Death Valley 69: Everything You Thought You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Too Traumatized to Ask

Today’s newsflash for both guys and gals: A man can fake his orgasms (and now his hard-on) too.

As some of you know (you have been kind enough to tell me), there are benefits to be had from sharing intimate details of our inner journey, especially painful and embarrassing ones. I said a while ago that I have kept my most intimate relations private, specifically regarding Dave Oshana and my marriage. But if humanity is a single organism, with many perceptual nodes, is anything ever really private?

(Think about that for a minute.)

I am a firm believer that “the devil is in the detail” and that, better the devil we know than the devil we don’t (better out than in). The same applies to God. Without some concrete examples of the process Dave is overseeing, it risks being too abstract, too “spiritual,” to be tangible to those who currently find themselves outside the “field.” It also risks seeming distant, theoretical, and impractical.

Last Sunday’s Dave event, “Spiritually Taboo: Sexual Energy: Good, Bad and Ugly: Uses, Misuses and Abuses” (replay this Saturday at 9 am UK time) was about sex, which some might say is the most intimate water of all to be diving into. Dave approached the subject with open trepidation: a set of clean clothes and lots of drinking water, which he drank at regular intervals from his Buddha mug (which my wife commented looks almost as big as his head—see figure A.)

What is Beyond My Power

The medium is the message: whatever reaches us, its quality is largely determined by the channel through which it comes. Since I am already using the medium of language, the message can never be anything but polluted (think about all the slobbering mouths and sticky fingers these words have already passed through over the centuries). The least I can do, then, is ensure my own state is as pristine and uncluttered as it can be, while transmitting whatever it is I have to transmit.

Something essential about sex? The thing everyone wants to know about but no one seems to understand? The thing that, perhaps in some horribly literal fashion, has now been done to death?

During the Dave event, I took very few notes. I had the thought early on—once I realized I wasn’t taking any notes—that making a blogpost around this event was going to be like trying to have sex is for me these days—beyond my power. Ahem. Please note the emphasis on the word “trying.” And if you are starting to want to say “TMI” round about now—just imagine how I feel.

Because the medium is the message, that’s what this blogpost is about: what is beyond my power—to experience, articulate, or express. I am reassuring myself that it is also beyond your power, because it is beyond all of our power; and that there is a reason why it is, and a reason why it needs to be.

However, I am by definition shooting in the dark here. It’s up to you, dear receiver, to decide whether I am firing with blanks or not.

I Don’t Mind Sex, I Just Don’t Want to Be There When It Happens

The night-morning before the meet, I had a series of dreams that I won’t reproduce here except to say: 1) they involved my sexuality; 2) they made it clear to me that my sexuality, libido and life force, had been imprinted at an unconscious level (likely at a very young age) by patterns of what I would call aberrant sexuality (though libertine progressives would doubtless disagree); 3) as a result of this, my sexuality has been severely compromised: as it stirs and moves, these older patterns or imprints (body memories) also move into awareness, causing feelings of ambivalence, beneath which are stronger, less conscious feelings such as anxiety, guilt, shame, or disgust.

“I’d love to hold you; I’d love to kiss you; I ain’t got time for that now.”

Here’s the thing: although, as already testified, I had difficulty accessing my libido as a teenager and a young man; and although that resulted in experiences of impotence and years of involuntary celibacy (yes, I was the prototype for the incel); in later years (early thirties to mid-forties), I enjoyed a fairly “normal” sex life. I even felt for a time like I had gained full access to my libidinal forces. (Parties, discos, fooling around!)

Yet last Sunday morning, in the small window between my disturbing dreams and Dave’s event, what I realized was this: I have never been able to give all of my life force to the sexual act, which sort of means I was never really there, at all. What may be considerably more disturbing is that, for much of the time, I really thought I was.

I am italicizing that last, not only because it’s true, but because I am hoping it potentially lets me off the hook of shameless self-exposure that the preceding sentence hung me on, scrotum in the wind. I am suggesting that this may very well be true of you, dear reader, whoever you are, though only if you have the balls to admit it.

There was a key incident in the dream in which my wife (full disclosure, she was also my close friend from childhood, who was male) stopped me touching his/her breast with words to the effect of: “Don’t forget—touch.” What I understood by this was that sex could only really begin with a kind of touch that has nothing to do with stimulating erogenous zones or even physical arousal, and everything to do with—touch.

With contact. Connection.

Where there is no connection, no real sex can occur. And when sex occurs without that connection, the chances of a real connection may actually be reduced rather than increased by our premature and presumptuous conjugation.

 

I Desire, Therefore I Am

Over the years, I have asked Dave for help with my “libido.” Over the years, I realized that Dave didn’t quite know what I meant by libido, probably because I didn’t either.

Essential point for the discerning to ponder: Dave only really understands whatever I say to him exactly as much as I do; that’s what makes him trustworthy as a guiding intelligence.

