The visible result of reading this book appears the moment you integrate new thought-maps into your Box to the depth that they generate new actions. Certain new actions produce a remarkable difference. If you start:
• Making a gap between you and your Box
• Identifying and sidestepping behaviors that previously locked you into ordinary human relationship
• Taking control of your attention and conserving enough energy to stop letting your Gremlin get away with thrashing your loved ones in low drama feeding frenzies
• Listening as a space to your partner, your children and your friends
• Making contact and improving your ability to be-with, and so on.
These actions alone will provide you with extraordinary human relationship. If these behaviors take years to develop, then those years are well spent. And if you keep making further contextual distinctions and keep experimenting with new actions, an entirely different and attainable relationship universe beyond the extraordinary could open up for you. You may enter Archetypal Relationship where you, and possibly also your relationship, become a space through which the Archetypal Bright Principles of your destiny can do their work in the world.
The perspectives and ways of being that accompany serving something greater are already known to us. We naturally have a deep instinctual resonance for the simple mechanics of Archetypal Principles intersecting with our life. We know it, without it being a conscious recognition. For example, a popular quote of George Bernard Shaw’s, from his play Man and Superman written in 1903 states:
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
Shaw is talking about (if I can be so presumptuous as to interpret the words of a Nobel Prize and Academy Award winning genius) the option of engaging life as a force of nature through functionally representing Archetypal Bright Principles rather than engaging life as a self-serving Box continually generating low dramas. He is talking about choosing to be put to more conscious purposes than Gremlin would ordinarily put you to. He says that living well comes less from catering to your insecurities, and more from serving so far beyond your comfort zone that every imaginable resource is wrung out of you. He claims that true joy is the background canvas upon which other experiences of life are painted, and that true joy can be your direct experience.
Not personally experiencing the joyous nature of the canvas is not the canvas’ fault. If you dig down through a few layers of the paint so skillfully applied by your meaning-making machinery, no matter what the stories of your life have been, you will find the canvas of joy back there, holding your whole scene together, even the horrible parts. Even now, in this moment of reading, that background canvas of true joy can be felt. Even if only for a moment, you can sense true joy like a delicate flash of warmth in your heart. This may be happening regularly during your day or night – a flash of true joy. A slight smile flickers across your lips. A doorway into a vaster world opens up just for an instant. Through that door you can glimpse all of life arising out of an endless field of Love. Experiencing the immensity of that Love is joyous, and you can personally discover that radiant joy and brilliant Love are there. Whether or not you keep your foot in that door, keep that smile on your lips, or keep that warm flash in your heart, does not matter. The door is there. One momentary experience is all it takes to know that the joy is back there behind everything, and then it is too late to deny it any longer. You felt it. You then know what Archetypal Love is about. The canvas of joy is back there behind all the layers of paint. Working at the Archetypal level of the original canvas was for Bernard Shaw the true joy of life.
MAP OF ARCHETYPAL / ARCHETYPAL RELATIONSHIP
ARCHETYPAL MAN BEING-WITH ARCHETYPAL WOMAN WHERE THE RELATIONSHIP ITSELF SERVES ARCHETYPAL PRINCIPLES
The urge to dig through layers of life stories that you have painted on the background canvas of joy is the same as the urge for simplicity. If you follow the urge toward greater simplicity you will be functionally realigning to the Bright Principles that you entered life to serve. You probably do not get to choose what section of paint to scrape away, or when, or exactly how. But, by submitting yourself to the service of recognizable mighty purposes, the purposes themselves could well have need of you to clean up a little more canvas so as to do a better job for them. This is what it means to “be used.”
Being a force of nature through serving a mighty purpose is not a bad way to go. People may describe their experience of being used by a greater purpose in various ways. It can be that thoughts break free of their adherence to rigid frameworks. Speech blends tempo, pitch, tone, vocabulary and phrasings like oil paints into brilliant new colors. Perceptions broaden and reach into expanded domains to tap resources of clarity and novelty never imagined before. Problems shrink into linear steppingstones for getting from here to there. Consciousness becomes palpable, steerable, and formable into the substances, textures or shapes needed to pierce barriers, slip through confusions, or leap over chasms. Unnamed faculties provide exacting information or test for possible options, creating whatever is needed whenever it is not found. Play expands to encompass questions, gestures, or combinations of factors previously labeled as “dangerous,” “taboo,” or “invisible.” Unsuspected talents arise fully formed to sensibly apply what gets created in the wonderful worlds that infinitely continue to unfold. And elegant ways to interact and make use of resources from the new territories are found in the new territories themselves.
After a few tastes of this sort of relationship experience, the disciplines needed for maintaining your relationship as a sacred-space vehicle for making exquisite journeys become more important than the pain of developing the disciplines. Once you know the value of what you are paying for, you are quite willing to sacrifice the Box’s ordinary treasures, such as security or control, in order to endure Archetypal intensities of longing in the presence of your partner. In so doing, you may come to recognize the abundance of blessings that come from relationship created in the name of Bright Principles, and you may discover a natural wish to reflect gratitude back to the Bright Principles. Your relationship becomes a component in a reciprocal exchange: receive blessings from the Principles, send recognition and appreciation back to the Principles. Through being part of something greater than yourself, it becomes more and more clear why such a circumstance is called Archetypal Relationship.
