The Tao of the Tree of Life

Paradise Found David Miller www.mauiarts.com

Tao of the Tree of Life

Cosmological Science, Psychedelic Christianity and Sexy Greenpeace Buddhism

The Problem:

Every person on the planet shares a desire to see the world continue and flourish, so that there will be a habitable world for our offspring, for the future generations of humanity and for the diversity of life to continue. We also want to see a world without war and one in which justice prevails for the rich and poor alike. Even highly religious people, except for those pursuing martyrdom, often for violent ends, and a few fundamentalist rapture seekers, want to see a world in which their children and other people can survive.

The trouble is that, while we want to have a sustainable world, achieving it seems to always be beyond the horizons of economic and political realities. Economic realities keep up the pressure on for short-term thinking and political realities are contaminated by vested interests in the business world who deny the damage done to the climate and biosphere by human impact for their own self-interests, despite the obvious mounting scientific evidence that human impact is causing increasing, and possibly irreversible, detrimental change to our future.

Worse still, the world's religions, despite some very good words from a few religious leaders, including the current Pope, are more devoted to ascendency and internecine apocalyptic warfare combined with utopian visions than actual care of the planet. The two major religions Islam and Christianity both promote unrestrained population growth and have ingrained agendas to control female reproduction. One only needs to make a rough assessment of how little financing of environmental projects comes from the major religions to see the actual thrust of their activity.

The large numbers of people who would like to contribute personally to protecting the planet and its future, face an uphill battle  because, in the absence of a society-wide ethic to actually cherish and replenish the Earth, effort remains confined to protest groups such as Greenpeace and sporadic government action such as creating nature reserves. Thus investment in saving the planet is like throwing money over your shoulder in a cold shower, because one can put time and effort and money into it until one becomes destitute and depleted, while the problem still grows larger, leading to a tragedy of the commons from the failure of people to act together with a coherent common sense of purpose ,while others exploit it for gain.

The Solution:

Is there a way out of this dilemma? Yes there is! Lets simply extract the two key ideas that convey the two most world-transforming insights from major world religions:

The first is the key insight of the monotheistic tradition with subdue amended to cherish: To cherish and replenish the living planet and its diversity throughout the generations of life.

The second is the mahayana of the Buddhist and Vedantic traditions: To facilitate the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Covenant:

1. I vouchsafe to cherish and replenish the living planet and its diversity throughout the generations of life.
2. I vouchsafe to facilitate the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

These two are sufficient to bring about a common sense of purpose, both to protect and sustain the planet, and to enable all people to reach a deeper state of understanding of the universe in which they live. They are thus good cosmological science and consistent with the scientific pursuit of knowledge unhindered by beliefs and assumptions. Affirmative belief is not essential to religious meaning. In Judaism, the virtue of keeping the covenantal traditions and in Buddhism observing the dharma, or way, - i.e. actions - are what is critical to bring the blessed condition into being.

The Sanctity of Nature:

The covenant to cherish and replenish the Earth is a commitment to preserve and restore the bountiful diversity of nature planet-wide. It is the key that unites the latent energy of people across the whole face of the globe to have the confidence and energy to realize we can together, without pain or privation, actually achieve the perpetual sustenance of the Planet in the immortal passage of the generations of life. This brings with it an immeasurable sense of relief from the anxiety that we are living in an insecure world of conflict and degeneration, where the very meaning in existence is occluded, and our futures, and the future of the whole world remain in an unacceptable degree of doubt.

By drawing people together with the clear and simple purpose of sustaining the immortality of life, the covenant to cherish and replenish can potentially unite the energy of the entire planet's population around the central activity for which the human species has inherited the Earth to perform. We thus become the guardians of the perpetual diversity of life and find our place in nature not to subdue and have dominion over it, but to act as verdant guardians of a perpetual paradise in the universe at large.

Enlightenment:

By facilitating the enlightenment of all sentient beings, we are also accepting the scientific pursuit of knowledge of the natural universe and the spirit of skeptical inquiry, where we test our assumptions against the oracle of nature, rather than imposing our preconceived beliefs. Enlightenment can have no meaning if it is simply a spiritual conviction or vision in the absence of affirmation from the nature of the world around us. We need both the knowledge and the wisdom to fulfill the engagement.

Thus the quest for enlightenment is both the scientific quest to understand the universe and the sentient vision quest to understand the very foundations of conscious experience of all kinds: waking, dreaming, mystical and visionary. The emergence of conscious sentient beings is a natural cosmological process forming the most complex complete interactive manifestation of the fundamental forces of nature emerging from the cosmic origin. It is thus a cosmological sigma point and the quest for conscious enlightenment is also cosmological.

Sacred Sexuality:

At the same time, accepting the sacredness of sex as the foundation of the passage of the generations of life, from which we all come transforms religions of renunciation such as most of Buddhism, the implicit sexual guilt of Christianity from Eve's 'transgression', and the explicit sexual oppression of Islam, through lethal penalties for adultery, enforced veiling and sequestering and seclusion of women into traditions celebrating in the mutual ecstasy and joy of sexual union and the full abundance of the flow of life, rather than the negation and control of it. Sacred sex has long been central to the Vedantic tradition and is one of the highest rites of illumination in Tibetan Buddhism as well.

Sex is a central part of social bonding key to deep human relationships and the stability of family life and is not just for reproduction, but sacred sex transcends social sex as the deepest celebration of the fertility principle between woman and man.  The sacredness of sex also implies mutual respect between men and women and the right of women to reproductive choice, not to be controlled by men or patriarchal religious dictates, because they the bearers of the principal responsibility for parental commitment in pregnancy, a sometimes perilous delivery, lactation and long-term child care. The passage of the living generations comes through sex, so it must needs command the uttermost sacred respect as the holy grail of life itself.

Sacramental Mysticism:

Complementing the meditative and contemplative traditions, the use of the visionary power plants and fungi as sacraments, which are already incorporated into religious traditions in the Americas, including an ongoing Christian movements, which identify them as holy sacraments, provide a democratic avenue to the mystical experiences that are the foundation of religious illumination - forming the psychedelic face of a new Christianity, thus healing the Eucharist which is otherwise a decadent empty sacramental religion celebrating in its central rite the consumption of human flesh and blood in remembrance of a homicidal sacrificial death two millennia ago.

Psychedelics are not dangerous drugs  and have been shown in recent experiments using mature people who are not drug takers that they can provide genuine spiritual experiences which have lasting benefits months and years later. The core of religious experience is mystical experience, so a genuine sacrament to replace the empty sacrament of the Eucharist is a pivotal step in making Christianity a real sacramental religion with the integrity to protect the Earth and one in which every person can share in the spiritual vision, rather than having to stoop to the conformity of unquestioning doctrines and a dominant hierarchy of the priesthood for instruction.

Universality:

At its most universal, the way, or Tao of the Tree of Life would involve just these two points as a simple all-embracing covenant, leaving everyone free to express this in an endless variety of creative ways in both acts of restoration and celebration of life.

This evokes a path of true compassion and a human movement of empowerment, which can celebrate its existence in diverse rites of passage, from birth, partnership and death, to the fertility of the seasons, and the agape of creative musical and artistic performance. Just as people across the planet love to party and experience life to the full, the path provides the zest of life with the added sense of meaning and fulfillment and joy of living which actually bringing our energy and activity to its natural fruition brings forth in overflowing abundance.