I told Dave, over the years, that for me, libido was synonymous with life force, and life force was equivalent to soul. When I said I needed help accessing my libido, I also meant this: getting back to my soul. Dave may have wondered why, then, did I refer to libido at all? The answer is, or was, that for me, libidinal desire and its expression, having a full experience of both, felt essential to relocating my soul and rediscovering who I am.

I suspect many guys, and maybe women too, feel this way; or at least you did when you were still young enough to think that your manhood was in your manhood, right? Size may not matter—but performance sure as hell does. Right, guys?

Or maybe wrong. Dead wrong.

*

During the meet, my first scribbled notes are:

Sex

consciousness

attention

body as container for spirit

women as receiver of energy —

I only began taking longer notes when Dave started talking about how each of us have assault courses set up around our souls, like minefields preventing us from getting too close to each other. For a couple to really connect, he said, they need to be in a shared state of peace and relaxation; but since we are forever setting off one another’s defense systems, there is rarely ever such peace between us. So how can we really connect?

When two people come together to have sex, they call it lovemaking. But unless they have been living together in a state of pure, condition-free love before the sex, and unless they continue to do so after, it’s doubtful if what they made in that act was actually love.

This is a pretty high-bar for lovemaking—but I think it has to be set that high, unless the word is only meant as a euphemism: a cover story. And if it’s a cover story, what’s the crime? (Maybe the crime is the cover story?)

Dark & Light Triads

When Dave said on this event that it is not really possible to separate sexual energy from life force, he confirmed my sense of a sacred trinity of libido, life force, and soul. Curiously, a day or two before the event, Dave sent me an email suggesting I do a search for “dark triad” on startpages and see whose image came up (his initials are JS). “Dark triad” is a psychological term I hadn’t heard before—it refers to the personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. So now I found myself contemplating two triads: one dark, the other light.

Towards the end of the event, Dave said he was not going to get into the dark uses of sexual energy on the planet but that this was an area that affected us all so long as it was going on. Before that, he spoke about the preoccupation with the dark side of existence and how it draws us into it; he suggested we make it a daily practice to dis-associate from “the melancholia mind.”

I made my own note: the trump card of the dark forces is to show their hand and spellbind us with horror and loathing so we endlessly obsess over them. This has never been more relevant—in my life at least—than today, in 2020, when every effort is being made to compromise our vision and to uncouple us from our life force, and from the guiding intelligence of existence.

(I went into this subject in more depth on the Live meet-up last Monday, a partial recording of which will be Saturday’s Liminalist podcast.)

 

Once Upon a Time in Eden

Back to sex: to be able to have sex that is uncoupled from traumatic imprints means we have to un-program ourselves and enter into a space of possibility with no idea what is going to happen. No idea of “sex,” at all. This takes us back to the Garden of Eden: before the fall. Being naked, without any clue as to why, or even that we are (naked). Going beyond the masks, to a pure foundation. Any idea of sex we have is a capitulation to the program. The program is what has us doing sex for something, anything, other than sex itself.

I said this blogpost had to be an exercise in futility, which is another way of saying a demonstration of impotence. If I successfully demonstrate my failure to convey this meaning, have I then succeeded? If I succeed, have I failed? It is not about either failure or success (any more than sex is), but about closing the gap between what’s articulated and what’s understood (or what is expressed and what is felt). Talking about sex is dancing about architecture: there is many a slip tween the tongue and the lips; and you might even get bit.

What are we all afraid of? How and why did we take the program of the serpent’s phony promise of “You too can have total mastery over your erection (it’s called Viagra)”? Because not to have control means being forever led up the garden path by our ding-a-lings, by any blushing beauty with the huevos to ring them—ding-ding.

This is not a pretty fate for any man, but it’s the fate of everyman, and none more than God’s lonely man: the incel! After Eve went off with old snake eyes, Adam was left twisting his Rubik’s cube languidly and making up stupid names for all the animals—making dominion over the earth the booby prize for the pussy-whipped cuckold?

No Sex in Death Valley

Structure is the killer, said Dave. Ouch. What becomes of language then? Did Adam kill life when he named it and assumed lordship over the beasts of the manor? Was that really just another trick of the gods?

To say that structure is the killer is a curiously sweeping statement for Dave, especially since liminality (a concept which Dave claims not to understand) is literally (anthropologically) “anti-structure.” The only solution, Dave says, is randomization, because “creativity can’t happen whenever we refer to a script.” Anything that is repeated creates a groove. Grooves in space (or maybe knots, a vision I once had under the influence). We dig our own grooves, creating “a death valley that gets harder and harder to climb out of, the more we dive into it.”

There is no sex in death valley: just a mind control cult that ends in murder, lost in the desert of the unreal.

