My therapist friend Renee asked, “How are you eating?”
“Uh, I cook meals, and I eat them. I’m eating fine.”
Since I was serving Renee baked salmon topped with pesto, the question caught me off-guard.
Flash forward eight months. I prepared a cod filet with fresh mango sauteed in ghee this weekend at the cabin. It’s hard to cook for one, so at $16.95 per pound, I shared a portion with my gourmand dog. The next night, I baked crispy garlic chicken thighs. Easy recipe: create a paste of copious garlic, fresh herbs, and butter, shove profusely under the skin, lavish both sides with smoked paprika, and bake at 450 skin-side-down for crispy orgiastic chicken skin. And tonight? The world-famous tomato pie (hand-written recipe from Melissa, my son’s girlfriend’s mom). The main attraction is the handmade crust made with ten tablespoons of butter and vodka instead of ice water — plus garden-picked tomatoes. Melissa scribbled directives like “2 teaspoons sugar - DO IT! And 4 pieces of bacon, Optional, but DEE-LISH!!
I know, crazy. Back to the original question: “How are you eating?”
According to my friend, Bridget, I’m gestating.
During pregnancy, young moms know what to expect each trimester, and with ultrasound, they can even peer into the joyous future. Since I’m gestating without a crystal ball, I’m in a profound question: Will my efforts usher in a second act, or am I fooling myself? My inner life percolates, but my outer life tastes like old coffee, longing for a fresh-brewed aroma. And what happens when I no longer feel like making tomato pie for one?
During month four, I felt an enormous urge to turn on my creative switch, and now I know why — SEX — not for oompah-oompah, but because I was drying up in a primal way.
Creativity and sex are synonymous — let that sink in.
Sex not only pro-creates but also drives the forces behind music, the arts, literature, and a better world. It’s the engine of possibility.
Neuropsychologist Alice Radosh struggled with the loss of sexual intimacy after decades of physicality after her husband of 40 years died. To add insult to injury, the literature she sought for guidance totally missed the mark. One study suggested she get a dog.
(How about a gourmet dog?)
Radosh surveyed over 100 older women (55 years and above) and discovered she wasn’t alone in her ‘sexual bereavement.’ “Before I did my survey, I spoke to friends, and a number of them said, ‘Well, that doesn’t matter anymore.’ The feeling was that’s in the past.” What Radosh’s survey proved beyond all possible doubt was that this was a myth and a damaging one at that: sex wasn’t a past tense activity – and it did matter.
This longing is more primal than even physical intimacy — it goes to the structure of life itself. Rabindranath Tagore described the parallel between atomic structure and human relationship to Albert Einstein in 1930:
“Matter is composed of protons and electrons,”Tagore explained, “with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly, humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to [humanity’s] world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner; it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature, and the religious consciousness of man.”1
If you don’t like Tagore, there’s Keith Richards:
Life seems to me like a kind of wild animal. You hope to rein in life, but it bucks, kicks you.
~ Keith Richards2
The evolution of life on Earth could be considered the biggest sexual experiment in history, generating amoebas and dinosaurs; fireflies and butterflies; sea horses and thoroughbreds. Each species has adapted and solved an ecological problem du jour: long necks to eat tree leaves or saber teeth to devour flesh. Among humans, our genetic variation accounts for about 0.001 percent of each person’s DNA — just enough to inspire romantic longing.
Today’s “non-dual” and “non-binary” language drives me crazy because I’m unabashedly pro-dual. Specifically, I experience the universe as a big battery, powered by the fusion of opposites. In the case of the sun, fusion occurs when two atoms slam together to form a single heavier nucleus and create energy in the process — all the energy.
Gurdjieff called this the law of three forces: an active force, a passive force, and reconciling force.
The law of three forces is present in all relations, sexual or otherwise:
● Atomic Structure
○ Protons, Electrons, and Neutrons
● Electricity
○ Positive, Negative, and Ground.
● Weather
○ High pressure, Low pressure, and Precipitation
● Mediation
○ Affirming, Denying, and Mediator
● Law
○ Plaintiff, Defendant, and Jury
● Marriage
○ Husband, Wife, and Child
● Christianity
○ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
● Taoism
○ Yin, Yang, and the Tao
● Physics
○ Space, Time, and the Continuum
● And Sitcoms
○ Set-up, Complications, and the Resolution
The words in italics represent the third force — or reconciling force.