One can think of the Tao of the Tree of Life as an integration of cosmological science, psychedelic Christianity and sexy Greenpeace Buddhism, taking the best out of each, but really it is the foundation of all spirituality. It is the common thread of sentient survival and the science of nature and cosmology because it is rooted in the realities of the natural universe discovered by the scientific pursuit of knowledge.

This Tree of Life is not just the Biblical notion of a tree in Eden hidden since the foundation of the world but is the tree of evolution of the diversity of life as it has emerged and flourished on the planet over geological time scales.

In a metaphysical way, this brings the two trees in Eden of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life together into one. Knowledge only gains the capacity and temptation for evil when it becomes divorced from our primary goal in life, which is to sustain the passage of life itself. Once this integration with our life meaning and purpose occurs evil fades away as simply a form of ignorance of the whole picture.

This is a covenant, which religious and non-religious people alike can accept and fulfill together, because its foundation lies in the very truth of the nature of existence. It can thus have a wider basis for collective action than traditional religions, which are fragmented into competing factions each vying with one another as the one 'true' way. By becoming a common affirmation of a wider section of society it would actually become possible for collective action to restore the living planet to become globally effective as well as applying ethical influence to government and business decision-making.

Sleepwalkers' Awakening becomes a Movie

Here is the video version of Sleepwalkers' Awakening on YouTube
The mp3 song link is here. For lyrics and other Niño tracks see here.

I want to explain something to you that is definitively portrayed in "Sleepwalkers' Awakening".

The song makes clear that we have TWO complementary primary incarnate responsibilities  -  one to discover the true nature of existence, without any preconceived assumptions, before we hurtle through life to our demise like sleepwalkers, and the other - even more important and essential - to give our whole life energy to the reflowering of life and its sustenance for the future generations.

There is not just one spiritual, or religious quest but two. Not just the one moralistic invocation to love the one God, or 'Jesus as Lord', or to submit to al-Llah under pain of death, but two - to both seek true illumination in the conscious mind and, even more importantly, to act as guardians of the ongoing life flow, for the unborn generations of life and the future flowering of life and consciousness.

One doesn't have to be religious to be spiritually illuminated. In fact religion is in fundamental conflict with true spiritual insight, because it interposes doctrine and priesthood in between ourselves and the insight of true enlightenment.

We now know that Christianity is in no way the path of Jesus. All that fell apart with the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas and a few of the other Nag Hammadi texts. In fact Christianity is a Hellenistic pagan syncretic fusion of fantastic beliefs in the born again aftermath of Paul of Tarsus amid acrimonious conflict between diverse cults during the Roman ascendancy. The Eucharist sacrament of soma and sangre is diabolical and the belief in worshiping Christ as only begotten Son of God is in frank contradiction to Yeshua's own teachings - wholly pagan and a completely corrupt cosmology.

Neither is Buddhism the religion of Buddha, although in this case the transmission is a little truer to the insights of the founder, and the quest is closer to enlightenment, although also contaminated with mind over nature fallacies.

All religions attempt to command the mental sphere as sacred, only to degenerate it into a moral dystopia of betrayal of God - in the case of Christianity, a war between God and Satan, in which both parties come off looking diabolical, as the Gnostics rightfully pointed out, claiming God was a mere demiurge, and history shows Christianity to be little better than Islam in terms of unmitigated violence and frank genocide. Islam demands complete submission to al-Llah and Buddhism likewise strives to command the mental sphere through elaborate doctrine, assuming control over the existential dilemma of the grasping ego, attempting to escape the cycle of birth and death, in the absence of the meaning and affirmation natural life itself provides.

Religious history demonstrates that the mental quest for God and eternal life takes compete precedence over the reflowering of nature as an immortal life process, right to the point of diabolizing nature as corrupt, even though some liberal Christians try to take a greenish view of the Church's guardianship implied by cherishing and replenishing the Earth, and some Buddhists, particularly Zen, commune with nature as satori, leaving the complementary Yin and Yang of the Tao and some forms of shamanism as the only paths respecting nature in its essence.

So the real problem is that no organized religion on Earth accepts the second primary responsibility, leaving the entire human and biodiverse planet in jeopardy. In many ways religion is more dangerous to the planet than business-as-usual, because it is irrational and plays deceitfully to everyone's worst fears, has manifest utopian ideals of planetary conquest and extols natural domination - dominion over nature - in the traditions of scorched-Earth habitats in which the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition was generated. Business-as-usual is selfish, and left unchecked can rape the planet and cause untold damage, but human knowledge and common sense can prevail, and in a rational  investment environment, act as a brake on harmful forms of development.

The only way we can redeem this situation is to set our sights on the pursuit of true knowledge, without any preconceived assumptions, as the sciences and humanities depend on for their veracity, and begin a tradition of personal dialogue about the 'second attention' - preserving and enriching the diversity of life - not just as a moral or ethical principle, but a manifestation of our conscious awareness and the need to give to the perpetuity of life in return for the mortality of our own personal experience, to make any meaningful sense of our existential condition.

This rebirthing of the sacredness of nature is absolutely essential. Without preserving the resilience of life and its diversity we face eclipse or annihilation. By comparison, the religious quest is a mere indulgence - naked lunch on the lawn of time - a self-fulfilling device for us to believe in our personal salvation.

Without religion we can learn to understand reality and discover our own inner nature.

Without safeguarding the diversity of life we embrace extinction.  It's that simple.

The Religion of Nature and the Nature of Religion

The other day I was looking at the "History of Pornography" series and came upon "Fanny Hill" as the first pornographic novel in the Age of Enlightenment. As it turned out, the author John Cleland was an avid deist. This led me into the deist ideas of a creator God that didn't intervene in nature after 'His' creation. Deists were a rationalist movement in the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth century that rejected the superstitious nature of miracles, the literal interpretation of religious scripture, Jesus' divine nature and the Trinity, in favour of a notion of deity that was grounded in rational exploration of God in the form of a creator that left nature to run its course unimpeded, once the creation had been set in motion. Despite this, many deists were regarded by their traditional Christian counterparts as irreligious, even though they tacitly believed in God.

Deism was a unique product of the rise of scientific rationality at a time when the presumption of God as a de facto creator of the universe was still almost universal. However two things eclipsed deism as a product of the hopeful Age of Enlightenment. Firstly it depended on a creator deity setting in motion a mechanistic Newtonian universe. This attitude successively gave way to more intellectually precise notions of scientific naturalism that nature itself is necessary and sufficient to describe life and the evolution of the universe. Secondly, the deist belief in the existence of a true source religion uncontaminated by subsequent fallacies spawned by a controlling priesthood and free of the distortions of revealed scripture and superstitious and miraculous confabulation proved to be an illusion. Instead it was found that religions worldwide displayed strong elements of irrational superstition and fear of the unknown, attributed to a miraculous deity,  deities or spirit beings. The rational basis of religion on which the deist premise depended was thus undermined.

Ironically, in the 21st century, it is as if the clock has moved both forwards and backwards at the same time. We see an even sharper division between scientifically and humanistically-minded people on the one hand coming to their own intellectually astute conclusions about the universe, many of whom have very high ethical standards for life and on the other hand increasingly literalist religious believers who discard rationality, good judgment and adequate safeguards for trust in beliefs, to embrace slavish religious imperatives often containing violent attitudes of a collectively psychopathic nature.

