Non-fiction / (none) (Analysis)
The decision to give up drugs singled me out in my community like a midget on a pro basketball team. At the parties I would often attend, people drop ecstasy and acid like breath mints; many felt that a night without a chemical enhancer was one that was incomplete. At weekend long parties filled with camping and dance music, joints are passed around campfires and a person can easily barter for mushroom chocolates, pure MDMA or drug-laced baked goods. I realized on the day I gave them up that I would be the occasionally conspicuous girl saying “no thanks”, the one quietly sipping tea while friends told stories in voices shrilled by alcohol, the one politely stepping away from being pawed by strangers and refraining from melting into drug induced cuddle piles that might turn into sex parties. There was no outside pressure from anyone else to do so, no drug screenings at work and no interventions of friends and family members…indeed my family lives on the opposite coast and all of my friends were my suppliers. Yet at a certain point I simply realized that doing drugs was counterproductive to the larger work I was trying to do for my health; while I once felt that I received a lot of relaxation and insight from doing them, the cost, I now felt, had come to outweigh the benefits. What purpose was there in daily exercise, in eating mostly raw organic foods, in cutting out preservatives and MSG, caffeine and sugar, if I was just going to turn around and douse my system with a chemical cocktail on the weekends, the exact contents of which I could never be certain? Did I really need to depend on one pill to help me love and be affectionate with my friends, and another to open and expand my awareness? Was it worth it to literally poison my body with toxic substances so I could see pretty colors? Why suffer through “sad Sunday” --as ravers call the ‘down’ of post ecstasy serotonin depletion-- when I could just work diligently to cultivate a true loving happiness that needn’t be augmented by drugs…one that I could experience all of the time? At a certain point, after about 15 years of experimenting, I was suddenly willing and able to put the drugs down. Ok, I said to myself, I know what that’s like. It’s always going to be pretty much the same, and it’s never going to change anything permanently. I’m ready to try something else.
I am finding, as I age, that most of the values, perceptions and decisions we come to in life must be, usually slowly with time, cultivated internally from our own experience rather than from the experiences of others. This applies to things as profound as our essential perception of reality (is there a God? Is the universe basically a friendly place or an inhospitable place?) to things as simple as the way we comb our hair. Since even scientists are finding that elements will appear as a particle or wave depending on what the observer expects to see, as a species we are learning that absolutely nothing can be taken for granted.
In much the same way that my desire to do drugs eventually gave way to a stronger desire to be as physically, mentally and emotionally healthy as possible, after 9 years of practicing polyamory on and off, I began to find a natural shift occurring in me. As I deepened my spiritual practice I found myself becoming more selfish with my attention and energy in certain ways, more efficient in where I wanted my focus to go. I discovered that I no longer had it in me to process the incredible complexity of polyamorous relationships; I found that there were other things that I wanted to devote my energy to instead. Meditation and prayer, exercise, studying sacred texts, taking classes, reading, writing, following new creative passions and expanding upon the old ones, building community, and learning healing skills I would be able to share with others began to take precedence over the seemingly trivial goings on of my own daily dramas with other human beings.
Although I was raised Catholic, I have long since expanded my spiritual beliefs. For example, I don’t believe in the Christian concept of “sin” with all of the guilt and damnation that it implies…from God we have come and to God we are all returning, eventually. However, the word “sin” is an archery term that means literally to have “missed the mark”. This is the concept of sin that I understand, and whether or not we have missed depends entirely on what we were aiming for.
The world, I’m finding, is filled with specialists. There are many people for example, in America especially, who live and breathe business as if it were their lives…checking stock reports in the morning paper, putting in extra hours at their careers, and discussing business deals via cell phone after hours; money and commerce are their interests and so they are content with their lives. Other people are consumed with family life and everything that it entails; vaccinations and schooling for the children, shopping and budgets and family vacations, dentistry and new dishwashers, and are content with that. Pro athletes are a great example of the specialist, leading lives of pure athletics; whether they are training for games, playing games, flying to games, or talking about games, you can rest assured that most of their lives revolve around their chosen sport. In much the same way, polyamory is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle as long as the participant realizes that by adopting such a lifestyle they are hedging themselves into a specialist, and they choose sex and relationships as their specialty.