If you’ve been sitting too long reading this, stand up and reach toward your toes. Feel the active effort (uh) to touch your toes and sense the resistance (ooh, tight) in your passive hamstring muscles, and then breathe the third force (ahh) into the tension. That third force works like grace, releasing the tension to touch your toes.
In an atom, because opposite electric charges attract one another, negative electrons are attracted to the positive nucleus. This force of attraction keeps electrons constantly moving through the otherwise empty space around the nucleus. Think of it as a sexually-charged dance.
My philosophic mentor, JG Bennett, explains:
“The energy behind sexual activity is the creative energy. This is beyond life and even beyond consciousness. It is in the nature of the creative energy, and therefore of sex, to be spontaneous and unpredictable.”
Back to Keith Richards:
“When you’re writing songs, there are no fucking rules. In fact, you’re looking to break them,” he explained. “You’re looking to sort of find the next missing chord... Writing songs is not about the lyrics on one side and the music on another. It’s about the two coming together. You can be a great poet, and you might write some lovely music. But the art and the beauty of writing songs is to pull those two together, where they seem to love each other.”3
Sex and creativity are more than the physical act.
Bennett explains how active and receptive forces of sex create the fuel for transformation.
“The sexual energy can enable us to change our being. The action in which we ‘make ourselves more than what we are’ is called transformation, and sex is necessary in our transformation, even though we may never take part in the sexual act itself. Sex gives us access to creativity as no other thing does, and our self-creation is above all a creative act. Hence sex is the key to immortality…”4
Whoa, immortality?
Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault, author of Love Is Stronger Than Death, felt a “new and tingling presence” when her spiritual partner Rafe died. She described it:
“I felt like an empty glass slowly being filled with champagne… A sparkling, bubbling life seemed to be pouring into me, filling me with such buoyancy that I could no longer sink into despair… I got up and started dancing on the deck… I knew in that moment that I was sustained by an invisible and intensely joyous partner.”5
Bourgeault described this energy as a creative, immortal force:
“I see the body of hope as a living, palpable, and conscious energy that holds the visible and invisible worlds together. It is the sap, metaphorically speaking, through which flows the higher communion—the sharing of personal love and the building up and unfolding of the wonders between two people. It is what makes possible the intercommunion of substances between two beloveds and the continuing growth of their one abler soul even when separated by death. It is the “holy element,” as Boehme would call it, that straddles heaven and Earth and makes possible the most intimate connection between these two planes.”
Bennett concurs that the sexual, creative, and spiritual are intertwined:
“This is the real mystery of sex, that it has an energy which goes beyond nature and is the means by which man can enter the spiritual world.”
My friend Carol has been a trusted grief mentor on my journey. She lost two husbands, a mom and dad, and a sister. Early in my journey, Carol wrote me:
“Bruce, I too experienced huge surges of energy, which which were crazy weird. It will take a while for you to learn the gifts of grief, the sweetness Rumi wrote of: “I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow.....” but the gifts are great and deep… You now belong to the club no one wants to belong to, and I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Welcome. You are not alone, and you are loved. I’m glad Karen’s presence is with you; that is a glorious thing.”
I reached out to Carol this week to share these insights about sex, creativity, and immortality — and specifically, this quote from Bennett:
“It is possible for [spiritual union] to occur without the sexual act at all, and though the normal thing is that it does occur though the sexual act, it is not even essential that the partner in this union should be a living being. There is something that is called the mystical union or mystical marriage which has the same effect, though it must be realized that such a mystical union is even rarer than real marriage itself and that it can take place only in special circumstances and as the result of a particular need.”
“Oh my god,” Carol replied. “While you were reading that, my thoughts immediately went to George. I never share this with anyone, but we had a spiritual union that existed across space and time and still exists. I still feel his presence; I still feel married to him. I still have bouts of deep grief when I miss his physical presence, and this causes a weakening in our connection. The separation dissolves when I remember to be grateful and stop crying, but it’s just so frustrating that I can’t see, hear, smell, or touch him.”
I forget how I went from tomato pie to the hereafter, so let me bring it back to Earth — to Harlequin Romance Novels. I wasn’t sure they still existed, so I went to the publisher’s site:
“Harlequin Romances are romantic, uplifting, couple-focused stories that invite readers to get swept away to glamorous destinations all over the world, and experience all the intensity, emotion and sparkle of falling in love! The sensuality level is low – the bedroom door stays shut – but the emotion is high.”