In Western society apologists for religion will note that there are good Christian communities that bring about a sense of social conscience and belonging, but Christian assumptions are also at the expense of a sense of ultimate confidence in our goodness of  nature depending on salvation to cure all from the sins of selfish expedience. However in the Muslim world, fundamentalistic attitudes have become ascendent in both Sunni and Shiite followings, leading to a literal interpretation of the scripture and law taking Islam back to the three generations of Muhammad in the seventh century and asserting that we are all to be slaves of God under punishment of death for apostasy, justifying psychopathic violence against Sufis, Amadhis, Yazidis, followers of other religions and democratic society alike.

Our ideas of god as a potential cosmocrater, or cosmic creator of the universe changed irreversibly in the twentieth century with the discovery of dynamical chaos, quantum reality and relativity. No longer is the universe seen as a divine Newtonian clockwork. The Pope recently stated that acceptance of evolution need not be inconsistent with creation, effectively conceding to nature the incontestable evidence of evolutionary change, while assigning to God the technical loophole of the 'big bang'. The difficulty with this idea is that the creator God is left with little meaningful relationship with the universe today. Although the finer details of the cosmic origin are still being researched, we know the universe began in a state of high symmetry and low informational content, in which principles of complex symmetry and symmetry-breaking are key, and that the subsequent processes leading to life on Earth have been complex unstable interactions, bringing both chaotic unpredictability and quantum uncertainty into play in the formation of galaxies and solar systems and subsequently, biogenesis and the evolution of life into conscious organisms. So the conditions at the cosmic origin no longer play out in a Laplacian determinism, which a creator God could induce to bring our personal lives, crises and moral tests omnipotently into being.

Once the laws of nature have adopted the symmetry-broken form we see in the standard model of particle physics, the evolutionary complexification of life becomes a product of the hierarchical interaction of the four forces of nature, to form the fractal architecture of molecular matter, resulting in natural interactions leading to biogenesis, life and evolution, including the opposing influences of mutual selection effects shaped by environmental interactions and stochastic mutational changes brought about ultimately by quantum uncertainty.

The only way a deity could continue to intervene in this evolutionary process would be to play dice with the universe, as Einstein denied, by casting the lot in each individual quantum encounter, which remains unpredictable under the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics. But here we find every statistical measure of quantum uncertainty and quantum entanglement conforms ultimately to the probability interpretation, with no evidence of divine intervention upsetting the odds. In the world of our experience misfortune and ill-health strike naturally with blind justice. There is no evidence for divine intervention to punish the criminals and uphold the virtuous. Indeed it would make no sense in a natural world that must needs contain predators and herbivores, just as it contains plants and animals.

Rather than imposing our naive ideas of creation onto the universe, we are better served by developing our understanding of existence from how we actually find the universe and nature to be in the world around us, without overlaying over the facts with preconceived notions based on naive attitudes of fixed belief and undiscerning superstitious faith in a divine power.

Central to the dilemma of existence is the nature of life, death and mortality. Understanding the natural condition of mortally reproducing life brings us much closer to gaining the depth and breadth of insight we need to be able to become a meaningful part of the universe and to come to terms with our own existential condition. Since we are mortal biological organisms there is no point in selfish aims which ultimately lead nowhere. We will gain ultimate satisfaction only by giving our all to the benefit of life and its immortal continuity.

This ultimately delivers on the moral issues posed both by Buddhism (enlightenment from grasping egotistical desires) and monotheism (leading a virtuous sinless life in the eyes of God). Furthermore, we learn that morality is a local process that is a functional part of a vital society, increasing intra-social cooperation to aid social vitality and inter-social dominance, but the universe is in no way a moral dictatorship - a cosmic stage for God to give humanity a moral test of judgment and faith in religion under pain of eternal damnation. We also learn that sin is not all bad and virtue is not all good - natural change involves both defection and cooperation mediated through astute tests of trust, in a climate of strategic dissimulation - Machiavellian intelligence - which gives us the complexity and diverse diplomatic survival niches of human society, accompanied by degrees of both altruistic punishment and discerning forgiveness.

When it comes to the meaning of life, we need to realize that, although we are mortal, sexuality provides the ultimate immortal altruistic antidote to individual mortality. Sexuality transcends parthenogenesis, inducing an almost endless source of variety through genetic recombination. While we are individually mortal, we are part of the immortal enchanted web of life, generating new forms of conscious being through sexual reproduction, in which our own genetic identity provides an equal half share along with that of our sexual partner.

We also need to learn from nature about our original virtue. The evolution of emotional responsiveness in mammals has enabled the formation of societies whose mutual altruism extends far beyond narrow kinship boundaries. Although we are capable of selfish expedience, jealousy, anger and even violent hatred, we are also capable of sexual, familial, comradely and selfless love and empathy for others in plight and feel most at home in a climate of belonging, in which we are a part of a mutual fabric of caring support - an evolutionary endowment of being small bands of people surviving together in the wilderness.

Some of the finest attributes of caring and sensitivity to others, as well as creative art, music and family life, come from the astute processes of sexual courtship, particularly those of women astutely choosing good partners to father their children, given the huge investment of the human female in pregnancy, birth, lactation and early child-rearing. Thus, rather than being lustful sinners to the core, we are a palette of emotions, which in the balance, provide evidence of our original virtue, which has sustained us into compassionate existence in the world of tooth and claw.

Beyond the narrow confines of sexual reproduction and parenting, to fulfill our place in the sacred web, while we are here, we also need to cherish and replenish the Earth in its natural diversity, because, although individual incarnation is mortal, the passage of the generations of life is perennially immortal, so long as the Earth shall live and be hospitable to life. We also gain fulfillment in life by playing our part in the pursuit of understanding, social caring, and creative expression of our cultures so that society and the world becomes, at least in some small way, a better place, through our presence in it. All of these provide the essential meaning of life as a creative process.

The key learning point is that sexuality is the generator of all complex life and absolutely necessary for us to come into the world as incarnate sentient beings. We trade off mortality for life's complexity and abundance. Without recombinational meiosis we could never have become complex multi-celled organisms. Sex is thus sacred and sacrosanct in the passage of the generations. While God is an uncertain proposition, sex is our certain foundation, and the key to our becoming and belonging.

Sexual incarnation might seem to be an endless round of menial animalistic reproduction, but it is far more than this. It has an intrinsic psychic dimension, because each conscious being is a novel evolutionary manifestation of the processes which invoke sentient consciousness - the ultimate mystery of existence. At the same time we are collectively evolving into a state of deepening awareness of life the universe and everything when we step back form the pressures of trying to feed ourselves to survive and the distractions of internecine inter-social and inter-religious strife. This coming to an inner knowledge of the world may be the key to the cosmic destiny of the universe - Gnosis or 'knowing'.

We can seek spiritual fulfillment in a variety of ways, many of which are quite direct, from meditation to psychedelic reverie. These avenues frequently lead to full-blown mystical experiences of a religiously formative nature. We can learn from these experiences, and they form the sang raal of spiritual experience from which all the major religious traditions have been borne. We therefore have a conscious avenue to explore the ultimate mysteries of existence and need to deal with these with the same spirit of open mindedness that is the hallmark of scientific discovery.

