily identifiable “personality”. For example, the little King Kong figure expressed a very gregarious personality, while the Hunchback expressed a hurt innocence.

Each one of these figures communicated something about itself *through* the details of its particular *form*. This ’something’ is its essential meaning. The *voice*, so to speak, of that essential meaning is the form’s personality — i.e., its *emotional tone*.

The personality of each one of these figures is VERY easy to perceive, and because it “speaks” so loudly, it’s also fairly simple to *directly* perceive the underlying essential meaning that their personality communicates.

Having opened their awareness of this level of their own perceptual faculties, I asked my [visitors] to examine the forms of the other objects in the room and try to perceive *their* personalities and underlying essential meanings. Most of the other things in my living room (where we were seated at the time) don’t “speak” themselves as loudly as the plastic figures do, until you get into the groove of this level of perception. But once you do get the grasp of it, EVERY form is expressive of an inner, essential meaning.

Now. What I am beginning to understand, though, is that there’s a difference between the way things speak in Nature, and the way things speak in civilization. Or, rather, there’s a difference in the way we perceive what speaks when we’re out in Nature versus here in civilization.

The difference is this: In civilization, everything lies.

Okay, that’s a bit melodramatic. The truth is that I find that I lie to myself, on a subconscious level, when I open to listen to the things that speak.

What do I mean? Well, when I look down at my desk, I perceive the superficial form of a desk. But underlying that desk is a lot of other stuff. Wood from a hundred places. Whatever chemical or mechanical process it took to form the compressed wood, and the workmanship it took to form it into boards and to paste a natural wood finish on the outside. So much human intervention and intent, and so many voices from a hundred different places. The voices all speak so differently, creating a cacophony. And each voice is the tantalizing end of a thread that leads elsewhere — to where, I don’t know. Was sweatshop labor involved? Were sustainable practices used in harvesting the wood? What chemical toxins were or are present? Who has suffered to bring me this desk?

In order to survive this barrage, I have to shut the door completely and say: It’s just a fucking desk.

In some ways it’s not that different out in Nature, as far as that barrage of information and multiple threads goes. But a tree is a tree; it’s not the nailed-together ground-up body parts of a thousand different trees. It is itself and has a unified spirit. Yes, there are a thousand different exchanges with the environment, with the soil and the ants and the wind and the sun — but all of that is right there, present and observable and part of a cohesive system that exists in the here-and-now.

It’s honest.

I could go through my entire house and talk about every object this way. I’m not trying to be depressing, or trying to focus on the negative; but rather I’m exploring the experience I’m already having: that everything speaks and I don’t know how to interact with it. And now I’m beginning to understand that one reason that I don’t know is that I already, subconsciously, deny its voice, out of self-preservation. To avoid looking at the ugliness that underlies pleasant exteriors.

And that’s just dealing with inanimate objects.

Here’s another anecdote from Wink’s book, regarding people.

A prosperous church once asked a colleague of mine to lead its governing body in a five-evening exploration of ways to respond to its neighborhood, which was now populated by gays, blacks, Hispanics, and the elderly. For the second session she invited me to do Bible study with them focusing on the nature of their discipleship in that neighborhood. For the first hour I simply floundered. Everyone was perfectly nice. I encountered no overt resistance. Yet each question I asked seemed to be sucked down into a black hole. At the break I whispered to my colleague, “What’s going on? Nothing is happening. Nothing!”

“It’s demons,” she replied, half in jest.

“You’re right,” I answered, shocked at our speaking this way. “But what are they?”

After several weeks of investigation she discovered that the head minister had been there over twenty years and had a physical ailment that would become aggravated under stress. So over that period he had selected a governing board that “knew,” without it ever having been said explicitly, that their job was to keep their minister from being upset. Into that situation we had unwarily come, with the ostensibly task of helping the church launch out into controversial and risky new ministries to a community of gays, blacks, Hispanics, and elderly. That task, which had been set by a new head of their session, was totally at odds with the session’s unspoken job description, and at some deep level they all knew it and responded with passive resistance. They were doing exactly what they were “supposed” to do.

This is quite in line with the idea of the egregore, which is

an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a legal entity) and the meme.

Every relationship is an egregore. My wife and I form an egregore. My family is an egregore. My classmates and I are an egregore. The school I belong to is an egregore, with my class being a sub-egregore. These are, in essence, what Wink is referring to as “angels” or “demons.”

