A PSI'D-KICK FROM THE PAST?

OK--where were we, ...oh, yeah... Bitch Goddess Supreme. Well, this concept has been gurgling around in my subconscious for awhile, and has recently helped me solidify my thoughts on some of the subjects that I am set to expound upon in my forthcoming book, "Towards a Universal Sexuality: One Man's Journey".

I am, most definitely, physically a man, and really do enjoy being one--I love having a man's body, and all that entails. (I really, really, really like my penis!) I am not outwardly feminine in appearance, nor am I overtly effeminately-mannered. Thus, this coming-to-grips with (en masse) a female energy, a female mind-set, a female intuition, and a female sensuality, all inside of and capable of being experienced by and expressed through my male body (emphasis mine), is a continuous inner juggling or balancing act--lately, more a battlefield, but for reasons other than you would suspect,

One major curse/blessing I have had in my life was my overly strong psychic-spiritual-energetic bond to my mother, One example should suffice: The morning my mother died, I was literally nine hundred miles away from where she was, with no way of knowing of what was happening. I woke up early, feeling incredibly sad, and at about 7:30 that morning, I doubled over in pain, feeling as though something were being ripped out of my guts; I looked up and saw my mother's face super-imposed over mine in a mirror. About an hour later, a friend drove crazily into my driveway, and said I should come up to work and call home (I didn't have a phone at the time), that something was wrong. I knew instantly what it was. My brother confirmed on the phone that she had died at 7:30 that morning.

Being that connected to such an intense female energy source from birth, and having almost no other substantive energetic input for most of my "formative years" (more specifically, no really strong male energetic input), I naturally adopted an instinctively female perspective (albeit a rather skewed female perspective) on just about everything from the git-go, while my "male" perspective was a sort of secondary sense or attitude, gleaned mostly from television and rock music.

No, mother wasn't very stable, nor very happy, but she did have a powerful triple-whammy-mojo energy field. Simply put, she was a witch and didn't know it (or at the very least, did not acknowledge it and thus did her unconscious best to suppress it). This led to all sorts of sideways manifestations of "The Mojo" that I learned as a sort of "energetic way-of-being" at way too young an age. With my mother's energetic patterns as a template, I was naturally headed for a bumpy ride out in the world. As I said, she was not a happy woman. She was extremely insecure, jealous, and more than a bit paranoid. She did not understand the energy she brandished. She feared the world and everyone in it. Everything that lay outside the thick, silent, illusory wall around our family was, to her, essentially evil.

It is this same set of fears, showing up as a template for all my own knee-jerk-emotional reactions that keeps coming back to haunt me whenever I feel overwhelmed by my life. I have spent large amounts of time and money to get rid of it; I have "worked on" this like some sort of new-age whore who just can't get enough-o-that glorious "healing" pain. I keep thinking I am rid of it, and it keeps reappearing. Always, I have treated this "thing" as bad, something to be tamed or disposed of--I have stabbed it with my steely knives, but I just can't kill the Beast! I am being forced now to look at it differently.

Is this "thing" really bad, just because it makes me (and others) a bit "uncomfortable"? This "thing" is inside of me, I have a connection to it. I have called it a demon, I have called it my mother, I have called it my dark angel. I have called it "Skippy, my evil twin". I have attempted to either shut it up or make it go away. I have attempted to feed it, no, to gorge it, so it will shut up and leave me alone and let me be "a man". (Sorta like "The Keeper" attached to Londo Molari in Babylon 5 -- You can act without it's influence only if you get drunk enough... )

As "a man", it is embarrassing, no, it is humiliating to admit to still falling into these dysfunctional emotional patterns when I have been through enough psychobabble to know that my behavior is totally (thank you, Spock) illogical, Captain. Yet, the manifestation of those patterns is so closely tied to the female energy inside me, I have begun to feel as though these seemingly dysfunctional patterns might actually help facilitate my contact and interaction with this "goddess" part of me. I relate to the goddess energy in a big way on an instinctive level--"all the lights light up"--when these patterns are in full-swing. It is as if this particular emotional state, of (literally) feeling and acting as my mother would, is one of my personal equivalents of a shamanic state of heightened awareness.