Ultimately we come to the cosmic question. What is the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, if, although it is in principle immortal, it will nevertheless ultimately be extinguished by the solar system being consumed by the Sun, or the eventual universal heat death or big crunch. There are two types of answer to this question.

One explanation lies in the universality of cosmic consciousness - the idea that all conscious beings are a manifestation of the cosmic mind, bundled up in a constrained form in each mortal biological being. Clearly the biota, with their complex brains, are the one place where we know complex intelligent conscious life can become manifest, but our experience of the world comes entirely and directly through our subjective consciousness, so it also appears to have an existential status as fundamental as the universe. Existential reality thus appears to be a complementarity between subjective consciousness and the objective physical world, just as wave and particle aspects are in physics. The brain processes supporting subjective consciousness appear to be highly unstable whole brain states attuned to be arbitrarily sensitive to changing circumstances in the world around us. The brain appears to use edge-of chaos dynamics and may also use quantum entanglement among brain wave excitations in these uncertain states, enabling our subjective conscious experience of free-will  to influence the fate of the universe around us through our actions.  There may even be forms of entanglement over space-time between the conscious experiences of disparate sentient beings similar to the forms of entanglement that we have discovered in quantum phenomena. Hidden quantum entanglement within an eternal universe at large has also been proposed to explain the nature of elapsing time that is key to the changing events around us in real time.

The other explanation lies the eternal relativistic conception, that life, in addition to being a perennially immortal passage of the generations in elapsing time, once it has come to climax is eternally present in space-time, which is itself eternal, extending from cosmological alpha to omega, so the fact that conscious life has come into being in the universe during some epoch mid-way through its evolution gives life its eternal 'meaning' and 'purpose' in a universe becoming conscious of itself. Religious believers may thus seek the eternal in an 'afterlife' because we sense that, in the completion of the universe, all we have done and will ever do is imprinted and encapsulated in this eternal nature of existence. The never-ending nature of heavenly bliss is basically a vision of this eternal unchanging reality.

Nature, Violence, Consciousness, Sexuality and World Religion

Nature, Violence, Consciousness, Sexuality and World Religion

This article is an unveiling expose of the lethal fallacies that underlie the religious traditions which between them are followed by a majority of people on this planet, which between them constitute one of the most principal threats to the future survival of humanity.

Reflowering the Western Spiritual Paradigm

Genesis forms a counterpoint to apocalypse. The Bible is a bow, the Crucifixion being the arrow of violence,

suspended between Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life re-emerging in Revelation.
Both ends of the bow are verdant - immortality in paradise. Apocalypse is the [bridal] unveiling reunion.

Since the Renaissance, Western cultures have seen themselves as the central crucible of cultural liberation, scientific discovery, democratic emancipation and social progress. However, underlying the world view of much of Western culture is a Christian notion of an ordered universe manufactured by a fatherly creator God, in which worldly affairs are but a foretaste of an afterlife in heaven or hell, which despite the advances of modern science into every dimension of reality from the origin of the universe to the human genome, is still believed in by a significant proportion of people.

Either this is frankly a collective delusion, or it has some genuine basis in the unfolding nature of existential reality. There are of course potential evolutionary and biological explanations. Propensity for religious experience could be a serendipitous consequence of the close proximity between the amygdala and temporal lobes - parts of the brain evoking ecstatic emotional fulfillment and intense semantic significance. Conservative religion could also be a quirk of evolution of the brain to make us susceptible to beliefs which facilitate larger more dominant social groupings, through envisaging a moral deity looking over our affairs, which serves to reduce intra-social strife in favour of ascendance over other societies, something which is clearly evident in both Christian and Islamic history and cultural attitudes.

Our spiritual and religious roots underpinning this world view, contradict its Renaissance ideals in many ways. The Christian tradition, far from being the basis of democracy, or scientific discovery, sought throughout the dark ages to impose an often corrupt totalitarian conservatism on its population, through internal crusade, witch hunts and inquisition, even denying its followers access to the very religious texts it claimed were the divine word of God, such as the Bible itself. Christianity is not originally Western either, but comes from a mixing of cultural ideas stemming from more ancient cultures strewn across the Middle East, fused with some lingering beliefs dating back to old Europe. It entered the Western institutional mainstream only when Constantine converted to the Christian faith after blood-curdling and obsessive episodes of martyrdom under emperors such as Nero.

Nevertheless the Western cultural tradition holds on to a notion of enlightenment based on Christian notions of brotherly love, turning the other cheek, forgiveness of sin, charitable kindness to others and a belief that our actions in the world have a moral and spiritual dimension, in which they will eventually be held to account in the life hereafter. This despite the fact that its priesthood frequently hasn't adhered to these principles and Christian societies have frequently engaged in genocidal war and ruthless conquest of other cultures.

If we hold up a mirror akin to that of scientific discovery to the Western religious tradition, many of the central tenets of Christianity look to be contrived beliefs concocted by early church fathers to craft a neo-pagan religion in frank denial of its roots based on cobbling together early orthodox Christian teachings with existing popular 'pagan' beliefs turning Jesus from a Jewish prophet into a born-again only begotten Son of God and Mary from an incidental player into a replacement for Isis and Diana.

Many of the central beliefs look to be fantastic fantasies with no basis in natural reality, or social history. The Trinity of Father, Son and a gender-exorcised Holy Ghost is a polytheistic contrivance alien to the formless abstract Jewish God. The ideas of the physical resurrection and virgin birth are biologically ridiculous fantasies reflecting an attempt to weld early Jewish Christian practices with the popular cults of Isis, Mithra and other deities, from Diana to Adonis. Neither Christmas nor Easter are genuine dates because the former was chosen to coincide with the solstice festival of Mithra and the latter with the fertility festival of Ostaria or Ēostre, a kind of European Ishtar, for which the Easter egg still stands in memory of.

The idea of a 'loving' yet vengeful father God, who is prepared to sacrifice his 'only begotten son', so that our sins would be forgiven if we believe in him looks like a throwback to neolithic thinking. The Eucharist celebrating the gruesome sacrifice of eating his flesh and drinking his blood - the central soma and sangre of Christian communion - is likewise a cannibalistic rite disconnected from Jewish tradition. Is this neolithic sacrificial principle that "without shedding of blood there is no remission from sin" any part of a genuine creator deity's modus operandi, or is it a dark carry over from customs of human sacrifice? Isn't the sacrificial principle that Jesus has to die to save us from our sins something from the dark days of older jealous tribal totem deities and those seeking to placate natural fertility, where sacrifice is deemed to renew the harvest by returning blood and bone to the fields?

There are deep confusions here about what the nature of a creator God would be. Why would a God which created the whole universe and all of nature in the magical diversity we now know it to be then set up a narrow moral human paradigm and a system of diabolical punishment in the afterlife? We know from nature that all niches, from plant to animals which consume them, from herbivores to carnivores which devour them, and from hosts to diseases which parasitize and sometimes kill them, is an integral part of the climax diversity of life. Life thus transcends morality. Moral systems have meaning only in so far as they emerge as a natural part of social evolution of a species to permit social integration. Therefore any God which created life as we know it would defeat his own purpose by ending it all in a simplistic day of judgment over human moral issues.

There are also deep confusions about the nature of the heroic messiah, with Jesus becoming the only begotten Son of God, who then drips blood endlessly on every crucifix and every church statue, despite the fact that it is 2000 years since it was claimed he would return in power in the same generation as those standing before him.