Where egregores get dangerous are when they go unrecognized — when dissociated or disowned parts of the self get shoved out and buried. The egregore will express and manifest it, even if the individuals involved try not to.

The important thing being that not only are there many conscious things going on in the way an individual, or a group, presents itself and interacts, but there are many subconscious and unconscious dynamics that underlie so much of human interaction, many of which are at odds with the conscious and external presentation, whether deliberately or not.

It arrives at the same place: dishonesty. People are dishonest. And I can tell, all the time — I’m just sensitive enough to know that people lie, even to themselves, about a great many things. Of course, there would be chaos if everyone spoke the truth all the time; because of the way societies have set things up, certain things are permissible to express and certain other things are not. Regardless of the particulars that vary with each culture and subculture, the fact that there is so often a divide between what is felt and what is expressed means, in essence, constant lying.

Thus, just as with inanimate objects, I see that everyone speaks and I don’t know how to interact with them, because everyone lies about what they’re actually thinking, feeling, and saying. So, out of self-preservation, I deny their voices, except the one I’m supposed to hear. I do this to avoid looking at the ugliness that underlies pleasant exteriors — ugliness (the dark, the dissociated, the inauthentic) that I usually can do little about anyway.

In so many ways, then, I find myself being lied to and lying to myself. So much so that I cocoon myself behind a wall of relatively rigid boundaries of self, maintaining a certain degree of integrity within my own walls. But what this means is that when I do encounter honesty in perception, I have lost the ability to know what to do with it. To be more precise, I don’t know what to do with pockets of honesty that temporarily arise within a sea of dishonest interactions.

It’s like those guys in prison who eventually tell their wives to stop visiting and writing letters, to forget about them and leave them alone. It’s easier not to be reminded of what you’ve lost.

I’ve got to figure out a way to move among the ordinary, mundane world of human dishonesty and the gloriously authentic world of Nature and the Great Mystery more easily.

In order to do this from where I am, though, I have to start thinking about all of that information, its honesty and dishonesty, in more specific ways.

And so we end where we began. Reading and thinking about these matters means slowly, painfully, developing a vocabulary for them. Hopefully before long I will have a more refined way to speak of these things.

On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note.

The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

Trapp lived alone in a drab efficiency apartment. On one wall he kept a giant Nazi flag and a double-life-sized picture of Hitler. Next to these hung his white Ku Klux Klan robe, with its red belt and hood. He kept assault rifles, pistols and shotguns within instant reach for the moment when one of his enemies might come crashing through his door to kill him. In the rear was a secret bunker he’d built for the coming “race wars.”

When Trapp launched a white supremacist TV series on a local public access channel — featuring men and women saluting a burning swastika and firing automatic weapons — Michael Weisser was incensed. He called Trapp’s KKK hotline and left a message on the answering machine. “Larry,” he said, “do you know that the very first laws that Hitler’s Nazi’s passed were against people like yourself who had no legs or who had physical deformities or physical handicaps? Do you realize you would have been among the first to die under Hitler? Why do you love the Nazis so much?” Then he hung up.

Weisser continued the calls to the machine. Then one day Trapp picked up. “What the f— do you want?!” he shouted. “I just want to talk to you,” said Weisser. “You black?” Trapp demanded. “Jewish,” Weisser replied. “Stop harassing me,” said Trapp, who demanded to know why he was calling. Weisser remembered a suggestion of his wife’s. “Well, I was thinking you might need a hand with something, and I wondered if I could help,” Weisser ventured. “I know you’re in a wheelchair and I thought maybe I could take you to the grocery store or something.”

Trapp was too stunned to speak. Then he cleared his throat. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s nice of you, but I’ve got that covered. Thanks anyway. But don’t call this number anymore.” “I’ll be in touch,” Weisser replied. During a later call, Trapp admitted he was “rethinking a few things.” But then he went back on the radio spewing the same old hatreds. Furious, Weisser picked up the phone. “It’s clear you’re not rethinking anything at all!” After calling Trapp a “liar” and “hypocrite,” Weisser demanded an explanation.

In a surprisingly tremulous voice, Trapp said, “I’m sorry I did that. I’ve been talking like that all my life … I can’t help it … I’ll apologize!” That evening the cantor led his congregation in prayers for the grand dragon.

The next evening, the phone rang at the Weissers’ home. “I want to get out,” Trapp said, “but I don’t know how.” The Weissers offered to go over to Trapp’s that night to “break bread.” Trapp hesitated, then agreed, telling them he lived in apartment number three. When the Weissers entered Trapp’s apartment, he burst into tears and tugged off his swastika rings. Soon all three were crying, then laughing, then hugging.