Monks and nuns of any faith take a vow that is essentially one of simplicity. Obviously, they don’t want to complicate their lives with clutter and chasing after material objects, so they take a vow of poverty. They choose not to experiment with the effects of drugs and alcohol on their bodies and minds, and they choose not to experiment with sex and the psychological and emotional effects that romances will bring. What a person chooses to withdraw their attention from will diminish, and what they focus on will expand. Much like adopting a poly lifestyle is essentially stating to the universe that our purpose and specialty in life will be sex and relationships to the exclusion of other things, a monk or nun minimizes distractions because their self-chosen purpose in life is the realization of spiritual truth in their hearts and minds, and the actualization of that truth in their personalities and daily life. To them it's not a question of "sacrifice", or giving up anything resentfully... it's simply a way of becoming streamlined, a recognition of something else as being more important to them than those other things. And as laypersons on the spiritual path, to have spiritual lives of profound power and deep fulfillment, aspirants must find the middle road between avoidance (celibacy) and indulgence (polyamory).
I have found that a good way to gauge if you are going in the right direction is to look at where you want to go, see who has gone before you, and try to emulate their lives as much as possible. For example, most, if not all, great spiritual teachers have a regular practice of meditation. They practice forgiveness and peace as a way of life. And, looking at the lives of those that were known for colossal spiritual endeavors or who achieved international success as spiritual teachers, I don’t find it a coincidence that none of them are or were polyamorous. Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Caroline Myss, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, Neil Donald Walsh, Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, David Hawkins, Iyanla Vanzant, Rumi, the Dali Lama, every noteworthy yogi of the last millennia, Eckhart Tolle, Don Miguel Luiz, Gary Zukav…and the list goes on and on, regardless of their gender, culture, race or time period, those who have affected the lives of tens of thousands to billions have been either celibate or married with children.
This is because relationships, particularly sexual relationships, take energy. Many polyamorous people claim that love is infinite. While that is true spiritually, and a human being might even have the possibility of being able to experience infinite love while housed within their human body, what are absolutely finite are time, energy and resources. I have heard many poly people say that to do sexual relationships well with multiple people is a full time job, and ironically enough, the people I have witnessed who do manage more than one relationship and also have a few nonsexual interests or can eke out a corner for their spiritual life have always been un or underemployed. Many people who do work full time and describe themselves as poly would be better defined as “serial monogamists”, breaking off involvement with one person when a new relationship starts, or having flings while on vacation with people that they will never see again. When we do both work and maintain multiple sexual relationships, while we are often intelligent and vibrant, polyamory becomes the alpha and omega of our personalities and the central focus of our intellects and talents…we put our relationships with others in the driver’s seat, and god in the back as an afterthought.
It is not difficult to understand why this happens. Consider again that what we focus on expands, and that time, energy and resources are finite. Subtract the time per week that we spend either working or sleeping…roughly 96 out of 168 hours… not including our time spent commuting. Subtract again the amount of time we are actually physically spending with our partner, preparing meals, watching movies and etc. Then consider the mental and emotional energy we devote each day to our partners, chewing over comments they or we made, plans for the future and incidents from the past, worried thoughts and joyful thoughts. And finally, multiply all that physical, mental and emotional time and energy by multiple partners. Developing a relationship with God, like anyone else, means that we must spend at least a little time with Him each day, while the goal eventually is to never leave His presence. Hence, if we are trying to ascend as quickly as possible, it becomes clear that having sexual entanglements with multiple people is counterproductive.
The problem though is that we cannot see that. It is common for polyamorous people to have never spent a significant amount of time alone as single and celibate creatures, and so we have never subjected ourselves to double-blind trial… how would we know the difference when we have never known anything else? From the time I was seventeen, I never went more than a month without involving myself in some kind of intrigue, experience or sexual relationship. During this time, I always considered myself a spiritual person. Yet it wasn’t until I became celibate for a year at age 28 that I truly connected with God and realized what authentic spirituality is about, and grew more profoundly in that one year than I had in the previous ten combined. It’s like Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, where men have lived within a cave all of their lives, facing a wall, and taking all of the shadows they see projected from people passing outside to be the sum of all possible existence. We are sitting in our lives, with our spirituality in one corner, steering along this personality that we take to be our highest and most authentic self. We are thinking that this is normal, that this is good, and so we’re content with it. We have no idea that there’s a whole world of sunshine and three dimensional life forms right outside.
Polyamory promotes itself through the concept that having sex with more people brings more love into the world. The idea that having more sex with more people brings more love into the world is absurd. At the most, it brings more affection into the personal lives of poly people, and since most humans seek their own comfort above all else, this alone is justification to the poly person that it works. Yet sex and love is not the same thing, as anyone who has ever had a one night stand can attest to. Poly focuses on the suggestion of having “many loves”; that since no one person can meet your needs it’s best we be with several. While the polyamorous certainly care for the people they are involved with, polyamory in practice revolves not around love, which exists independent of sex, but around sexual conduct. When you look at why monogamous relationships fail due to infidelity, it is never because one partner or both partners loved other people, so long as they didn't consider themselves "out of love" with their original partner...it is because they decided to act sexually on those feelings, either privately or publicly. Loving many people --not just one-- is generally encouraged by society as a healthy thing.
