Innocence may be shattered through being betrayed, abandoned, or abused, through losing something you cherish, or being stuck with something you hate. One person’s innocence is shattered by being born prematurely and living their first three months in a plastic incubator. Another person’s innocence is shattered by being sent to public school when they are five years old. Someone else’s innocence is destroyed by the psycho-emotional terrors perpetrated on their family by an alcoholic father or a choleric mother, by a disease or an accident requiring surgery, by being sexually molested or by someone close suddenly dying, by natural disaster or the effect of war. Whatever exactly happened to you, whatever story you produce about what happened, the consequence of the wounding will be the same at the moment of the wounding as it is now, even if the wounding was lifetimes ago. The result of the wounding will be objective, having the same result from person to person. The result of your wounding is a broken heart.
A Dirge For Certainty
Like a dust devil spinning out into nothing,
You died quietly.
The rustle of a few dead leaves in the wind.
Which was a surprise for me.
How precious I once thought you were.
You seemed solid as granite,
Fierce as a tax collector,
Deadly as a wounded vampire.
I almost didn’t know you were gone
So engaged was I in the avalanche
Of new experience,
Liberated by your passing.
I used to hang all my finest possessions
On your robust branches:
My expectations, my superiority,
My resentments, my trust.
Only raise the temperature and the sturdiest wood
Transforms into ashes
That can hold nothing.
I have fleeting memories of a time when things fit together
Into nice, neat packages and made sense.
Oh, what a small, tight world that was.
By accident I meet you now,
Lurking in the bottom of a glass,
Behind a betrayal,
Beneath a mistake.
Like brushing against sheets hanging on a line to dry,
I slip past so as not to disturb,
Feeling gratitude that you escorted me safely
Into a vaster more mysterious world,
Not wishing to renegotiate.
Life is better raw and unprotected
Without certainty. – C.C.
To move into the space of Archetypal Love requires the broken heart. Your first reaction to the image of having a broken heart could well be revulsion – a broken heart is a weakness, a vulnerability that saddles you with a handicap. What could it mean, a “broken heart”? First of all, it is not the heart that is broken. The heart is fine. What breaks is the agglomerated encrustations around your heart, that you collected so as to buffer your heart against experiencing an intensity of feelings you thought you could never bear. You defended your heart in order to survive. And it worked. You did survive. Your intention was noble and successful. Your intention was to take care of yourself so that you could continue to live. You lived and you grew. You matured, until that which once defended you has now become your prison. What may be happening now is that you are outgrowing your own defenses. The tricks you created to stay untouchable are as irrelevant as diapers, as unnecessary as a baby bottle, as extraneous as training wheels on your bicycle.
The broken heart is hard earned, and commonly perceived as an avoidable evil, something that God lets happen as an oversight. An extraordinary event must occur to shift a victim’s view of having a broken heart to include its true value. How is one to responsibly understand and use the pain of deceit and betrayal to expand compassion rather than shrink it? How can a broken heart serve Archetypal Love?
The answer is counterintuitive. A broken heart is so tender and raw that considering doing violence to another person or to nature feels like raw skin scraped on hot pavement. It is not the pain of “being violated” but the pain of “being about to cause violence” yourself that changes you. When pain about your own unconscious behavior wakes you up to the depth of your unconsciousness, then, your broken heart changes the way you behave. You care too much about the being of a person to be insulted by their Box. You cannot even pretend to take revenge. Why take revenge against a sleeping machine when there is a living being in there, whom you could love?
When you accept the unexpurgated experience of your broken heart, there may come times when you think you want to die of overwhelm from shame, from isolation, from depression, grief, or remorse. But you do not die. Instead, you live on within an intensity of experience, far above what you previously defined as the maximum limit. Even if you do not know how this process works, you continue living. In these times you have “hit bottom.” You have given up trying to control the circumstances and have become fluid to a level that you previously assumed would drive you crazy. Then, you discover that in these times you are, to a high degree, transparent to the Principles that serve what is wanted and needed in the space, because your Box does not care to interfere with its dreary opinions anymore.
As paradoxical as this may sound, in my experience the upperworld is entered through the bottom of the underworld. Your broken-heartedness gives you answers that you thought could only be found elsewhere through struggle or merit. In those “worst” of times, as you look back on your life, you see that having abundant compassion toward your own broken heart is what finally made sense.
If you practice delaying your reflexive moves that try to patch up the cracks in your heart, the heart will gradually relax into staying open even when it hurts. You develop distinctions between the different kinds of hurting. Is it fear? Is it rage? Is it sadness? Is it joy? Is this a feeling or is it emotion from the past? Is this my pain or is it someone else’s pain? Is this feeling mixed together with other feelings, or is it a pure feeling? How big is it – what percentage?
