Spirit


When the spirit comes it comes because the emotions have become tuned to the body, or at least it's that way with me. The emotions sit on top of the instincts and play music to them. Instinct needs to move outward and so does emotion, and out riding point is the decider. "Give me land, lots of land beneath the starry skies above but, don't fence me in."

When the decider doesn't have anything to decide, he can begin to pay attention to harmonics. The truth has a beautiful emotional resonance because everything is in harmony. All of the lies -- in the sense of discrepancies between one's actual behavior and one's self-presentation -- depend on one-sided evidence. If you start with the decision then it's natural to gather only the evidence that supports it and ignore the rest. This works in court, where the two versions are compared and the truth discerned from them. It doesn't work in an individual. Well, maybe for Hamlet, because it was his only gig. In general, it leads to inflation followed by a painful deflation.

I have no opinion one way or the other as to the value of one-sided evidence, because without it a fool would have no way to expose himself, and a lawyer no way to support herself, and so it is useful for self-immolation and for stacking the deck. I do think that if you have any patterns going at all, you can't release your intellectual center to align with the moving and emotional centers, which is the process of the three into the one.

Art can be a transformational process because what expresses through you becomes you. An old man (Abraham Kaminsky) who was a handwriting expert told me, when I was 22, that he could draw or sculpt a person from that person's handwriting, because it reflects them. He said that while it is true that you can tell a personality from the handwriting, it is also true that you can change your handwriting and change your personality.

I had the sudden revelation, as he explained it to me, that the same thing is true of anything which provides patterned feedback from the nervous system, such as the sound of the voice, for example ... truth is indistinguishable from integrity of form. As the form changes, what is creating form becomes increasingly aware of it's mechanical nature, which makes mechanical behavior optional.

Now I'm beginning to play and sing well enough, when I'm by myself, that I can begin to feel that linkage run from down in the earth, through the heart transformer, on up to the outlets of the senses. When I am not by myself I keep doing better, but I still don't play and sing close to the way I do when I'm alone. My daughter let me know when I was escaping that stage that seems normal in children but not in an old man. "I'm beginning to enjoy this more," I said. "You know why?"

"Because you don't suck so bad now?"

"Really?" That wasn't what I was thinking but it was unexpectedly good news.

"Yea." She didn't want to bat it around more than that. She had to make popcorn.

Bodywork can be used to evoke the Spirit. I know people who think of massage as quasi-respectable, and legislators who ponder how to divide touching somebody from a potential sexual assault.

But for somebody who practices it as an art form, thinking about a sexual encounter would be just one of a thousand ways to let pre-established patterns take over. It doesn't matter what the pattern is, the idea is to recognize that every pattern is under mechanical laws, and that the more laws you are under, the less freedom you have. Freedom is the Spirit's doorman.

Some things are common and you can get a lot of them, and some things are more rare. Sometimes they are unique, and that they exist at all creates a sudden expansion of energy. It's like waking up from a dream. There is a numinous presence in the room at those times. Actually it's probably there all the time but I'm usually too busy with my self-importance to notice it.

With the clients I enjoy the most, this is the central experience. Everything is taken in and nothing is done with it. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. That means there is no separation of ego and shadow, or any other opposites, and the experience is contained in a ritual. When you contain energy in a ritual, you can go back to the ritual and your energy is still there. It's like a bank. If you deposit gold, you find gold, and if you robbed the bank, you find your picture on a wanted poster.

The level of the ritual varies with each person. I always found it interesting that one of the clients who had the greatest gift for following me into deep trance states could not hear well, and had learned to rely on a form of direct communication for which hearing is only a supplemental input.

Bodywork and music are both ways to invoke the Spirit.

"There's a spirit in the night and it rides on a train
and it rolls on forever and forever back again;
I stand at the station with a cordless microphone,
I'm taking off my body and I'm dancing in my bones ..."
(Ray's Blues ©2000 Dan Lee)

Sometimes the Spirit comes in unexpected form. For example, last night I was laying back in a recliner. The black cat jumped up on my lap, but I'm not superstitious. I feel sorry for him because before his brother was tortured and murdered by coyotes, he had a constant playmate. Now he seems at loose ends. He began to purr. His fat black paws began to work and a repulsive stream of saliva dripped out of his mouth onto my arm.

I heard Linda come in upstairs. The way the house is built, the theater room is at the bottom of the stairs. It has a projector and screen, and up above there is open space with planters, so you can look directly down at the recliners. "Here," she said. A black cloud swooped down on us and the cat, terrified, dug in his claws.

"Arghhh!" I screamed. "Jesus Christ." His paws had been on my balls, specifically the right one. He drew blood.

"I'm sorry," she said. There was the slightest dissonance ...

I tossed away the sport coat I'd forgotten at her office, which she had graciously returned from above, and inspected the damage. "Goddamned cat."

During the experience I was in the moment. In fact, a cat with his claws on your balls gives you an eerie sense of focus on the Now. And later, if you want to think about what it "means" when your wife "accidentally" provokes the black cat to try to tear your balls off, then you can have a talk with her. You might start it with something non-provocotive, like, "Honey, I'm sorry."

Posted: Sat - December 2, 2006 at 02:33 PM