In Celebration of Love’s Labors Lost (Part 1)

Radha Krishna and the Gopis

As I lean back now and look back on the life path I have taken since I first stepped out into the world, two recurring motifs dominate the pattern of events.

The first is a hardwired impulse to be free – free of all external compulsions (which is well nigh impossible when you happen to be part of a family, and all of us are). But as one whose birthdate adds up to a 5, numerologists say I’m “one of those people who is always striving to find answers to the many questions that life poses; [that I] want to be totally unrestrained, as this is the sign of freedom and independence.” So I’m only being true to my core nature in cherishing my freedom.

Freedom from debt, for a start. I don’t have a credit card, no overdraft, and I have never once applied for a bank loan. The house I’m living in is in my wife’s name and it was given to her when her entire village was relocated several hundred yards upstream on account of the Selangor Dam. So, no mortgage either - although the fine print says the land the house stands on is on a 99-year lease. We have until the year 2106 to worry about having to move.

The second motif happens to be my susceptibility to love. Some live to work, some to eat, some to make money – I live for love.

My first love was at the tender age of 4, when I shared a bathtub with a neighbor’s daughter, who arrived on earth 11 days ahead of me, and later found myself sitting beside her at kindergarten. I remember how we shared little secrets in class. She was curious to know if boys and girls had similar genitals, and neither of us had a clue – so I drew a simple diagram to show her what mine looked like, and she reciprocated, very demurely, by handing me a piece of paper on which she had written the letter V. I wasn’t satisfied with her response, suspecting there had to be more to it, that she was holding back. Then we got separated in primary school – there were no co-ed schools when I was a kid – and didn’t meet again until we were in our early teens, and I was smitten by her luminous beauty which I noticed for the first time.

When I learnt she was in the habit of roller-skating along the corridors of a school opposite my house most afternoons, I decided to take up roller-skating too – and soon became quite adept at it. But we were both too shy to go beyond smiling at each other and I felt totally tongue-tied when face-to-face with her.

So nothing at all transpired until fate brought us together again when we reached fourth form. I was appointed to the editorial board of a science magazine jointly published by my all-boys school and a nearby girls’ school. At our first informal meeting to discuss the magazine, I was astounded by how mature the girls were compared to me at 15. She and her best buddy, my co-editor, were smoking real cigarettes (not the chocolate ones I was familiar with as a kid) and even driving around without a license.

That’s how I began smoking, and soon I was borrowing my dad’s car to drive – at first up and down the compound, then increasingly further around the neighborhood. Working together on the science magazine project gave me a good excuse to start visiting her in the afternoons after classes. She lived conveniently around the corner from my house, within a 3-minute walk, even less on my bicycle.

Several times a week, I’d perch my cockatoo on the handle bar and ride over to her place. She was usually home. We would sit around her airy front porch and chat till twilight. Each time I saw her she grew more beautiful in my eyes. But I just didn’t know how to shift gears from being her childhood playmate to being her beau. 

So things drifted along for a while sweetly enough, but neither of us wanted to make the first move into adulthood, although I occasionally detected a flirtatious or teasing tone in her glances. I just wanted everything to be perfect between us. The thought of doing something clumsy or saying something inappropriate paralyzed me. Much later in life I realized that the abstract notion of “perfection” itself could be the #1 Killjoy Factor in the human universe…

Anyway, many other events intruded that weren’t part of the pattern of “perfect love” and I took them all in my stride as part of love’s learning curve. As my mind drifts slowly backwards in time, scanning for precious memory fragments to rescue from analog oblivion, I become acutely aware of the many-layered nature of experience: in so many instances, I can’t draw a linear timeline marking one event without then wondering when some other event occurred.

For instance, during the years I didn’t see my first love, I enjoyed quite a few other romantic fantasies. I vaguely recall an alphabetic crush I had for a pig-tailed cutie who played the letter M in some kiddie concert I witnessed around 10. I remember a couple of stiffy-inducing dreams with me playing the letter K and somehow showing up the loutish low-class L who stood between us. I never found out her name, but I bet it began with the letter M...

Then there was WW, baby sister of one of my best buddies in whose home I used to hang out all day after school. My own siblings were much older than I, so I never felt the same sort of intense kinship with them. In this household there was a great deal of family interaction. It was an ideal atmosphere for innocent fun and puppy love to flourish: the stirrings of juicy adolescence, the brief but intense thrill of her foot brushing against mine during a game of Monopoly. I was present when her first period arrived, her face flushed as she hurried towards the bathroom.