Accepting your own broken heart is a new experience. Your whole body may find empathy, may become unpredictably kind and generous, may sense what is happening in its proximity as if it is happening to itself – not because your heart wants to feel these things, but by the very fact that it is broken and no longer protected with a sense of already-knowing certainty. The broken heart opens to wideband exchange, both with other people and with specific situations. It encounters a new kind of energetic flowthrough. Sooner or later, you come to discover that the experiences that shattered your innocence and eventually broke your heart open gave you the exact reference points and sensitivities that you need to serve others and fulfill your destiny. Your pain has been your apprenticeship.
A broken heart becomes the gateway to Archetypal Relationship domains when you accept the totality of its brokenness. There is a difference between accepting broken heart-edness as a permanent condition, and enduring a broken heart as a temporary strategy, just long enough to get through a moment of anguish. Enduring a broken heart is conditional. But Archetypal Love is unconditional. Archetypal Love cannot land in the relationship space you hold, until you are willing for it to be there forever. Then, Archetypal Love comes and goes as it pleases. By trying to endure a temporary broken heart without accepting an irreparably broken heart, the wall stays in place.
A man’s broken heart exposes him to unspeakably precious experiences, that were too frightening for a heart guarded by reactionary machine guns. Experiences that were previously too intense become suddenly too temporary. Tenderly caressing the aliveness in your woman’s hand enchants you endlessly. Within the field of your delicate attentions her she-ness unfolds into none other than the true Archetypal Feminine, the astounding Goddess, the same one who was Mary Magdalena to Jesus, who was Shakti to Shiva, who was Radha to Krishna. This radiantly alluring she-being stands in relationship to you, and every cell in your system tingles with the connection. You smell the musky warmth of her skin; you stroke the electric
tangles of her hair. Maximum Womanliness fully and richly responds to your glance. She speaks into your fortunate ears. She willingly spends precious moments of her life sharing ordinary chores with you, while exuding flawless beauty, every breath and gesture only full of love. She envelopes you in her nurturing and healing balm of legendary proportions, the taste of which you can neither absorb enough nor appreciate enough. Being too close aches as much as being too distant, and yet she is the focus of your unquenchable longing when you appreciate and accept your broken heart.
SECTION 8-E
The Power of Attention
Human attention is one of the most delectable substances in the universe. How much effort do you put into trying to get attention from other people? Why? Most people love to get either positive or negative attention because it feels great to have another person’s attention, no matter what form it is. Human attention is sometimes the only thing required to perform healings and transformations.
We each have masculine and feminine forms of attention. Masculine attention is singular, focused, directed, analytical “point attention.” Feminine attention is wideband, multidimensional, free-floating, intuitive “field attention.” Each kind of attention has its particularly effective applications. Masculine point attention is useful for persisting, getting a project finished, or “drilling down” to get to the root of a matter. Feminine field attention is useful for scanning people, projects or situations to assess the state of things, to check for unexpected conditions, to detect moods or the drift of underlying currents.
Placing your attention on something is like shining a flashlight into the dark. Where your attention goes, your energy flows. The effects caused by consciously directed attention do not come from the attention itself, but rather from the energy that flows along the attention. It is your energy that lights things up. For example, when a man places his Archetypal Masculine attention on his woman, his Archetypal Masculine energy flows to her, and in that moment she can light up. When a man places his conscious attention on his woman, the space is held for her. She is protected and safe. She no longer has to take care of herself from a survival perspective, so her masculine defenses can relax. She softens and becomes more feminine. In that moment of softening, the door opens for Archetypal Woman to appear. You can watch it happen as she changes before your eyes from an ordinary human woman into the Pirate Sorceress Warrioress Queen Goddess Woman, a transformation that is more thoroughly investigated in the next chapter. But, if a man places his ordinary attention on his woman, even for an instant, the spell is broken. One woman described it like this: “If I am adored by my man it builds a foundation and I can abandon myself into being a fabulous and sensuous woman. But if he judges me, even in the slightest way, everything falls apart like a house of cards.” The mood is shattered. The door is closed.
A woman must also be careful about what kind of attention she places on her man. A woman’s ordinary attention can look anywhere and find fault. She sees whatever is not working, whatever might possibly go wrong. If you direct such attention at the imperfections in your man’s thin ego structure, that ego mechanically snaps into a scared snarling dog, fighting for its life. But if you split off a portion of your practical field attention and use it to scan behind the scenes in all dimensions of your daily affairs, to detect anything that needs to be handled, and if you place whatever you find on a prioritized list at the feet of your man to dispense with as he sees fit, that creates Archetypal Relationship. With the details handled through respectful team-work rather than entangled in low drama, you can reserve the bulk of your feminine attention for appreciating the experience of being with your Archetypal Man as he brings you on his adventures, fights his battles and rescues you from the dreary ordinary. Admiring your hero with Archetypal Feminine attention, even if he struggles or wavers in his efforts, gives a man the strength of knowing that someone truly believes in him. The mysterious strength that arises from knowing that someone truly believes in you makes legendary results possible. Behind every successful Archetypal Man is an Archetypal Woman admiring her hero.