Trapp resigned from all his racist organizations and wrote apologies to many people he had threatened or abused.

This incredible tale is actually true. Time did an interview with Weisser and Trapp in 1992:

Weisser: I think Larry Trapp has always been a good man, yet he’s had a life that’s been messed up. Until I spoke to Larry Trapp, I’d only had a couple of other experiences with people who are involved in the organizations that Larry was involved with. I never wanted to talk to them; I was afraid of them. The experience of having met and talked with and learning to love Larry Trapp has been eye-opening for me. Larry has helped me realize something about my religion that I’ve taught a lot of people: I am obligated to try to love Larry Trapp — to hate what he stood for, but to love Larry Trapp.

Trapp: I think I was meant to be a Klansman, meant to be a Nazi, meant to do the various things I’ve done so I could learn that they weren’t right, so that maybe, out of my experience, I can help other people change their way of thinking. I think the whole thing was planned out. I really do.

A final note, from this article in Being Jewish magazine.

Over the coming months Larry went through such a complete transformation that the Ku Klux Klan turned to threatening him. He made apologies, he joined the NAACP, spoke in public schools, and was even interviewed in Time magazine with Michael Weisser.

In time, Larry was asked to speak at an interfaith Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. His words, humbly spoken, revealed a new person. “I wasted the first 40 years of my life and caused harm to other people until I believe God stepped in to give me Cantor Weisser as a messenger, to show me that I could receive love and that I could give love. I have learned we are all the same, no matter whether we’re white people, or Oriental, or black people… we’re one race.”

As Trapp’s illness progressed, he moved into the Weisser home and became known to the Weissers’ three teenage children as “Uncle Larry.” As his heart and kidneys began to fail, Julie quit her nursing job to take care of him.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of his transformation was his conversion to Judaism in the synagogue he had once threatened to bomb. Three months later he passed away in the Weissers’ home, surrounded by his adopted family.

When he died, Michael Weisser and an African-American activist to whom he had once sent hate mail eulogized him.

The story of the Weissers and Larry Trapp has touched many over the years. Kathryn Watterson wrote a book about them called Not by the Sword, and David Roth wrote the song Dragon to Butterfly as a tribute … Here are some of the lyrics from Dragon to Butterfly:

Michael helped Larry back into the house,
And then Michael’s wife Julie helped Larry to bed,
A lifelong diabetic confined to a wheelchair,
He couldn’t do much for himself any more.

So they’d taken him in to unravel the pain,
How his father made fun of him, planting the seed,
And the root of the anger that grew so completely,
Once strangled his heart like a weed.

Larry’s last breath in his bedroom at Michael’s,
Came later that night with his friend at his side,
“Thank you” was all he could whisper,
“For changing a dragon to a butterfly.”

The lessons all of us can learn from the story of Larry Trapp and Julie and Michael Weisser are summed up beautifully in the final paragraph of an editorial that appeared in an Omaha newspaper when Larry passed away:

“Trapp’s life may have balanced out. The good he accomplished may have canceled the years of evil. He gave his fellow man a memorable story of how a hate-filled hardened heart may have been changed by goodness, kindness and love.”

I just discovered that a friend of mine, of deep religious persuasion, is enthusiastically in support of California’s Proposition 8, a voter initiative to amend their state constitution essentially to abolish same-sex marriages.

Without attempting to dive into the complex fray of the conflict among religious, social, political, and sexual beliefs, I just wanted to quote two authors who represent my views on sexual orientation.

In this correspondence with other practitioners, Hermetic practitioner Rawn Clark writes,

Is homosexuality an Elemental imbalance?

It is only we humans who divide sexuality into hetero-, homo- and bi-. This has nothing to do with sexuality itself since all species that express sexuality, naturally express all three of these human-defined types. Sexuality is sexuality, period, and its sub-type is not a matter of differing Elemental balances.

Sexuality is an aspect of the mental body. As the mental body incarnates, it seeks out a life circumstance that best expresses its nature and which will lead to the learning of the lessons needed during that incarnation. It is fundamental and not a matter of mundane choice that arises during the incarnation itself. With the human being, each type of sexuality brings a specific set of life lessons because we are social creatures who live within the context of specific culture. In human culture, a homosexual faces a very different experience than a heterosexual.