I knew nothing about hormones and pheromones then. But I enjoyed the undercurrent of irrational desires and the heady sensation of erotic impulses. These weren’t exactly romantic – primal, more likely. Electromagnetic and biochemical, at least. No guilt was attached to these prurient fantasies; nor were they focused on any specific person. Non-specific lust is what I call this syndrome.

Girls were lovely to dream about, but my everyday reality was populated with boys. Since girls were sexually unavailable, we resorted to making lewd jokes about them; but among ourselves, we were comfortable showing off our erections and competing to see who could shoot his load the furthest. There was ample opportunity for experimentation. Staying over at male friends’ houses presented no problems with parents and it seemed natural for us to have temporary crushes on each other without their becoming full-blown affairs.

Being single-minded about anything has never been a habit of mine - which may explain why I never became a virtuoso in any specific endeavor. Looking back, if I had kept my focus on winning the heart of my first love, ignoring other distractions and settling for nobody else, perhaps we would have ended up as a couple. I can’t imagine what married life would have been like for us – but I’m fairly certain she would have compelled me to become a high flyer in the upper income bracket, since it’s clear she had set her sights on a comfortable lifestyle, being what people would consider a trophy wife. As it turned out, she subsequently dated and married a fellow who became an accountant – while I drifted in the opposite direction, devoting my energies to the arts, after a short-lived stint in the glossy advertising game.

Clark Kent look @ 1968

But I’m getting ahead of my narrative. While all this was going on, I began to visit a couple of pretty sisters – one shy and demure, the other outgoing and vivacious – both of whom eventually became integral parts of my life.

When you’re a teenager it’s very important to appear cool – and to visit a young lady on a rickety bicycle is fairly uncool (especially with a cockatoo perched on the handlebar). Since I had convinced my father that I could drive competently, he rarely protested whenever I asked to borrow his car. I had a schoolmate named Johnny who was always on the lookout for hot chicks. He didn’t have access to a car, so he would sometimes tell me about some nice girl he knew who happened to have good-looking sisters – and we’d go visit them in my dad’s car.

That’s how I got to meet Annie, my French kiss instructor only a year younger than I but slightly more experienced. It was because of Annie I decided to quit wearing glasses (which, prior to my first kissing lesson, I had believed to be a requisite accessory since they made one look smarter and older). We were both wearing glasses when the serious smooching began one sultry afternoon – and the collision of our spectacles almost turned the experience into an episode out of some Woody Allen movie.  Anyway, thank you, Annie – for your wonderful coaching which has served me well through the decades.

(In 2011 Annie tracked me down on facebook. Imagine the great joy I felt to be reconnected with her after 46 years. She's moved on from kissing coach to tai-chi instructor.)

[To be continued...]

Originally posted 1 April 2012, reposted 6 May 2016

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL (REVISITED)

The root of all evil isn't MONEY, contrary to popular belief. It's JEALOUSY. How so? Consider the greatest of all possible evils - MONOTHEISM - as expressed in the utterly psychotic statement: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous god." You may substitute "goddess" for "god" and the results are equally abysmal.

Just ask yourself this: if you were indeed the One and Only Deity in Existence, would you be constantly looking over your shoulder in anticipation of rivals or threats to your Absolute Status? In Barbara Hand Clow's nebulous tome, The Pleiadian Agenda, I was struck by a powerful quote attributed to the Prophet Isaiah: "Monotheism breeds fanatical anthropocentrism, which eventually destroys Earth." How absolutely and tragically true.


Such a jealous, spiteful, insecure, and vengeful deity can only engender generations of jealous, spiteful, insecure, and vengeful humans. The Old Testament records the first instance of murder in the story of Cain and Abel. The archetypal case of sibling rivalry wherein a deity plays favorites with two brothers over their ritual offerings and arouses a jealousy so intense it leads to fratricide. Fast forward to Abraham and his sister-wife Sara, whose greed and jealousy result in the unjust expulsion of Hagar, the servant who bore Abe his first-born son, Ishmael. Behold, the remote descendants of Ishmael (generically known as Arabs) to this day continue to be cruelly treated by the remote descendants of Sara's freak-birth progeny, Isaac (generically known as Jews)!