All the world’s troubles come down to man’s inability to be alone in a room and do nothing? Or perhaps, to a man’s incapacity to be together with a woman in a room—and do nothing? To not flinch from flaccidity or blush at his boner.

Most of my adult life, I have fluctuated, like a drunken cobra under control of a tone-deaf snake charmer, between trying to avoid having sex and trying to avoid not-having sex. The liminal path, straight is the gate and narrow is the way and all that, is in now trying to avoid all kinds of avoidance and to avoid all kinds of trying. This means 1) not having sex; but also 2) in some weird too-soon-to-formulate way, not not having sex; so far, sadly it doesn’t involve 3) having sex.

All comes to those who wait, they say. Unless we are too old and wrinkled to remember what it was we were waiting for, or care about it if and when it finally arrives. But be of good cheer, my brothers: for though I have not yet overcome the world, I have made some significant strides in uncoupling my ego from the pressure of my nut-sack.

And that, surely, is progress is this (bittersweet) pil-grim’s tale.

Divine Time

Last up from my notes: Dave stresses, once again, that we have lost our sense of divine time. Only he knows what he means by that. While Dave may only understand what I say to the extent that I myself understand it, he is not beyond saying things that I am incapable of grokking. He tills the soil of my soul for the sowing of future seeds that my mind may never get to see, much less eat the fruit of. He is in it for the long-haul and playing the long-game. The stakes he evokes are that of the macrocosmic sperm, on a mission to seed a Universe.

To get divine time back, Dave says, we need to move in response to existence’s design, regardless of whatever may be happening around us. As a devilish combination of inertia and chaos creeps across the planet, like the sperm dedicated only to reaching its destination we are beleaguered on every side—but we do have a purpose.

Our purpose is encapsulated not in a transcendental mission that would derange even the most expanded of minds, but in simple things: when to eat, drink, sleep, wake, dance, move, when to have sex or not to have sex. Enlightenment, once again, is not following the crappy Hollywood Armageddon script we’ve been given, but listening to the intelligence coming though us, even when everything is telling us to follow the fear, to listen to the prison guards inside us, and go into full-blown, full-body lockdown.

The egg-timer of our life force, meanwhile, is running out—and nothing focuses the mind like death.

 

Love is a Rose and You Better Not Pick It

Life is very short, and there’s no time, for fussing and fighting my friends. We can work it out. Together.

How many different ways are there to say “I don’t know”? And when is it a cop-out and when is it a concession and a confession that lightens the load of a burned-out nervous system and unleashes the libido-life-force-soul to spread its wings and do its unfathomable, uncategorizable thing before our unbelieving eyes?

What are you, guy, willing to admit is beyond your power? Are you willing to take idle hands off tinkly-winkly and let the good Lord hitch his plough to him? (Please don’t take that image literally.)

There is more to this post, but it has to come directly from my heart to you, right here, right now. And it has to come from you back again. Otherwise we are selling each other short. I don’t claim to have the solution, but that’s OK: I am not presenting this as a problem, even if it has felt to me like that for the last forty years. I offer it as a mystery—the mystery of sex, in both senses of the word (gender can kiss my cojones, there are no lukewarm taps or neutral bathrooms in heaven).

The mystery of sex surrounds a wound, or is hidden inside one, or both. And since I know how difficult it is for us guys to open up to one another in the first instance, never mind with women around, the next phase of this exploration is for men only (cue disbelieving murmurs in the audience).

So here it is: an invitation, an opening, the creation of a space for guiding intelligence and loving connection to enter into, or emerge out of: I call this event (which will only happen if enough sad-sacks are ballsy enough to get hard for it): “Sex: What Is It Good For?—Including When You Aren’t Getting Any (Or: Why Incels May Be Ahead of the Curve).”

To book this event, if it is your first time, answer the questions at the consult page, here. If you have already been circumcised approved for previous meets, email me. I haven’t yet decided on a date, but it will probably be sometime during the Easter Weekend, between Friday 9^th and Monday 13^th of April—around noon, Pacific time, 8 pm GMT.

Please note, while this event is for men only, it is also, by inevitable extension, for our other halves, past, present, or future, and hence, they are all invited in spirit.

Other proposed coming events: “Post-Apocalypse Post-Mortem Party,” the follow-up event for attendants of Dave Oshana “World’s End Meet & Greet” of the 4/4 (sign up here if you haven’t yet). My event will be on Monday April 5^th, noontime Pacific, 3 pm Eastern, 8 pm UK time, 7 am the next day Oz-time. It will be a decompression, consolidation, and integration opportunity especially (but not exclusively) for first-timers to the Oshana experience, who have been lured, cajoled, seduced, or strong-armed into attending by my relentless and undying efforts, at this site and elsewhere. I will be available to meet as many pieces of minds fly my way, with my own peace of mind, and offer my body as a bridge over troubled waters. (But please don’t take that image literally.)