Sexual orientation is not an issue of Elemental balance. Where Elemental balance comes into play is in the individual’s response to, and enactment of, their sexuality, whether that be hetero-, homo- or bisexuality. This is the arena of concern so far as the impact of sexual orientation upon the Hermetic path.

A heterosexual person is no more or less suited to spirituality and Hermetics than a homosexual and vise versa.

Can a Homosexual person advance in the path to perfection or is that something they have to overcome?

Homosexuality, like hetero- and bisexuality, is not something to be overcome. The path of self-perfecting is built upon being your true self as completely and as clearly as possible. Since sexuality and sexual orientation are fundamental qualities that an individual possesses, striving for perfection would necessarily include manifesting one’s sexuality in a self-defined positive way. This is true regardless of one’s sexual orientation, and the specific type of sexual orientation makes this process no harder or easier than another. In other words, homosexuality itself presents no unique barriers to following a spiritual path. A bi- or homosexual individual faces the same basic issues of positivizing their sexual expression as does a heterosexual individual.

It’s only a recent judgement that homosexuality is something to be “overcome”… In many cultures (native American, Hindu) homosexuality was either accepted without comment or considered a spiritual asset. In particular, the berdache (cross-dressing homosexual) of the native Americans generally took the roll of diviner, healer, or shaman.

This is true of the majority of earth-based cultures. I know of one such culture on the African continent who consider homosexuals to be the spiritual “gatekeepers”. The impact that Gay people have had throughout the ages upon human culture is largely unrecognized by the heterosexual majority. Gay culture and Gay people are a powerful force in human mimetic evolution. ["Mimetic evolution" is a scientific term for the evolution of ideas and culture. For humans, this aspect of evolution plays an especially important role in the survival of our species and is, in many cases, now superceding our genetic evolution.]

So in my “opinion” I suggest not only is homosexuality not a sin to overcome, but perhaps even that many homosexual people are more spiritually centered and complete in their nature. Likewise the fear based fundamentalist show a real lack of spiritual maturity.

In my experience, one’s sexual orientation has little to do with their centeredness or their sense of completeness. One advantage that the Gay person does have however, is a direct experience of the ugly under-belly of society. The advantage here is that there’s perhaps less to un-learn! But the same can be said of anyone who lives with a barrage of constant prejudice and discrimination, such as women, the “over-weight”, the physically deformed, people of color, etc., etc. The ones at a true disadvantage in this regard, are white heterosexual men!

And from Seth’s book The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, by Jane Roberts:

The love and cooperation that forms the basis of all life … shows itself in many ways. Sexuality represents one aspect, and an important one. In larger terms, it is as natural for a man to love a man, and for a woman to love a woman, as it is to show love for the opposite sex. For that matter, it is more natural to be bisexual. Such is the “natural” nature of the species …

Heterosexual love is one important expression of bisexuality, and sexually represents the reproductive abilities. Heterosexuality, however, rests upon the bisexual basis, and without man’s bisexual nature, the larger frameworks of the family — the clan, tribe, government, civilization — would be impossible.

… Deeper bonds of biological and spiritual love lie at the basis of all personal and cultural relationships, a love that transcends your ideas of sexuality. Heterosexual love, as it is understood at least, gives you a family of parents and children — an important unit, about which other groups form. If only stereotyped ideas of female-male relationships operated, however, there would be no bond or stimulus great enough to forge one family to another. The antagonism between males would be too great. Competition between females would be too severe. Wars would wipe out struggling tribes before any traditions were formed.

In the social world as in the microscopic one,, cooperation again is paramount. Only a basic bisexuality could give the species the leeway necessary, and prevent stereotyped behavior of a kind that would hamper creativity and social commerce. That basic sexual nature allows you the fulfillment of individual abilities, so that the species does not fall into extinction. Man’s recognition of his bisexual nature is, therefore, a must in his future.

There are, again, obvious differences between the sexes. They are insignificant, and appear large only because you concentrate so upon them. The great human qualities of love, strength, compassion, intellect and imagination do not belong to one sex or the other.

Only an understanding of this inherent bisexual nature will release those qualities in each individual, regardless of sex …

Any deep exploration of the self will lead you into areas that will confound conventional beliefs about sexuality. You will discover an identity, a psychological and psychic identity, that is in your terms male and female, one in which those abilities of each sex are magnified, released, and expressed. They may not be so released in normal life, but you will meet the greater dimensions of your own reality, and at least in the dream state catch a glimpse of the self that transcends a one-sex orientation.