My wife of 23 years, Anoora, is a real cutie... except when possessed by the demon, Jealousy. This demon she inherited from her mother, whose emotional insecurity was pathological to the degree that it drove two previous husbands to drink, distraction and, eventually, divorce.*

Jealousy is in itself a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the person you proclaim to love - and whose exclusive devotion and sexual attention you demand - invariably begins contemplating the pleasures of strange flesh as soon as nagging suspicion begins to rear its ugly, deformed head.

I can happily swear eternal allegiance, affection, and friendship to anybody who has won my heart... but to insist on exclusivity seems to me the epitome of insanity. Imagine vowing to eat at only one restaurant your entire life. That's an insult to FOOD!

The crux of the problem is that monotheistic religions have programmed their followers into believing there is only ONE way to be married, and only ONE interpretation of wedded bliss - and that's MONOGAMY! (Okay, so Islam and Mormonism allow polygamy - but only on strictly patriarchal terms wherein a well-to-do man can have several wives/concubines but a woman can't have several husbands/toyboys. Pathetically dickheaded, if you ask me.)

My own parents were married for more than 60 years... but Dad probably had that many lovers on the side (and Mum quite a few too, though far more discreetly)... and most folks do indulge in a fair amount of "illicit" (read "unlicenced") sex, only problem being they have to be hypocritical and sneaky about their behavior - instead of being good-humored, honest, and open-hearted about their own testosteronal or pheromonal propensities. Of all the women I've known, perhaps only two or three were virgins before they met me - but I've certainly loved and cherished the others no less, and enjoyed them all the more for their sexual experience and emotional maturity.


I'm convinced that if POLYAMORY was included as another way to explore LOVE and HARMONY, the world would blossom into a spiritually wholesome and truth-valuing place - where deceit, hypocrisy, guilt, and vindictiveness cannot flourish, and destructive jealousy will be seen for what it is: an emotional disease!

As I approach my seventh decade in human embodiment, I feel sufficiently seasoned to declare myself a pantheistic pansexual. That's right, folks: everything and everybody is actually quite edible if your perception is pristinely unclouded.


_____

*Since this essay was first posted, a whole lot has changed with regard to Anoora. In January 2013, with the help of two masterful emotional healers, I was able to clearly visualize the source of my wife's insane possessiveness: it was a demonic entity, an etheric fungus, tightly wrapped around her lower spine, feeding off her negative emotional discharge and her addiction to drama. It had become an integral part of her being and had to be gently detached with psychic surgery. Since then, Anoora has become far more cheerful and open to befriending most women who visit - well, at least 80% of the time!

[First posted 10 November 2009]

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL (revisited)

The root of all evil isn't MONEY, contrary to popular belief. It's JEALOUSY. How so? Consider the greatest of all possible evils - MONOTHEISM - as expressed in the utterly psychotic statement: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous god." You may substitute "goddess" for "god" and the results are equally abysmal.

Just ask yourself this: if you were indeed the One and Only Deity in Existence, would you be constantly looking over your shoulder in anticipation of rivals or threats to your Absolute Status? In Barbara Hand Clow's nebulous tome, The Pleiadian Agenda, I was struck by a powerful quote attributed to the Prophet Isaiah: "Monotheism breeds fanatical anthropocentrism, which eventually destroys Earth." How absolutely and tragically true.


Such a jealous, spiteful, insecure, and vengeful deity can only engender generations of jealous, spiteful, insecure, and vengeful humans. The Old Testament records the first instance of murder in the story of Cain and Abel. The archetypal case of sibling rivalry wherein a deity plays favorites with two brothers over their ritual offerings and arouses a jealousy so intense it leads to fratricide. Fast forward to Abraham and his sister-wife Sara, whose greed and jealousy result in the unjust expulsion of Hagar, the servant who bore Abe his first-born son, Ishmael. Behold, the remote descendants of Ishmael (generically known as Arabs) to this day continue to be cruelly treated by the remote descendants of Sara's freak-birth progeny, Isaac (generically known as Jews)!


My savage punk wife Anoora is a real cutie... except when possessed by the demon, Jealousy. This demon she inherited from her mother, whose emotional insecurity was pathological to the degree that it drove two previous husbands to drink, distraction and, eventually, divorce. Anoora's ego insecurity very nearly drove me mad during the first few years of my sharing space with her. She couldn't even tolerate my having a conversation with another woman.

