My Past Lives

The entry following this one was sort of written to mark the passing of time. Except for the 7 days I didn't write while I was in Washington state, I've tried to write something everyday, and the crap I wrote below is that. Now, I'm writing just to make ti-me fly, and it's even less justifiable than what follows. "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to."

I thought the crying jags would be over by now. They started when I received an invitation from the oldest daughter of my second marriage to attend her second marriage to a truck-driver named Doug. She wrote me an e-mail to say that she had talked to her mother, and that her mother had stated that she felt okay with me showing up for the wedding she would also attend. Just that mention was what started the weeping.

Weeping is an old story with me. That's how I segue from one situation to another. Weeping, and having elaborate self-conversations that can run on for at least a quarter century. But, seeing my ex-wife again face-to-face was not the same thing as having conversations with her ghost. I've been a sycophant with some modicum of skill and bravado for all of my life (especially my formative years), and I have a pretty good idea when I'm being summoned by the opposite sex to account for my misdeeds. My daughter became my mother to summon me before her mother, hopefully just before she becomes a mother herself.

I hate that I love women. If it wasn't for my conviction that a man has to be born that way, I would have surely converted to being an open homosexual, maybe even gay. As it is, I've lived the last 28 years as an eunuch. This, as the flip side of being a sex addict for the first 22 or so years of my adult life.

I think I must have been sexually abused from the day I was born, and then one day I got curious about the power that offered from the other side of the coin. Then, one day I got a vasectomy and stopped pursuing sex with other people, and eventually even stopped masturbating. Doing that seems just crazy for a Taurus/Scorpio orientation. I took the art of seduction to extremes... only to abandon it en toto? What a drag, man.

I used my skills on the way home from the wedding on the short hop from Memphis to Raleigh-Durham. I seduced this young engineer who had been married less than a year as a diversion to make time fly on the last leg home. I didn't seduce him sexually, but religiously, and yet by the time the hour and a half flight was over he was squirming to do anything to mark our ti-me together. Who doesn't need a better defense against their Jungian experience with God?

It wouldn't have made any difference whether the person who chose the seat beside me had been on that airplane by either age or gender. I needed time to fly. I know what needs to be there for that to happen, and nobody else on earth. Everybody else on earth has to interpret from my behavior what their's might be.

I lost Jung's quote about what religion is. It's something like "Religion is each person's defense against their experience of God." I been juking this notion around for a week or so now, and the more I bring it into the conversation, the more I grok what Carl Gustav was trying to say. I find myself agreeing with Jung a lot. That could mean anything.

There's a reason why I find that quote so interesting. It brings up the negative aspect of God I call The Terror, and another quote I don't know the exact source of, "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."

I recall a specific incident that revealed an attribute of the horrific aspect of God that took precedent over any other "idea" I may have had of it. My friend Billy and I did hypnosis together in order to take him through his actual birth process, and when he got to that "place" he was just before he dived into a physical body in order to be-co-me human. I asked him what it felt like previous to his embodiment. He told me he was dreadfully afraid. He couldn't describe what was so terrifying to him in that state of being.

Suddenly, the question I needed came to me, and I asked him if he had only taken a human body to escape this dreadful fear, and he answered me simply. "Yes." Then, I asked him if that same terror would be waiting for him when the human body he took to escape it lost it's integrity and died. Again, "Yes."

I finally understood my own sense of the terror of death. It's not the dying, but the fear of what's waiting beyond the pale. It's the same irrefutable force that's always waiting through eternity, and not even God is God over it.

At first I thought I was weeping from the sheer physical pain I was experiencing, and now I think to myself that I'm weeping for joy at the lack of that sa-me pain. I waited for so long for my ex-wife and I to have that face-to-face conversation. I couldn't be happier with the results of it. I felt like the Three Bears. It was not too much or too little. I found myself saying some of the most shocking things. I almost sounded human. So, why am I still weeping?

It may be because I also saw my daughters for the first ti-me in all those years. I wasn't there for them. They weren't there for me. It was a repeat of what happened with my first daughter with my first wife. I passed by where I thought they lived many times, but couldn't go knock on the door because of my immense shame. I am is the unforgivable and the unforgiven. That may be universal with Everyman. A species flaw. Romantic love is tyranny of the most odious sort. Only the detachment of the wounded Grail King can survive the very sentimentalness of it.