How do we rationalize whether there is actually a core of genuine understanding in this tradition and separate the wheat of some genuine knowledge of our inner life and destiny, from closely held, but completely fallacious religious notions, which hold us back from discovering what conscious life is all about?

Jesus occupies a central place in Western belief, yet his life and sayings are somewhat contradictory, between apparently genuine source gnostic sayings such as those of the Gospel of Thomas "I am not your master but you have drunk from the bubbling stream I have measured out", to the synoptics, which have been later overlaid by the mythical narratives of the authors, claiming Peter acknowledging Jesus is the chosen messiah and ornamenting the history with manifestly fabled accounts, including the Bethlehem birth narrative.

None of this goes anywhere towards notions like the only begotten Son of God, assumption into heaven or bodily resurrection. Nor did Mary have a significant role in Jesus' mission, except perhaps at the beginning in Cana. Later Jesus was to ignore his mother and brothers when they sought him and in John his brother derided him, although later James and desposyni, or blood family of Jesus became the first Jewish Christian following. Mary in a patriarchal moral twist was only later elevated to semi-divine status by the Pauline church fathers to overturn Magdalen's sexually questionable position as Jesus' emissary and complicit partner - in his own words "everywhere my name is mentioned they shall also speak of you".

Jesus' mission also launched him into an ambiguous position, encompassing both the firebrand apocalyptic desert Nabi of John the Baptist and even Zealot viewpoints regarding the establishment, to indulgent fertility worship, from his anointing by a woman, through his mission being supported by the women 'out of their very substance', to the women of Galilee coming down to see him off, and the motifs of the true vine, the winebibber and turning water into wine, all of which echo Dionysian rites, as does his advent on the epiphany and the nature miracles, such as calming the storm and walking on water. This is why the Jewish mainstream see Jesus as a false messiah and why he is referred to as such in the Talmud.

Although some of these pagan notions may be later synoptic ornamentations, it is consistent with Jesus attempting to make a very innovative messianic cross-cultural synthesis of the prevailing beliefs in Israel and neighbouring Nabatea, which was at its cultural peak at the time, and goes a good distance to explaining why Christianity became so popular in the pagan world, although this was also partly a redrafting by people from Paul on, in terms of a miraculous semi-god in the traditions of Adonis, Ba'al, Dionysus, Melcarth and Mithra.

The traditional notion of the Jewish messiah is not a man-god but a human hero that brings about an epoch of long-term future goodness, associated with David, Solomon and Cyrus the Mede, who assisted the Jewish return, and later in such human figures as the rebel warlord Bar Cochba a century after Jesus and the apostate Shabbati Zevi in the middle ages. Traditionally a mashiach is 'anointed' by a high priest rather than a woman of dubious virtue. The Christian idea of an only begotten messianic Son of God is a complete breakaway from this tradition into fertility worship heroes.

Looking deeper into this situation, one can ask in terms of the cultural stream of consciousness and wider religious traditions, are there underlying patterns or archetypes, in the sense of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, which have driven the advent of not only Christianity but other heroic religious movements, and are these a valid expression of subterranean currents in evolving human life and consciousness?

Central to many aspects of Jesus' mission was the idea of apocalypse - that world history was hurtling towards a tumultuous falling-out, ending in an ultimate clash between good and evil in which the day of judgment would come about. Originally Satan had been merely a kind of tester and the after life in old Hebrew ideas was just the underworld, or Sheol. However, Zoroastrian notions of cosmic renovation by trial of fire in the conflict between the light of Ahura Mazda and the ignorance of Angra Mainyu became the model for later Jewish notions of the day of judgment and the division between those going to heaven and those purged in the fires of hell. Jewish prophets by the time of Zechariah had adopted this apocalyptic view in various forms, also shared by the Essenes and other desert ascetics.

It is this view of tumultuous apocalypse in a free fall to an Armageddon-like day of judgment, an unveiling in which all the covers will be thrown off reality, that haunts us down through history to this very day.

At the opposite end of the Biblical epoch we have two very quaint, absorbing mythical origin stories, the 'Elohistic sabbatical creation and the Yahwistic Eden story, between them giving us complementary views of our mythical beginnings in Genesis, in what may have originally been separate and conflicting Northern Israelite and Southern Judaic accounts.

Genesis forms a counterpoint to apocalypse. The Bible is a bow, suspended between Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life we see reemerging in Revelation and such works as the Book of Enoch. Both ends of the bow are verdant - immortality in paradise. At the centre is the Crucifixion, the arrow of violence, the war of dark and light. The apocalypse is, in its own word, the [bridal] unveiling.

The sabbatical creation is a very beautiful iconic account, but it has manifest contradictions which could come about only in a flat earth view, in which the sun, moon and stars are little more than earthly features on the firmament above. The plants get created, not only before the animals, which are made in steps from sea creatures to land, but also before the sun, moon and stars, clearly an astronomically impossible and naive earth-centric viewpoint. Nevertheless it is this charming brief mythical account which creationists and intelligent design proponents are prepared to place against all the predisposing evidence of nature, genetics and evolution showing a dangerous and slavish literary idolatry to the text, turning it from a charming mythical allegory into a fundamentalist confrontation with nature.

This situation deserves a moment's thought. Evolution is not just an alternative hypothesis to creation. The notion of creation is a two page mythical opening account written around 500 BC that was never intended to be a literal scientific description. The growth of scientific knowledge has taken place despite relentless opposition from the church from Galileo on down, one of whose turning points was the discovery of the ovum, which meant that children were not just the seed of men planted in their mother's wombs, rendering Jesus' virgin birth genetically impossible.

Each step of discovery of the natural universe has come through overthrowing preconceived notions by diligent searching to find patterns that completely transcend naive ideas, from the quantum theories of the forces of nature and the cosmological evolution of the universe, to the intricate mechanisms of molecular biology. Evolution has been confirmed in action in diverse phenomena, from disease resistance to cancer. Its imprint is clear in all the genetic evidence that has emerged from molecular sequencing including the human genome project and its offshoots. We now understand the evolutionary tree of life in intricate genetic detail, yet Christian advocates are still relentlessly trying to subvert the educational system, by demanding that creationist and intelligent design ideas be taught alongside evolution. Not only does this violate scientific integrity, but it runs against the command not to make graven images of Genesis 1.

Moreover, there is nothing we can find in the miasma of cosmological phenomena we now know the universe to contain, which in any way suggests it was externally created by a separate personality, or deity. The very idea of creation is a human concept to do with manufacture and the most elegant complex system in the universe, the human brain, is self-generated interactively in embryogenesis in a way which it is impossible to 'create' by external manufacture. Thus the jealous, father god looks increasingly like an outmoded cosmological concept, neither necessary, nor sufficient to explain the material universe, nor our subjective consciousness within it. Moreover it is a sexually imbalanced notion, possessing the all-to-human attributes of personality, sexual jealousy, vengefulness and forgiveness but only in masculine form, when the diversity of life is founded on female and male sexes interacting in complementation together.

The Eden account has a different resonance, declaring many of the jealous and vengeful aspects of Yahweh right at the outset and portraying the whole of human history as a fall from the grace of paradise in what is also a sexual falling out between woman and man, in which patriarchal obedience of wives to husbands, amid sexual undertones, through Eve's seduction of Adam, via the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil at the behest of the serpent, causing mortality, the travail and pain of childbirth, and living dust to dust by the sweat of the brow, cast out of the gates of paradise by a flaming sword.