Yet, as time passed, she reserved the right to ogle every good-looking young man who came to stay with us - and after a while became emboldened enough to openly flirt with them. I'm happy to report that in the last two or three years, Anoora has finally matured and relaxed to the extent that she's now open to befriending my female visitors - sometimes to the extent of attempting to hijack their affections. The day Anoora manages to entice another man with her feminine charms, I would consider my Henry Higgins experiment a complete success. There's nothing sadder than being married to a spouse nobody else would contemplate borrowing for a wild weekend or even flirting with.

Now jealousy is in itself a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the person you proclaim to love - and whose exclusive devotion and sexual attention you demand - invariably begins contemplating the pleasures of strange flesh as soon as nagging suspicion begins to rear its ugly, deformed head.

I can happily swear eternal allegiance, affection, and friendship to anybody who has won my heart... but to insist on exclusivity seems to me the epitome of insanity. Imagine vowing to eat at only one restaurant your entire life. That's an insult to FOOD!

The crux of the problem is that monotheistic religions have programmed their followers into believing there is only ONE way to be married, and only ONE interpretation of wedded bliss - and that's MONOGAMY!

My own parents were married for more than 60 years... but Dad probably had that many lovers on the side (and Mum quite a few too, though far more discreetly)... and most folks do indulge in a fair amount of "illicit" (read "unlicenced") sex, only problem being they have to be hypocritical and sneaky about their behavior - instead of being good-humored, honest, and open-hearted about their own testosteronal or pheromonal propensities. Of all the women I've known, perhaps only two or three were virgins before they met me - but I've certainly loved and cherished the others no less, and enjoyed them all the more for their sexual experience and emotional maturity.


I'm convinced that if POLYAMORY was included as another way to explore LOVE and HARMONY, the world would blossom into a spiritually wholesome and truth-valuing place - where deceit, hypocrisy, guilt, and vindictiveness cannot flourish, and destructive jealousy will be seen for what it is: an emotional disease!

I feel sufficiently seasoned to declare myself a pantheistic pansexual. That's right, folks: everything and everybody is actually quite edible if your perception is pristinely unclouded.

Polyamory: The Next Sexual Revolution?

[First posted 7 January 2007, reposted 7 January 2011 & 11 September 2016]

In Celebration of Love’s Labors Lost (Part 3)

Akhunaton and Family

For the next few years I found myself living parallel lives. Externally, I was in a domestic partnership and had to claim my adulthood by getting a job, leaving the parental nest, and building a life with my own nuclear family. Internally, I grew increasingly fascinated by metaphysical conundrums, greedily devouring whatever literature came my way that might shed some light on life’s complexities and mysteries.

Courtesy of Creative Arena

It sounds trite but nevertheless true: even if each of us was born with an instruction manual to guide us through the various stages of life, only a few would bother reading it.

I’m not one of those few. I chose to view my life as an open-ended experiment, learning by trial-and-error, with only integrity as my soul compass. An honest scientist doesn’t doctor the statistics or tamper with empirical evidence, regardless of his or her own peculiar beliefs. If one is genuinely interested in living a true life, one cannot be governed by others’ opinions – although it’s always wise to pay attention to feedback, be it negative or positive.

Very early in life I saw through the abominable hypocrisy of what we loosely term “society” (I refer to it as the Cultural Matrix). I was appalled that loaded words like “bastard” or “blasphemy” remained in popular use long after the insidious influence of the Church had waned – even though their meanings are couched in and tainted by false piety and quasi-religious judgmentalism.

Illustration by Ben Heine

“KEEP OFF THE GRASS” and “NO TRESPASSING” signs are a symptom of sociopathology arising from an obsession with ownership and control. Why plant grass if your children aren’t allowed to lie on it and bask in the sun? Why construct a fence around a space where no artificial boundaries existed and then claim exclusive rights to it? Will the fence keep out the wind and airborne viruses, will it prevent the entry of alien ideas?

Such a distorted view of reality results from obeying a base impulse to Acquire and Protect – instead of following the nobler impulse to Attune and Harmonize. The former behavioral pattern leads to ego competition, exclusivity, and entropy (disintegration); the latter facilitates enlightened cooperation, inclusivity, and syntropy (reintegration).

Painting by Alex Grey

Frank Harris: "My Life & Loves"

To retrieve and record in writing every memory fragment of my life and loves would be a monumental task indeed – and, much as I’m occasionally tempted to emulate Frank Harris, who in 1922 shocked the literary world with his self-published memoirs, filled with graphic accounts of his sexual and political exploits, I shall save such a self-indulgent project for, as people say, my old age.

