Pathways to Bliss + 20/20 Hindsight

“Everybody is fundamentally the Ultimate Reality... GOD in the sense of being the self – the deep, down, basic, whatever-there-is. And you’re all THAT, only you’re pretending you’re not.” — Alan Watts

When you meet God, it’s nothing like you think it’ll be. You arrive at the Airbnb where you were supposed to meet him, which is actually the basement of someone’s townhouse. You have trouble finding the door; the sun just set and there are no lights outside, nor a sign illuminating where the path to your temple might begin.

You’re there alone because he had to rush back to Texas, to the girlfriend he hadn’t broken up with yet. Of course, he didn’t tell you this, but some part of you felt it in the stiff cadence of his words.

When you walk in the door, it’s not romantic. There are no roses strewn on the bed. There is a cracked mirror and a tile floor and it’s a bit cold for your liking. Though it wasn’t explicitly stated, and it may be all in your head (but probably not, because you’re intuitive as fuck) there is a feeling of expectation — that you’re there to undress. To show yourself. Because you’re soulmates…or something.

Or something… The truth is, you want him to be your Very Sexy God.

So you do what any God smitten woman does: pray.

Switch your iPhone into selfie mode, kneel at the edge of the king size bed, and edge yourself into fits of ecstasy.

“Your erotic self is pure, authentic pulchritude,” he echoes from another galaxy.

You don't quite believe the poetic admonitions after looking up what the fuck “pulchritude,” means (beauty). But you want to, and that’s the first step in your transformation.

Desire is, after all, life’s heartbeat.

“You didn’t teach me, I taught myself through you.” — Alice Phoebe Lou / Only When I

The first mistake you made was attributing your realization to him.

Sure, he invited you to the room where you met God.

But you came with the intentions (and you executed like you meant it).

Sure, he said nice things, helping you see yourself in a new light.

Helping you believe it was safe to let your guard down.

But you chose to open.

It’s becoming clearer now isn’t it?

That it was your desire, not his desire for you, that was the holy (yes, pun intended) portal?

That it was your desire to connect with something greater, and not your bestowing of a title upon him, that was the pathway to bliss.

That it was your love for your body, your being, your expression, your beauty, that set the stage for God to drop in?

And then there was the poem. The poem!

The muse must confess her sins,
for it begins a cascade
a deluging rain of
crystalline consciousness
radiates through my veins and
I feel the pulsation

How, my love, do you attribute what’s dripping through your being, to someone’s absence?

It’s the longing, isn’t it? The perpetual wish to connect with the feeling. The space within.

“This desire for our own far off country [is] the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.” — C. S. Lewis

Hindsight is a double edged sword.

Part of me is angry, disgusted, hurt, disappointed that I fell for it. Part of me. But the core is tender, compassionate, curious. After all, I created the trap. He just crawled in and pulled the strings.

Forgiveness is the way.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t been there then. So I honor the upheavals dismantling the romance.. I bow to the embarrassment of witnessing my naivete.

Of course he loved me.

Writhing on the bed, attention fixed on how can I please myself in a way that pleases this man, I was perfect. This was all he knew of me. A pure expression of erotic longing. Of love pouring without history, without intimacy, without the weight of closeness.

The sense of perfection was temporary.

“One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are apt — but not always so — to play it rather cool on sexual love… An erotic relationship with the external world operates (so far as they are concerned) between that world and every single nerve ending. Their whole organism, in all its aspects—physical, psychological, and spiritual—is an erogenous zone. And therefore, their flow of love is not specialized or canonized so exclusively in the genital system as is with most other people.” — Alan Watts

Before I “met God” in a man, I was already Here. Experiencing life as an erotic happening. Honoring each moment. Alive and awake as I danced, did yoga, took photographs, nestled into sunny corners.

Sex with him started out like that. Ritualistic. Free flowing. Opening my heart and all my nerve endings.

The first time we fucked, in a much nicer Airbnb, not in someone’s basement, all mirrors fully intact, he spent an hour teasing my skirt up my legs before overwhelming my senses with tongue and fingers and cock and eye contact and bellies pressing together.

He left after three days and texted me about the importance of ritual.

Waxed poetic on the concept of sex as transcendence. The idea of me as a goddess.

He talked a really good talk, convincing me in so many ways he was Here, too.

But he wasn’t. Something shifted once the novelty wore off.

He never pressed his belly into mine again. Not in the way he did that day. Not in a way I believed with my whole body.

I became a concept.

God became an expectation.

I was expected to open just because his cock was throbbing.

And you know what? Sometimes, too often, I took it. Accepted his lack of consciousness, penetrated myself with the demand I wished he was giving. Surrendered to myself.

Was I longing to suffer? Sure. That’s how the world occurred to me, unconsciously at least. After all, I’d never been in what you might call a healthy relationship.

But more than suffering, I was longing for the kind of ecstasy that only presence can bring.

It took real strength to find pathways to bliss in the midst of this emotional trainwreck. But because I was fucking myself to God on a regular basis, alone at home with curated playlists and my sparkly bronze emotional support dildo, I did.

Even though I was under a love spell, I knew with unshakable certainty that God’s six foot cock of consciousness was always within me.

“Love, for me, exists only in a moment of choice in a moment of time: there is no other manifestation except for the one available right now. Repeating those moments is the key.” — Toni Bentley

Apathy is a wretched thing. Just like habitual sex, it zaps the magic right out of the moment. We glide along on autopilot, missing anything that isn't sufficiently loud to wake us from our slumber.

I abhor apathy.

For me, presence has always been the only choice. Even when it came out in the most distorted of expressions, I always found a way.

Recently I had a long, luxurious conversation with a friend about how movement as an art — a devotion — reorganizes our ways of being, seeing, connecting with life.

To choose a craft is to choose to interface with reality. That is, if you practice it as an art, and not some set of rules and expectations to satisfy the ego’s anxiety.

Not that we don’t all slip. Nobody can be 100% Here 100% of the time.

The point is, as much as possible, to swing with it.

To slip inside and just start noticing.

What’s here? What’s alive, asking to be seen?

Who, or what, is God, really?

Can God be stated?

Or only felt?

“A separate thing is real only in a system of abstractions. It is not physically or naturally real, for just as there cannot be necks without heads and trunks, there cannot be flowers without environmental fields. The field flows into the flower, and what we call the “thing” — flower — is a wiggle in the flow, while the flow itself, the energy of the universe, admits of no definition.” — Alan Watts

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