This theme of falling out has deep cultural resonances, running right back to the emergence of agriculture around 10,000 BC and the transition to patriarchal culture we also see in Genesis in the transition from the ways of Laban to those of Jacob. It is a theme which one could easily understand in terms of a recurring creation myth retelling our falling out from integration with nature, as gatherer-hunters, to form patriarchal civilizations, amid the tumult of war and rumours of war. In a more general sense, it is an account of the human stream of consciousness, of future shock under rapid cultural change, heading inexorably towards a tumultuous and uncertain denouement.

There is another deep theme in the Fall from Eden towards apocalypse and that is in the discovery process of consciousness itself and the idea that all the covers will be thrown off reality, rather than through a naive innocent view of paradise, nor through a glass darkly in the intervening period, but in the end, face to face with reality, we will discover what existence is all about, very much as the explosion of the scientific world view has brought about in the last few centuries.

However apocalypse also comes with dire warnings of tumult of the war of civilization and belief system against civilization and belief system and of the Earth being shaken into a state of genocidal triage in the process, in which a third of all living things expire.

Many fundamentalist Christians believe they can shake off the entire natural order in a mythical rapture, in which the elect all float up into the heavens and reunite with God casting away the entire beauty and complexity of the natural realm as little more than a husk or mere detritus of a flawed realm, despite the fact that we now know the 'heavens' are the astronomical vacuum of outer space lethal to planetary life and not a simple firmament of God in which winged angels can fly effortlessly between the clouds. This brings out the worst in Christian fundamentalism taking no responsibility for caring for this 'transient' world or how far it is abused in the dominion of man over nature, while looking to a potential armageddon of 'the late planet Earth' in bringing about the advent of the kingdom of God.

Islam like Christianity has just such a distorted fantasy life. The prophet, despite his own remonstrations about Jesus' and Mary's deification, has become effectively deified as the 'last prophet' so that Bahai's, Ahmadis and others are persecuted and killed for believing in a more recent prophetic figure and others are summarily killed even for merely depicting the prophet's face. Yet Muslims also look to a final victory of Islam in the day of judgment and some would hasten to bring it on by military and political strategies. Shi'ites believe the Mahdi, a Muslim messianic figure of the second coming will appear and teach Jesus, while some Sunnis demur that there is no Mahdi but Jesus, confirming the continuity of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

While the Christian heaven is populated with sexless angelic winged beings, the Muslim paradise is crafted exclusively for the sexual pleasure of men, with 72 black eyed virgins made anew each morning to wait on a man's every whim, let alone their many wives from the earthly realm. This sexually imbalanced patriarchal view is a biologically untenable contradiction as are the winged angels of Christianity. The idolatrous devotion to the book by fundamentalists on both sides reduces any wisdom either religion might have to naught.

Rather than a rapture, what we are witnessing is a dangerous transition in which human impacts on the planet are becoming more and more damaging and the combination of sheer human population pressure, combined with reckless consumption of the Earth's non-renewable resources are precipitating climate change which could raise the oceans and make many areas inhospitable.

At the same time we are destroying natural habitats on a global basis so that we are coming to witness the sixth great extinction of the diversity of life, not at the hands of a supernova, a volcanic eruption or an asteroid or cometary impact but simply at the hands of humanity's unrestrained lack of long-term sustainable outlook.

It remains unclear whether humanity will have a soft landing and be able to make a satisfactory transition to a sustainable global culture or whether our lack of long-term foresight and short-term greed will lead to a hard landing with dire consequences for our future survival.

So one could say that the apocalyptic paradigm is a real warning to our existential condition and that the messianic heroic quest is a journey we all need to take to avoid the hard landing and bring about the sustainable epoch of planet earth for the future generations of humanity.

Could Christianity survive in any recognizable form in this situation? The Christian church was meant to be a steward to guard the Earth until the second coming, but what has actually happened is that the deification of Jesus has been used as a token to perpetuate the reign of the church and effectively prevent any transition to a new epoch, by making the church the permanent guardian of a pagan fallacy that sees this supposedly deified figure caught in an idolatrous trap, dripping with blood in churches throughout the world.

This means no real flesh and blood messiah male or female can hope to bring about a natural paradigm shift to the sustainable age without overthrowing this pagan fallacy, designed by the clergy to ensure the perpetual reign of Christianity, in contradiction to the throwing of the covers off reality in the apocalyptic awakening into the epoch of the tree of sustainable life.

If the Western spiritual tradition were redeemable, it would become a very different entity, celebrating the living presence in each and every one of its participants, in restoring and protecting the natural diversity of paradise on Earth for the future generations of humanity and of all life, while practicing the ethic of selfless love for all in bringing about the blessed condition of existence we all know is possible.

Rather than lamenting the blood of the savior, it is the life blood of the generations, celebrated in the the key rites of passage of birth, loving partnership and passing away and the passage of the seasons and their bounties, with the reflowering and sustenance of living diversity forming the natural cycle of celebration. Ironically this brings us back closer to the Jewish mother tradition in which spirituality is a vehicle for celebrating the ongoing life and life-blood of the people to go forth and multiply, to cherish the Earth and replenish it, rather than original sin, sexual guilt and hungering for a heaven which sloughs away our biological existence.

Its natural sacraments, rather than the empty cannibalistic vessels of soma and sangre encompass the diverse living visionary sacraments of the biosphere, from the sacred mushroom teonanactl, flesh of the gods, through San Pedro and peyote, to ayahuasca the vine of the soul.

It is also much more sexy, because conscious sentient life of the human species is sine qua non essentially sexual. While our individual incarnations are mortal, the sexual web of the generations of life is immortal. Rather than the patriarchal eternal sky god exhorting women to be faithful to men, the feminine 'goddess' aspect of spirituality again becomes ascendant and sacred, because it is the females who bear live young and nurture the next generation into life. Rather than rejecting sexuality as part of the flawed material realm of bestial lust, as Christians do, based on the fallacy of original sin, sex is the central mystery of immortality of the generations. So spirituality and sexuality come together as one, and in the place of the bonds of patriarchal marriage, we have astute choices of loving partnership in liberation between women and men.

This is why the Song of Songs made it way into the Bible even to become the holy of holies, the inner sanctum of the mystical communion with the divine, because it contains within it the secret coda of immortality in fertility.

Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:

for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh,

and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing;

whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

The emphasis is on a fulfilling and beneficial incarnation in this lifetime, through good actions nurturing the world around us, leaving it wherever possible a better place than we came into while celebrating the best experiences of life, rather than looking to an imaginary afterlife for redemption without taking full responsibility for this life. The emphasis is also on the original evolutionary virtue within us, that makes us able to love and to be in love, and to compassionately care for others we are not even related to, rather than the disabling fallacy of original sin, which leaves us as broken beings, helpless without the imagined savior's intervention. This is a critical phase of our cosmic coming of age in planetary awareness, in taking responsibility for our own fate and our destiny in the universe.

On the Epiphany (left). Reciting the anointing with Jane (top right)
Celebrating the Millennium Eve dawn on Mt. Scopus (lower right).