What prompted me to embark on this series of essays was the recent discovery of an amusing oil painting, long hidden behind a stack of framed artworks in the clutter of my study. It was a first attempt by my Luxembourgeois lover - yes, the one I met in New Jersey at age 17 and with whom I maintained a steady correspondence for 11 years. We met again in late 1979, in London, and she decided to relocate to Malaysia to share my life and times, for better or worse.

From her perspective, it must have been for the worse – because she decided a few years ago to stop communicating with me. At the time, I figured she was undergoing some sort of mid-life crisis – menopause, perhaps – and that she would get over it and begin to remember the good times we had, not just the sad moments.

Well, some are slow healers – and some, alas, choose to never recover from emotional wounds. I find it difficult to understand how anybody could possibly maintain a grudge for the rest of their lives – and yet a few apparently do.

No matter what terrible things people may have done to me – they need only apologize to achieve reconciliation, redemption in my eyes, and a gradual restoration of goodwill and friendship. I have experienced my share of outright rejection and scornful dismissal (a woman I was briefly besotted with actually called me “a perverted creep” which cut to my very core, but if she were to add me on facebook tomorrow, I would be overjoyed to renew contact with her, seeing as how she was once David Gilmour's squeeze).

The fact remains, once I open my heart to somebody, it stays open – even if the psychodynamics between us deteriorate beyond the limits of endurance and we are compelled to buffer the friendship with some space and time.

"Lustrous Love" by Alex Grey

At one point I began to suspect I was only in love with the idea of love – not anybody in particular. The problem is, in English, we only have ONE word to describe a complex and multifaceted dynamic spectrum of feelings and behaviors that has perplexed even the brightest minds and wisest souls for generations; and that four-letter word is LOVE.

"Kissing"  by Alex Grey

Very early in life I became aware of the biochemical basis of our animal responses to environmental stimuli. Primal drives like the desire for food and sex can be said to be universal – at least in terms of life-forms familiar to us. Humans may be the only biological species that has compartmentalized itself to the extent that we require a mystical experience (whether spontaneous or drug-induced) to remind us of our intricate interconnections with the entire electromagnetic spectrum which has generated the astounding variations on the magnificent theme we call Life.

Otherwise, in our anthropocentrism, we tend to view ourselves as separate from - and even superior to - other forms of life that constitute the planetary biosphere. Therein lies the basis of our cannibalistic, suicidal and psychopathological interactions with the earthly ecosystem that gives birth to and sustains us.

With a favorite smoldering siren

I have never been able to take monotheism, monogamy, or the notion of monopoly seriously. Even when I was dating delectable Barbie dolls and smoldering sirens who kept me on the edge of emotional and erotic exhaustion, I still saw other women as wondrous embodiments of my Twin Flame or Anima. Whenever a lover dumped me for another, the pain I felt was not so much because she had made her physical assets available to some other aspect of myself – but that her body was now unavailable to me.

The late great Robert A. Heinlein once came up with the concept of “pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism” - a phrase that perfectly describes my overall belief system.

I consider myself primarily a cosmomythologist. As such, I’m constantly on the lookout for heavy-duty metaphors that serve a greater understanding of our existence, elucidating the mythic context in which all phenomena occurs.

The Ouroboros in the seal
of the Theosophical Society

For many years I have been fascinated by the symbol of Ouroboros – the serpent devouring its own tail – which is generally acknowledged as a representation of “the cycle of life, death and rebirth, leading to immortality.”  

In effect, the Ouroboros symbolizes the perpetual cyclic renewal of life. The erotic subtext of eating, of course, is familiar to those who – according to an archaic law preserved in our statutes – deserve to be whipped and imprisoned for 20 years, simply for indulging in metaphorical and not merely literal coitus.

Some are cunning linguists and others jolly good fellators, or both. A privileged minority has evolved beyond sexual polarities and, like the Ouroboros, taken to self-cannibalism (more commonly known as autofellatio) – an acrobatic feat demanding fantastic contortionist skills.

Nokulunga the Pythoness: she's my facebook friend!

If asked to state clearly and emphatically what I ultimately desire to achieve, I’m sorely tempted to point at the Ouroboros - at the risk of being permanently labeled “a perverted creep.” The way I see it, being totally self-contained (and therefore no longer emotionally needy) in no way prevents me from simultaneously being eukaryotically erotic (another way of saying "polymorphously perverse") – in short, a fun guy to be around.

Tattoo Art by RPB

Primate yogi (pic courtesy of Forum Sains)