Looking at the lives of our teachers, none of the people who powerfully impacted the lives of others did so by having sex with them. It is not sex that brings more love into the world, but love that brings more love into the world, plain and simple. Love is the mighty oak and its roots, and sex is only one of the branches. People who have made great waves in consciousness did so by loving other people... even if they were their oppressors, such as in the cases of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. Up until sexual involvement, the psychological and emotional intimacy we feel with one another…the drawing together and the tender, openness of our heart pulsing in sync with another… is actually only love, pure love, and intimacy, and this is achieved without taking it into the realm of sexuality. This is why people who have had the most power to see the goodness in and love others unconditionally... cultural icons of compassion like Mother Teresa and the Dali Lama, have been celibate... they exist wholly in that nonsexual place of pure loving intimacy with everyone. The teacher on the other hand, who is a married layperson such as Caroline Myss or Deepak Chopra, must constantly balance themselves between the human compulsion to focus their love on their own offspring and partner and the knowledge that everyone is a brother. So having put spirit as the focus of their lives as opposed to sexual relationships, they excel in their altruistic work and their ability to inspire others, much, much further than poly people, but not as greatly as celibate teachers!
This isn’t to say that our modern teachers never experimented with pushing the boundaries of relationships or explored their sexualities…let’s face it…many of today’s spiritual guides grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, so they probably did. Pushing the cultural boundaries of relationships very well may be an integral evolutionary step for many people. Much like taking certain drugs can show us what levels of bliss and openness are possible so that we can strive for that experience within our daily lives, people who have been conditioned to believe in "one true love" might need to experience “multiple loves” as a transition to the expansive spiritual love many mystics describe as “being in love with everyone, all the time”. In fact, it seems only natural that expansive people on the path to self-realization would seek these experiences. The problem then occurs only when we get stuck there, thinking that we have reached the destination. It seems that, much like drugs and impure foods, polyamory is merely a tool, and something we are ultimately meant to transcend as we spiritually mature.
For the last ten years, I have consistently had a vision in which I am meeting with God for coffee. When we have finished talking about small things, the Creator reaches into her jacket pocket, and pulls out two small jewels, cupping them in her palms as she holds her hands out on the table between us. In one hand, a life filled with the up and down thrills of romantic intrigue and heartbreak, where my personal growth would trickle down slowly like condensation from a stalactite, and I would count the periods in my life by which lover or lovers had been breezing through. As Kahil Gilbran says, in this life I would “laugh, but not all my laughter, and cry, but not all my tears”. In Gods other hand, my glistening potential…the deepest yearnings of my heart fulfilled, my dreams realized, the beauty and wisdom I could contribute to the blessing of this world made real, and I would count the periods in my life by the great, leaping milestones of grace that appeared in my consciousness and manifested in my life… the year I suddenly found it easy to forgive anything, they period in which I wrote a book or traveled the globe, the moment when I finally permanently shifted to a state of joy and optimism. The more we put into our spiritual lives, the more we get out of them, and the blessings are heaped upon our plates in larger and larger portions. Within this vision, I always have understood intuitively what she is saying: I am an attractive woman; I could play this game forever. If it were offered to me so simply, the choice would be an easy one. The problem emerges in that in real life, living up to my potential takes work, and the benefits, while penetrating to the core and unending, are not a quick fix but are derived down the road and only with effort. Sex, on the other hand, is right here right now. In a world where so many people are hungry for love and comfort, there is no lack of sexual and romantic entanglements to involve ourselves in.
Instant gratification is a powerful force that should not go unrecognized. An obese man might comprehend that if he wants to live past 50 and improve his health, at some point he needs to begin to exercise and diet. But like the relationship or sexual experience that will be “the one” to fulfill us, as long as the obese man can rationalize that this Twinkie, or the next one, or the next one will be the best Twinkie ever…will leave him emotionally satisfied for a long time, and won’t adversely affect his health that much, he will never make that move. Again, it comes back to what his greatest goals are for himself. If his goal is to stay the way he is, to sample all of the delicious food in the world, then he is on the right track. But he might dream of someday running a marathon, and then he would need to determine which goal was of more importance. He would realize that he would need to get up an hour earlier, in the dark and the cold, to begin a routine of walking. He would need to alter his diet. And if his goal for his health overcame his goal for desserts, he would restructure his life to accommodate this, and with time the unhealthy things would naturally fall away as easily as a nun giving up cigars. Okay, he can say to the Twinkie, I’ve had enough. I can put it down now. They always taste the same, and they just aren’t serving me anymore.