To fulfill this transition in terms of a rite of passage to the new epoch, I journeyed to Jerusalem with Jane over the second Millennium to pronounce the epoch of the Tree of Life in sexual reunion at a 12 day workshop at the Academy of Jerusalem, with the warm support of liberal Jewish hosts, which included an all-night vigil with 100 or so people on Mt. Scopus on the night of Millennium Eve and a second rite of passage on the Epiphany (my birthday), from the ascension site on the Mt. of Olives, via Gethsemane, pronouncing the opening of the Gates of Mercy and sacred reunion in the Song of Songs at the Wailing Wall.

Apocalypsia Celebration Millennium Eve (YouTube)
Opening the Gates of Mercy on the Epiphany

Gaia Anointing
Video

The spirit of God is upon us
the spirit of Gaia is within us
because they hath anointed us
to sing good tidings unto the meek
they hath sent us to bind up the brokenhearted
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and the opening of prison to them that are bound

to proclaim the acceptable year
to comfort all that mourn
to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion
in Palestine, in in Sidon, Syria, Arabia and the world
to give unto them beauty for ashes
the oil of joy for mourning

the garments of love for the spirit of heaviness
that they might be called trees of compassion
the planting of the divine
that all might be glorified
in the abundance of wisdom

and we shall renew the old wastes
and we shall restore the former desolations
and we shall repair the waste cities
the desolations of many generations

they hath clothed us with the garments of salvation
and I as a bridegroom decketh myself with ornaments
and I as a bride adorneth myself with jewels
for as the Earth bringeth forth her bud
and as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth
so shall harmony and fulfillment spring forth
among all the nations

this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Is there a pattern connecting events which leads to the unfolding of an apocalyptic stream of consciousness? There is nothing in the scientific description of reality which confirms or denies the possibility of conscious experiences having a collective dimension in relation to fundamental changes in our planetary situation over time epochs.

One interpretation of the evolution of conscious life forms is that this is the sentient cosmological conscious of the universe coming to know itself through us knowing ourselves - that our individual conscious experiences are capable of entering into a rapport with a more oceanic conscious sensitivity. Many of the elements of Eastern mysticism point towards a state of contemplation, or samadhi, in which individual consciousness becomes one with archetypal, or cosmic consciousness.

A central aspect of the evolution of sentient beings may be to fully explore and experience such states, which may become a web of conscious experience reverberating throughout space-time connecting generations vastly separated in both space and time into one self-fulfilling experience of the universe compassionately knowing itself, even as if we are the 'mind of God' becoming complete in our own liberation. In this sense it is the biota of the universe which become the pinnacle of molecular complexity and conscious sensitivity, so it is in the consciousness of the biota, rather than the heavens that we should expect to find the mysterium tremendum of the 'godhead'.

The existential cosmos appears to be a complementation between the objective physical universe composed of quanta, atoms, molecules and their accumulation into biological and geological forms, and into astronomical bodies of planets, stars and galaxies, and the subjective stream of consciousness in all of us, which is subjective rather than objective, and thus complements all objective phenomena, and stands as the central Cartesian theatre of existence, without which we would never have access to experience the physical universe, despite appearing to be merely a manifestation of our fragile, excitable brains.

It is this conscious aspect of a complementary reality that has driven spiritual and religious paradigms and their quest for meaning in a conscious life which might continue to exist after physical death, as well as the phantasmagorias of heaven and hell, with all their delights and furies. It is the conscious dimension in which religions find their supernatural plane of existence and which makes people prepared to die for their religion as martyrs, and unfortunately in our age, to kill innocent victims in suicide bombings.

In the dance of Tantra, Shiva as the inert conscious aspect engages with the feminine Shakti spawning in the dance of maya of illusion all the material phenomena of existence. Likewise in the Tao of nature the feminine receptive yin complements the masculine creative yang.

Both subjective consciousness and the notion of intentional (free) will remain enigmatic in the objective scientific description of reality and it is through the agency of these two that our conscious experiences of intentional life and our accountability to fate unfold. The universe is neither random nor predestined. Future states remain indeterminate through quantum uncertainty and the unpredictability of chaotic processes. While, in the quantum world, all outcomes remain probability superpositions, in our conscious experience, Schrodinger's cat is either alive or dead. This suggests that subjective consciousness plays the role of collapsing the wave function of superimposed states of the universe, reducing the probability multiverses of quantum reality to the historical process of perceived reality we experience.

Consciousness thus looks like a cosmological phenomenon, in which we are evolving participants. If there is hand-shaking quantum entanglement between future and past, as quantum experiments like the Wheeler delayed choice experiment imply, it is even possible subjective consciousness may form an eternal web throughout space-time, extending even after the immortal web of life on Earth may have become extinguished, as the sun swells into a red giant, heralding the demise of our solar system. Whether or not humanity spreads beyond our solar system to spawn the galaxy, the consciousness we experience may thus take us right to the core of the cosmological condition.

Healing the Western spiritual tradition in a reflowering of nature could become the pivotal complement to the scientific revolution, in bringing about a sustainable paradigm enabling sentient consciousness to come of age in its discovery of the deepest nature of cosmic existence, but only if we can escape the bondage of our spiritual tradition to the long expired persona of Jesus and the frankly pagan fallacies of the Son of God caught forever dripping blood on the sacrificial cross and the neolithic notion of a father god who saves by killing his only begotten son, as if the good of redemption from sin can come only through weighing out a lethal dose of homicide.

But is this a realistic scenario? Can we really redeem an utterly flawed neolithic blood cult, in which we have dressed some of the more admirable virtues of selfless and brotherly love? Wouldn't it be better to just start afresh with a new beginning? That depends on whether the spiritual tradition can let go of its rigid stranglehold on our perceptions of reality and open to an evolutionary transformation of its own identity, in the nascent unfolding universe.

Reproductive Passion, Tantric Completion and Polyamory

My second menage-a-trois was a time of both sexual adventure and domestic bliss.

Sexual Paradox - our website

Polyamory as the Spice of Fidelity

I was a shy, only child become a willowy male who met a mysterious beatnik American expatriate girl who was way ahead of me in the love stakes, having already had a string of heady relationships and sexual experiences, when I was still a gangling somewhat jealous virgin.

We married on the somewhat paradoxical basis that she could have other lovers should she wish later - an option encouraged by her father. Things were relatively idyllic for three years and we had our first two offspring, a son and a daughter.

Then she fell in love with one of our best friends. she was the experienced, confident, independent party and I was the anxious, dependent, paranoid party and it dragged our relationship down to the point where we split up for a short period, just as I began to have my first exploratory polyamorous relationship with a younger music student, who was a brilliant pianist.

My first double partners

Then the three of us came together again partly as a way of keeping the children together and looking after them as a family and we lived for a year and a half as a menage-a-trios. This led to a crazy period in the seventies where we held open free love house to a number of our hippie friends and pursued an ever increasing number of casual and intimate relationships, in a kind of race towards the full sexual charisma of loving or being loved by just about everyone we knew. Those we the innocent days when the worst disease we suffered was genital herpes.

It was at this point that I met Christine and she became an integral partner in my second double marriage, and we proceeded to have one, and later two, children together. My wife as the 'leading lady' was highly ethical about her relationships with both the other women and relations were friendly and conducive to a resourceful and positive family environment for our children. Four and a half happy adventurous, but chaotic, years ensued in relationship terms, in which we brought up the children together while pursuing a variety of strange affairs that eventually led to the breakup of all three of us.