My recent experiences have made me realize that when I'm in the throes of acting out my mother's emotive patterns, I feel as though I am witnessing an actual manifestation of (or experiencing possession by?) an aspect of this inner female I call "Bitch Goddess Supreme". She is awesomely powerful, she is pissed, and she is, well, a bitch! Think Liz Taylor in her two most magnificent bitch roles: Katarina in Taming of The Shrew and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff. Think Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane. Think Joan Crawford in anything THAT bitch was ever in. Ah, now you begin to understand!

Schuyler has pointed out to me several times that my chosen persona within our Tribe (that of the shaman, way out on the edge of this reality, jumping up and down, naked, going "Look, you guys--come see what's beyond the rim over here!") often necessitates my being "pushed away" at times. His point became all the more apparent with a look at the traditional shaman's role: he lives out on the edge of the village, alone; he's usually dirty and scary--he protects and helps his tribe by interfacing with "the ancestors" (which are too scary for the run-o-the-mill villager to deal with), and the villagers in turn honor and value him, but it's an uneasy peace. That somewhat faithfully describes my relationship to my own Tribe. Some of my "states" puzzle or frighten them; I tend to deal with issues that they are not wanting to look at. The real battle for me is to not take their "pulling away" personally. My extreme emotional sensitivity often results in feeling hurt or attacked when no attack is intended. The Bitch Goddess is lately a manifestation of the wrath of the "injured party" in the whole Schuyler affair, and this has resulted in a period of truly altered consciousness, wherein I got in touch with a feminine energy source so incredibly strong, it can send a beam of essentially "female" energy through and out of my very "male" body.

In this book I am writing, I am trying to come up with what is essentially a "definition" of a universally sexual being. Beginning with a list of characteristics, if you will, that a universally sexual person might have. The area lately in my thoughts being the sex-magickal aspects of a universally sexual person. A nutshell version of a traditional sex-magick ritual as described by Frater U.D. in his "Secrets of Sex Magic: A Practical Handbook for Men & Women" has one partner taking the role of, and literally "becoming" (through the ecstatic state) the god to be invoked (or male half of "God") in the ritual, and the other partner assuming the role of, and in essence, "becoming" the goddess (or female half of "God"). Now, where it says traditional, read "hetero", with the male being the god and the female the goddess. My proposal is that either sex can take on either role, without reservation, once the personal internal connection to the opposite-sex energy within is made. Thus, one characteristic of a universally sexual person would be the ability to feel and utilize the (seemingly) dormant energy of the opposite sex that dwells within oneself. In sex magick, this ability is key to reaching the altered state needed to "become" the god/goddess.

Most of the books I have read on sexual magick usually refer to male-male rituals as being "only useful for destructive magick and harming spells". To that, I must heartily cry "Bullshit!" Statements damning same-sex ritual magick to the "dark side" are based strictly in homophobia, especially the fear that by offering yourself to another man, you are no longer a man yourself. Nonsense! If a man can become aware of the female half of his energetic being, make peace with it, and learn to use it, there is an absolute sanctity to the experience that has only recently become clear to me. If the blending of their energies is clear and their hearts open, the new energetic space--the new reality--created by the union of two men is just as valid, just as ego-less and utterly unified, and just as sacred as the similar altered-reality state achieved during a conscious male-female union. It may have a different energetic quality and feeling, but it is undoubtedly an equally viable unified, ego-less state of oneness--i.e., a reality wherein magick happens.

I feel I have achieved a point of connectedness with the goddess-energy inside of me that is strong and fairly constant. And I am familiar enough with it now to begin to know the nuances of difference and similarity to the male energy that also flows through me. I definitely know enough to tell them apart from one another. Lately I have begun to strive for the ability to "wield" or "become" either of them at any given moment; to feel (alternately) utterly female, or utterly male. Thus, being able to actually experience what is literally a "takeover" of all my non-physical aspects (psyche, spirit, soul) by a feminine presence, while my physical body is being sacrally utilized in a "female" way, the process of "becoming" the goddess in a ritual is a truly profound state for me to reach as a man.