The ability to intentionally place and sustain your attention on your partner takes intelligence and care. But, we have a conflict here, because the natural, unintentional manifestation of the masculine and the feminine is stupid aggressivity and evil. The key to the Archetypal domains is applying our attention with conscious intention, but practically speaking we do not own our attention. Most of the time we do not even know where our attention is. Our attention wanders around, bouncing from one thing to the next; whatever flashy object or loud sound strikes us gets our attention. Without specific practice, we have difficulty placing our attention anywhere with intention, for any length of time, because our attention span is so short and we are so accustomed to letting it be absorbed in distractions.
Since our energy follows our attention, then whatever has our attention also consumes our energy. A thousand distractions will feed on us, whenever we don’t pay attention to exactly what we are feeding with our flow of energy. Here is a list of distractions that consistently get our attention and devour our energy.
Common Things That Can
Devour Your Energy
• Worries
• Resentments
• Physical pain or discomfort, even minor itches or having your hair out of place
• Withholding communications; not saying what needs to be said
• Keeping secrets
• Withholding anger, fear or sadness
• Repressing joy
• Getting hooked and emotionally overreacting
• Taking sides in a conflict
• Taking a position about anything, e.g., politics, sports, art, religion, science
• Having opinions
• Sustaining beliefs
• Avoiding unpleasant tasks
• Having internal mental conversations with others
• Having other people’s energy in your personal space
• Power struggles with authority figures
• Making up justifications for what you did or what you want to do
• Blaming others
• Trying to be right
• Trying to make other people wrong
• Trying to be perfect
• Complaining to anyone about anything
• Trying to get other people’s attention
• Trying to remember what you forgot
• Trying to find or reclaim what you have lost
• Trying to look good
• Trying to look better than other people
• Trying to be acceptable to others
• Trying to make other people jealous
• Trying to look normal
• Trying to be superior
• Strategizing ways to get revenge
• Being late, even just a few minutes
• Breaking your promises
• Not answering the exact question that was asked
• Saying more than is necessary
• Driving faster than the speed limit
• Arguing with anybody about anything
• Making messes for others to clean up
• Living in unseen messes, e.g., packed attics, unwashed dishes, unpaid bills
• Unf ini shed bus ines s, uncompleted projects
• Broken agreements, either by you or by others
• Broken objects that need to be fixed
• Too many possessions, having more than you need
• Borrowing money or things
• Loaning money or things
• Flirting, i.e., exchanging sexual energy casually with friends or strangers, over the telephone or over the Internet
• Protecting other people from feeling hurt; walking on eggshells
• Being adaptive
• Giving your center away
• Being a source of psychic violence
• Making lists of things to do
• D
isorganization, confusion, pointless chaos
• Listening to other people complaining.
• Overeating, over drinking
• Junk food
• Drugs, prescribed or not
• Trying to stay in fashion
• Indulgence, e.g., fantasy worlds, bingeing, over shopping
• Mass media: television, radio, newspaper, magazines, billboards, posters, etc.
• Overindulging in desire for objects or experiences, e.g., sexual fantasies
• Addictions, e.g., to adrenalin, to problems, to being perfect, or to speed
• Gossiping or being around gossip
• Low drama
• Triangulating in communications, telling one person what you should be telling another person
• Not enough boundaries with your children
• Not enough boundaries with your parents
• Not enough boundaries with your own Gremlin
• Excessive orgasms or orgiastic behavior
• Making boundaries at the castle gate instead of at the frontier
• Avoiding contact or intimacy with your mate, shunning
• Making other plans, having a back door
• Leading a double life
• Not expressing what is really going on with you
• Conflicts with your neighbors, colleagues, boss, employees
• Violence, cathartic expression of emotions, horror films or novels
• Doing things that you do not consciously take responsibility for choosing to do
• Doing things you do not want to do
• Always just doing things, and so on.
As you can see, your energy is swiftly devoured by countless distractions. Without paying attention to your attention, your precious energy is easily sucked away. Like a sieve with a thousand holes, you can be drained in a matter of seconds. No wonder we can be so tired halfway through the day. Without realizing how, we frivolously spend our daily energy allotment. Then, we have little patience for deep listening, for being-with others, or for doing Edgework experiments.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 42