My wife became involved with another of our close associates and became pregnant to him with whom she later had a second child all of whom have become an integral part of our extended family of adult offspring. Christine also became involved with another associate, just as I was heading off alone on my first sabbatical to wander India as a sadhu, and do research in Europe and the US - the ultimate full circle back to solo existence.


The simultaneous split ups with my two familial partners were very painful, but we agreed above all to look after the children together, with them able to come and go freely between us on neighbouring blocks of land, on an equal time-shared basis, after I returned from my year overseas. This kept the overall family intact and enabled it to become an even larger extended family, all of whom share a deep bond of love and commitment to one another, even to the third generation.

I continued to be polygynous by choice and entered into a third double relationship for 15 years or so with Christine and another partner. This was also fraught with tension caused by the two partners' reluctant and at best partial acceptance of one another, even when we sometimes had other male partners in common, leading after a couple of years to each having separate domains with me going to and fro between. This is an endless problem of polygynous marriages.


Eventually, after Christine and I had my fourth child together, my relationship with my other partner ended in overt terms, only to become a long drawn out smouldering clandestine affair - a decision I made after continuing tension, made to confirm my commitment to the partner with whom I was rearing a family, while still being faithful to the principle of being lovers with my other partner, as opportunity provided.

Eventually this situation led to separation, but was followed by a consensual open partnership with Christine, where it was possible to negotiate to have an outside sexual relationship, but only if ring fenced with total care for our health, by having 'pre-nuptial' STD tests of any potential outside partners to protect existing partners who could be harmed. This was an essential reaction to the HIV era and something we have never been prepared to compromise on since for all the casual habits of swingers, the tortured lifestyle choices of devoted polyamorists, let alone the unprotected clandestine affairs of more conventional people.

I have since had a small number of outside relationships to further a creative psychic and physical relationship with another person, not for the fulfillment of polyamorous sexual desires, but to live out fully an intimate creative relationship with a member of the opposite sex with whom I have had an emerging engagement.

The critical point in favour of open polyamory is that it makes it possible to be honest that you are entertaining an affair and to gain some acceptance of it from ones existing partner, establishing some trust around what is often a painful situation if only one partner is actively seeking a new relationship. Conventional monogamy has the almost inescapable pitfall that it leads to deceit and betrayal in the affairs of love and often the health of the affected parties, leading to divorce settlements, and acrimonious contests over custody.


Finally, for the last seven years, Christine and I have entered into a period of creative monogamy, in which we are each giving our full energy to our sexual relationship with one another and making it into a passionate saga of unforgettable experiences, whose ultimate peaks we are continually in the process of scaling to mutual oblivion. This has proved for both of us in our sixties to be the unleashed sexual high point of our whole lives. I am still inherently polygynous, as most men are liable to sew wild oats by evolutionary trait, but I sublimate this, through using mild pornography as Tantric exercises towards another bout of creative sexual reunion with the beloved.

Reproductive Passionate Love as the Holy Grail of Eros

We have a highly heterosexual view of sexuality that prizes Tantric complementation of female and male energies as manifesting the full completion with the alien exotic other. This is not just sex as erogenous gratification, but more of a cosmic fusion and annihilation, in which both the woman and the man play an active creative part in the inner mounting flame of love, as forthright as Krishna is to Radha and as topsy turvy as Kali is to Shiva.

Willendorff Venus meets Green Man

It also holds, as its full quintessence, reproductive fertilization, and the implicit capacity of sexuality to emanate the life force both psychically, energetically and in the capacity to get physically pregnant and to give birth to new life.

It worships the sexual differences between the two sexes, as fully manifesting the complementary nature of the Tao in its totality between wave and particle, mind and body, female and male, chaos and order and so on.

While it is true that many of the Tantric temples of India and Nepal, such as a the Lakshman temple at Khajuraho, have lower freezes depicting all the sexual postures and erotic perversions of which humanity is capable, from bestiality to anal and oral sex, the higher pinnacles depict the union of Shakti and Shiva, not just of two unisex people, gay, lesbian or coincidentally heterosexual, performing any act from sodomy to cunnilingus without discrimination, but the intimate complementarity of female and male cosmic principles, in reproductive lingam-yoni coitus, often surrounded by a supporting group of attendants.

Khajuraho upper and lower friezes

In today's epoch of consenting adult eros and the pursuit of simple gratification by any means, there is only a limited difference between heterosexual and homosexual eroticism because both engage the same spectrum of perverse erotic acts unrelated to the reproductive quest. There is a poetic irony in that heterosexual pornography is as engaged as gay male voyeurism in non-reproductive sexuality, from exploitative deep-throat fellatio to sometimes violent sodomy, as an expression of male sexual power.

It may well be that this is ancient - that some women throughout history have been prepared to subject themselves to any form of sexual concourse to give their man everything he desires and thus to hold on to him by letting him possess them utterly and completely, but it is rarely for their own sexual fulfillment or sexual autonomy that they do this. Female eros and particularly astute female reproductive choice takes a very different direction of its own, more likely to very discretely seduce and attract the most genetically endowed and capable man in sight on her own terms of ecstatic enticement.

Eros only makes sense if integrated into creative relationship with the deeper unifying truth of the fusion of the complementary principles of which the universe is composed in the burgeoning of the diversity of new life. This doesn't mean neglecting contraception, or denying women the right to reproductive choice. In fact it is founded on the principle that women, as the principal bearers of new life, must have reproductive sovereignty over their own autonomy and a degree of sexual choice that can't be made subject to male control.

The strategic preservation of female reproductive choice is why females have evolved to possess an ecstatic orgasm even though it is unnecessary for fertilization, why ovulation is concealed, and why women have become sexually attractive at all phases of their reproductive cycle.

It is because my beloved partner has pendulant flowing breasts which I have seen and tasted running with milk and an aromatically delightful copulin-filled vagina and I am fertilizing her fullness with my manhood to my oblivion with all the poly-orgasmic manifestations of the abundance of life flowing forth that affirm the sexual complementation is complete. It is also because the sexuality is implicitly reproductive that it fosters long-lasting meaningful relationships, related to family, the passage of the generations and thus the immortality of ongoing life.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing;
whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

It is not self-love, or the love of self-natured sexuality, which is forever limited, because it ultimately seeks sameness and is thus narcissistic, even when one or other in a uni-sex relationship assumes the stylized roles of butch or doe, but the worship of the complete other in the overflowing fullness of their natural abundance.

The seeking of the complementary 'other' is at the evolutionary source of all sexuality, because in sexual reproduction we communicate only half our genes in an intermingling with the other's, and it is through the genetic differences between the two parents that each generation gains its adaptive strength and resistance to disease. This is why women are pheromonally attracted to men with complementary histocompatibility genes and resist the incestuous advances of close male relatives.

It is also a completion, by contrast with the sexually stereotypic extremes of male-exclusive or female exclusive sexuality, which despite its pretensions to a more overarching gender encompassing identity, tends to extremes of runaway male promiscuity or female nesting.

"There's a joke in the gay community that goes like this -
'What does a lesbian bring on her second date?' - 'A U-Haul'.
'And what does a gay man bring on his second date?' - "What second date?'

Reproductive passionate love is not in any way homophobic - it has no need to need to be for the very reason that it is complete, but it IS all-consumingly and overflowingly heterophilic, as Tao and Tantra, and as the Holy of Holies - the Song of Songs declare:

Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:
for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.