If, when offering himself to a brother in a sacred manner, a man is taking on the spiritual and physical roles of the goddess, and his brother is taking on the role of the god in a conscious way, what effect does "becoming the goddess" really have on a man's "maleness"? Is he truly no longer a "man"? What if the opposite were really true; what if something altogether different takes place?

What I have found in my own experience, and in research among other bisexual males, is that most of us tend to feel more masculine after a conscious (key word: conscious) sexual encounter with another man. Literally, an "amplification of manhood" seems to take place; a feeling of being more "grounded in maleness", if you will, so that both men feel stronger, more balanced, and more truly "male" after the experience.

I suppose there are as many ways to express it as there are people willing to experience it. Everyone who journeys this way must eventually come up with their own definitions, their own thought-forms, their own rituals, their own unique way of expressing the ineffable places created when two or more persons are joined in ecstatic sexual union. It could be stated thus:

The emphasis on "as no other can" is to point out a very important thing about the male-male sexual bond: if both men are open and conscious while in the throes of the experience, there is an incredible awakening of power that does not happen during the male-female bond. It is the "amplification of manhood" phenomenon I mentioned earlier. Yes, having a sexual experience with a woman awakens an incredible amount of male power and recognition of same in me, but, the amplification effect is an entirely different phenomenon which cannot occur with the opposite sex, (unless that person is totally aware and in touch with their internal "opposite-sex energy", also). This is a point that came up in my last really good conversation with Schuyler, as I was trying to explain why the attraction to make love with him was so strong. "I feel as though I have something important to give or impart to you, something important you need to know about your power--a part of it you cannot see yet, which can only be transmitted through a sexual experience", I said, still feeling totally unable to properly voice the concept, or (more really) the feeling behind the concept. (Sometimes I feel that concepts are just mental masturbation about feelings that we can't explain.)

I truly feel that I could not have reached the place of understanding and "grok-age" that I have with this concept, were it not for the two-year relationship I have been pioneering with my wonderful lady, Sheila. I have been making an effort lately to keep reminding her that she is probably the only female who could have ever gotten through to me, and made me crack open and make myself available for a real significant-other-type relationship with a real-live, girl-type, female woman.

Sheila is really, honestly, all the woman I want, I don't really look at other women; I'm happy with Sheila. She has given me more insights (especially into this whole "goddess" thing) than I would ever have gleaned on my own. It is also through experiencing my manhood with her that I have been able to sense the truer nature of the male-male bond. One more important point about said nature: I feel that I can be more balanced, more able to "be here" for Sheila when I have had a sexual encounter with a man--it is as if the aforementioned amplification effect enables me to be "more of a man" for Sheila than I am able to be otherwise.

Sheila's latest bit of wisdom came this morning, as I was explaining my thoughts on this whole "bitch goddess" aspect of myself. "Of course your inner woman would be a bitch, hon," she said, "all she ever had as an example was your mother, in all her craziness. She doesn't know any other way to be." Great... so now I need to look for a positive female role model? The net result of this whole upheaval is that I am having to re-learn everything, from how to move my body (I'm flailing around like a toddler, now that there is over 25 pounds less of me to move around) to what constitutes a "treat" (ice cream is still an unfortunate no-no). This is all rather, shall we say, "inconvenient" to have to go through at age 39.

Back to my relationship with Sheila, about the only other desire I would have for any other woman in my life is that I still wish to father a child someday (Sheila is just entering menopause, so, for "us" that's not an option). I have given some thought to this issue, and have several ideas as to how it might be achieved, all of them anarchic, rest assured. And it will all be well documented, of course.

If you are experimenting with or attempting to live a poly / pan-sexual / fidelic / amorous lifestyle (I hate labels), you know there is precious little really original material out there to draw from, and thus we really do end up being pioneers in defining relationship roles. That is why I find it important to write about it. It's people like me and Sheila and Schuyler, out here "in the trenches", actively trying to live this lifestyle, who are doing the true "research" by living it. If, by relating my experiences as an evolving sexual being (who is, yes, out there on the edge), maybe I can bring insight through my experiences to others who are trying to do similar things, and their insights can, in turn, nourish me. When enough people reach the same energetic place, we will have already begun to shape the "new" morphic energy fields necessary to make reality shift.