I love those three words: intensity, emotion, and sparkle. More remarkable, I discovered that Harlequin publishes almost 100 titles a month, or 10,000 romance books in the last decade. Our culture is preoccupied with sex — even with the bedroom door shut — because there is more to sex than what we see on the surface. The creative force of sex is deeper and more mysterious than physical satisfaction and more energizing than the unitive quality of love.
Sex is an elixir distilled from the experiences, actions, and sufferings of our physical existence. It can release us from the constraints of the earthly body.
After feeling sexually connected for forty years and now severed from my supply, I feel squeezed by the perverse humor of the universe — like the womp-womp on a dating show where the curtain reveals your future partner — a 19-pound dog. Henny, please help me!
“Let me tell you about being married,” Henny begins. “For years, my wife would call out, ‘Come to bed, Henny, I need my rubbies!’ ‘Yeah-yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming,’ I’d shout back and grumble to myself, ‘Whaddya think I am, some kind of out-call massage?’ And then my mind would go, ‘Great set-up…’ By the time I finished working on the joke about a husband, his wife, and an out-call massage, I make it into bed and find my wife asleep. ASLEEP! What kind of god makes you choose between creativity and sex!”
During those final days and hours of Karen’s life, I squeezed into her hospice bed to feel that “sparkle,” the secret flow from our living battery. I hyper-focused on feeling the dwindling trickle of electrons, those love-trons until December 9, the fateful “dimming of the day,” when Karen’s love-trons no longer pulled at this world like the “moon pulls the tide.”
The Dimming of the Day
In the bad metaphor department, I have lost a percentage of my life yanking two-cycle engines that wouldn’t start — sometimes ripping off the cord in vain. This time is no different. Over the last eight months, I have tried to outwit the universe and jumpstart the Bondo engine.
The Genius of My Circulation Vow
If you’ve been reading along, you know the various schemes — from “call and response” to “conservation of angular momentum.” Last Sunday, I attended a choral concert of Franz Schubert Mass in E at the invitation of Stacy and Geoff, who randomly sat at my table two months ago at the Democratic Blue BBQ in Clayton, GA — another random invitation. Ah yes, the genius of my Circulation vow to say yes to every invitation. The physicist Heisenberg would undoubtedly understand how radical acceptance creates sufficient circulation for spontaneous collisions of atoms — and the promise of Bondo.
This is not my first time writing a real-time book with a consequential finale and zero idea where it’s headed. I took to heart today, Bennett’s revised postscript to Witness that he wrote near the end of his life. He wrote:
I discovered that what was really needed was a balance of self-effort and self-surrender, of planned intentional work and of free, spontaneous acceptance of a transcendental action within the soul… The past ten years of my life have brought me a series of insights into the way the non-material spirit and the material psyche interact — and I still cannot describe them in a way that is meaningful to others.6
Around this time, Bennett met the Shivapuri Baba — a wandering ascetic believed to have lived for 137 years. The Shivapuri Baba confirmed Bennett’s conclusion that the work required individual effort and cannot be left solely to the inner working of the spirit.
“Think of God alone: put away every other thought. Strengthen your mind and discipline your body.”
With rapid-fire life changes, Bennett returned to the Catholic Church, offered his spiritual center to Idries Shah, and launched a grand endeavor: The International Academy for Continuous Education. Bennett also attended the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival (England’s Woodstock), where he had a “genuine experience of sharing and caring that held together a quarter of a million young people and lifted them for a brief moment into another world.”
Bennett wrote after that experience:
This is what can come from Schools of Being… These schools need not, as in the past, be esoteric, admitting only an initiated few… one must have understanding and this does not come from the mind or even the heart, but from the will.
I will be more satisfied with my life than I am now, if I can help young people to establish schools of being and hold on to their heritage. They need all the help they can get.
Nearly fifty years ago, at age 24, I entered a similar school of being, The Institute for Conscious Life. With Reshad Feild leading, we studied Rumi, Arabi, Gurdjieff, and other esoteric traditions and practices. We were taught the vortex of energies but only learned how to be together through trial by fire. Tagore called it “the interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world.”
This morning, I made a similar decision. I graduated from the need to modulate whatever lack I feel in my nervous system. I want to explore and share Bondo's mystery with others. We all stand to learn how to be together.
I’m calling it The Bondo Project.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/keith-richards-essential-advice-songwriting/
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/keith-richards-essential-advice-songwriting
Bennett, John Godolphin. Sex and Spiritual Development. Bennett Books. Kindle Edition.
Cynthia Bourgeault. Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls
JG Bennett. Witness, Postscript April 1971