It seems as though all of life is structured to move us through phases, the point of which are to well-round our education. In our earlier phases we are reared to believe certain things and act in certain ways, and other cultures, other political affiliations or forms of government, other religions or lifestyles are strange, wrong, and unnatural to us. We think “those people” are weird. As we grow and buck the yokes of propriety in favor of finding and living our own values, oftentimes we become what we previously judged… we are “those people”. At some point, sometimes we transcend even that phase, and become someone who is neither of the people who have come before, but someone who has taken the lessons of the previous lives and synthesized them. Like a person who has lived through every season we understand a world that exists as more than the chirping birds of spring or a wintertime blanket of white…we have moved through and chosen differently, we are wiser in that we understand the spectrum in its entirety. We then have the freedom to choose according to our evolving goals for ourselves. Awareness brings choice, and choice brings freedom.
Just like the decision to do or not do drugs, to eat healthy food or junk food, regardless of how much evidence there is weighing on one side, no one can tell you the truth; the decision of how many partners to have is a progressive one that a person must make on their own based on their own goals, and those goals change over time. In high school, my goal was to try every kind of drug…put it on the table, and it was going into my lungs, in my veins or up my nose. I was experimenting with and exploring life, and deemed myself individualistic and revolutionary for shunning the admonitions of society and being bold enough to do what many weren’t. Eventually I found that in a world where McDonald’s revenues total 23 billion dollars per year, where pollution continues to rise despite international law, where cancer, heart and pulmonary diseases are Americans’ largest killers, refusing to accept second-rate health was the only authentic expression of my individual soul.
True love, unconditional, available to all, and liberated from ulterior motive, has the power to heal from the ground up. Every victim of crime and every lashing out, hurting perpetrator can be healed with love. Every diminishing old growth forest and every polluted river can mend with our care. Every familial or friendly relationship that has soured, every national or religious conflict can be repaired should we put love, and only love, back in the driver’s seat. Love is the only thing that brings more love into the world. Love is the only path to love. Polyamorous people are self-described revolutionaries, asserting that they bring an evolution of consciousness and love. We should listen to them in this regard, to open our hearts, expand our minds, and consider loving each other-- many others-- in ways we would previously never have dared. But the love that they bring to the world is primarily self-serving. Logistically, what they are saying is that they want to sleep with several people, and there’s nothing innovative about that. Truly, courageously, and unconditionally loving others, on the other hand… now that would indeed be quite the revolution.
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Interesting. That’s a good thing! This novel definitely has promise. It’s ironic that the basis of your non-fiction novel is the basis of my fiction novel. Wanting to experience love in it’s purest form. Putting mind over body for the betterment of ourselves. I agree, you can do anything if you just put your mind to it and be relentless in being consistent. I like where you are going with this story. It needs some polishing but all works can use something or another. You can’t please everybody all the time. The only thing I would say is at times you jumped from one analogy to another too quickly. Stick with one and drive it home. For instance, with the obese man. You were using him as an analogy to sex and in the midst of that you jumped to the nun giving up cigars. You used the nun giving up cigars when you could’ve made that same point with the obese man. However, I still got it and if you like it then that’s all that matters. If either of us get there we need to get the other one on, cool? :-)
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Hello,
I was deeply interested in this piece. It was written from a perspective of both great maturity with great humility. The choice between a curiosity and adventure-seeking fueled hedonism, through which great discoveries and revelations can be made being weighed up against a more ascetic existence which, although more demanding and without instant gratification, may hold the grand prize of self-realization.
I think there is a clarity of thought and a relevance to contemporary society that I have not previously found in such abundance.
The (possibly) provocative theme of polyamory is very interesting to me. It is a life choice that I have always thought about. It is clear from your piece that it would require more focus and attention than I would be willing to give. Without being reactionary, it is hard to practice an open relationship without some party being hurt. I imagine that any practice which causes others to suffer will reflect negatively on spiritual well-being which may explain why spiritually-focused people often embrace monogamy or celibacy. What ever the case, these are obviously decision each individual has the right to choose for themselves.
I could go on all day.
Your article has sparked many interesting discussions.
You have a beautiful and clear writing style.
Thank you for posting this.
Bosco
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