The world-atmosphere also teaches us what to see. “One can say not only that as individuals we live within a sociocultural organism but also that the sociocultural organism lives within us. Not only are we individual units within an organized society, but organized society is represented and incarnated within our brains.” Whatever the System tells our brains is real is what we are allowed to notice; everything else must be ignored. “We give the system the power to make the known unknown.” Thus we are taught to mistrust our own experiences.

Every observation is a directed observation, that is, an observation for or against a point of view. Every mind is a “contaminated mind,” a mind constructed of a network of suppositions and assumptions. All descriptions are paradigm-conditioned and value-laden. A Skinnerian and a Freudian will not only describe the same behavior in incompatible ways, but their conceptual frameworks actually cause them to see different behaviors. The observed behavior is different in each case. The result of this limitation on what we are allowed to see is a miniaturization of our living world.

People would not be so acquiescent in their own oppression unless they were caught in a powerful delusion. “Delude” is from the Latin deludere, “to play,” specifically, “to play with anyone to his injury or frustration, to mock, to defraud; to befool the mind or judgment so as to cause what is false to be accepted as true.”

Exposing the delusional system is the central ascetical task in our discernment of the Powers. For the Powers are never more powerful than when they can act from concealment. To drop out of sight and awareness into the general surroundings, to masquerade as the permanent furniture of the universe, to make the highly contingent structures of current oppression appear to be of divine construction — such is the genius of their deceptive art. They have armed might at their fingertips, to be sure, but they know, far better than the oppressed, how fragile and potentially impotent it is. Of what use were Philippine army tanks in 1986 when their commanders refused to carry out orders to roll over unarmed civilians? What power was left to Philippine dictator Marcos when his own pilots refused to bomb nonviolent demonstrators and instead defected to a nearby American air base? The mighty prefer, therefore, to rule by means of invisible constraints: unseen filaments tied to the public’s arms and legs, and imperceptible spiritual brain-implants causing the masses to will to be what has been made of them.

It is characteristic of the Powers that, although they are established, staffed, and perpetuated by people, they are beyond merely human control. It was the experience of a total system operating (as it seemed) autonomously and even, at times, malevolently, that gave rise to a perception fo the role played by the Powers in human destiny. “For our struggle is not against enemies fo blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). The Powers are the structures and institutions, in both their outer and inner manifestations, that embody the Domination System in any historical moment.

I first read this book a few years ago. Now, on this second reading, I like it even more, because there’s so much of what he says that’s completely consistent with a primitive anarchist worldview. Central to his writings is the idea that “Powers” influence human destiny, not as devils roaming around somewhere but as the unseen — I would say astral — aspects of groups of people. A Power moves an angry mob. A Power grips a nation terror-struck by 9/11. A Power gives a company a culture, a character, a personality. It’s a vague and wildly complex mixture of things that somehow gives rise to the experience of a group of people, in whatever form — crowd, association, institution, government — as an entity. But an invisible one.

It’s like how you can give birth to an idea or a book or a song or a company but then it can begin to develop its own independent existence. It’s like how gossip can take on a life of its own.

We think we control our own destinies, and on the deepest levels we do. But what we don’t know and don’t have power over in ourselves becomes projected into these things Wink calls Powers, and they control us.

No one person or group of people imposed the Domination System on us; it came wholly unbidden. People inadvertently stumbled into a struggle for power beyond their ability to avoid it or to stop. This struggle … generated a selective process, beyond human control, which molded change inevitably toward power maximization in human societies …

People have thus become the slaves of their evolving systems, rather than civilized society being the servant of its members.

Finally, Wink makes a statement that I resonate so strongly with, it’s like he wrote it knowing exactly what I’m feeling and trying to say and am unable to articulate.

The pain of living a life so alienated from what is natural and pleasurable exacts a psychic cost: numbing. Most of us, winners and losers alike, are profoundly unable to grasp the severity of our loss. Numbness in turn produces amnesia about what a fully human life would be like, and even a fear of remembering. We internalize the ethic of productivity, the constraints of patriarchy, the imperative of success, the drivenness of modern life, the obligations of machismo, the laws that prevent our achieving for ourselves what the powerful achieve at our expense. We become complicit. And so we leave unopposed the world that injures us, restructuring ourselves to appease the Powers we depend upon. To achieve peace with the world, we declare war upon ourselves.