SECTION 12-H
The Archetypal Chamber
Archetypal Relationship starts when you commit to Archetypal Relationship even before you know much of anything about Archetypal Relationship. Committing first creates a force field of necessity that directs coincidences toward unfolding your abilities to take whatever steps are necessary to proceed. Committing first is a fabulous secret to success. Your Box may demand guarantees and explanations and may hesitate or be offended if you do not provide them. But, if you give your Box’s requests for your attention a higher priority than holding space for Archetypal Relationship, you will never gain enough momentum to leave the linear worlds. Archetypal Relationship especially is ongoing nonlinear creation. It is certainly nonlinear to commit before you know how to proceed.
Begin with the commitment to cleanse your energetic relationship-space. Imagine a 1 foot wide and 1½-foot tall arch-roofed “temple” floating just in front of your body. This is the sanctuary for the energetic interactions between you and your mate. Before this sanctuary can be fully occupied by you and your present partner, it may be helpful to cleanse and purify it of energetic remnants from all your past relationships. For example, if your temple is 65-percent filled with attentions and memorabilia coming from or directed toward other past, present or future relationships, then you will only attract a partner willing to commi
t a maximum of 35 percent of their energy and attention to their relationship with you. The rest of their energy and attention for relationship will go toward other people, as yours does. If you like it that way, fine. Leave things the way they are. But if you are interested in a higher percentage commitment from your partner, you have some work to do. No one but you can clean out and prepare an attractive and welcoming space for your partner to commit 100 percent in their relationship with you.
Cleansing the relationship temple is a practical and straightforward procedure that involves, for example, going through everything that you possess and getting rid of anything that holds energetic residue. Items commonly disposed of may include photographs of previous lovers, mementos from travels together, souvenirs, letters, postcards, books, CDs, DVDs, gifts, jewelry, furniture, clothing, artwork, kitchen equipment, cars, properties, magazine subscriptions, bank accounts, credit cards, and so on. Cleansing the energetic space from future relationships may include eliminating fantasies about movie stars, posters of rock singers, Internet sex sessions, pornographic magazines, or daydreams of being a character in a romance novel or soap opera. Such cleansing work takes persistent, conscientious effort over a period of time. I once knew a couple who made a pact with each other to be perfectly faithful unless Brad Pitt or Halle Berry came along and personally asked them for a date. Needless to say, the couple is no longer together, without either Brad or Halle having come by. Your particular escape route from commitment may differ from this example, but an open back door is an open back door.
Each cleansing action closes one more back door and therefore helps you to preserve more and more of your own energy. You are thus disengaging yourself from other people’s attentions, and reclaiming your own attention that was previously entangled in other people’s affairs. It makes sense to get your own energy back. Then you can use it for doing the experiments that you want to do in the relationship laboratory that you have created for yourself now. It is respectful to extricate yourself from other people’s energy and send it back to them, so they can use it for doing their own experiments. Cleaning up your energetic entanglements might also be compared to a chemist cleaning up his or her lab equipment before starting an experiment. Without first cleaning beakers and flasks, there is no telling what kind of contaminated mess may be mixed together.
Successfully tracking your attention, and conserving your energy, effectively closes the back door and seals the chamber of your relationship. Once you seal the chamber, the heat naturally generated by Archetypal Love will begin to intensify. Your chamber of Archetypal Relationship grows hotter and hotter, gradually burning away anything that is not eternal.
SECTION 12-I
How To Be Turned On
Both men and women have the capacity to be irresistible. Not in a neurotic sexual way, not with a false mask, not by feigning irresistibility, not through pretending. You know what I am talking about. Deep within, you have a natural dignity, a mysterious nobility, and a fabulous being that makes you irresistibly attractive. It is your innocent excitement about being alive. And, you do not show it. You hide your natural attractiveness away. You block that luscious energy from running through your body.
If you are like most of us, you put your authentic irresistibility away long ago to protect yourself from being devoured by human wolves. When you first started being irresistible, there was too much power to deal with, no guidance for what to do with it, and plenty of hungry predators. You shut it down and buried it away for your own safety.
Bringing your irresistibility back to life in modern times is complicated by the nearly overwhelming impact of media. Modern advertising fabricates and markets false irresistibility to increase the sales of products. Our daily dose of seductive and tantalizing images in association with alcohol, cigarettes, automobiles and clothing is abusive to our senses and demonstrates that the purpose of irresistibility is to manipulate and deceive. The opposite is true. Irresistibility is simply our natural vitality. Disentangling ourselves from the experiential spiderweb of modern mass marketing, so that we can reclaim a sense of wonder and the true thrill of being in the presence of our partner, may also involve some disillusionment.
A friend of mine got to sit backstage in a photo-shoot for a line of clothing. He had seen a catalog of female models and was attracted to their voluptuous femininity revealed in the photographs. He wanted to meet these women that he had so longingly gazed upon in the pages of the catalog.
So, he used a fake press-pass to get in the door. One after the other, he watched rather ordinary (albeit skinny) women receive professional makeup and elegant clothing, but nothing seemed to change. They were still smoking cigarettes and gossiping loudly with one another, making power struggles, competing for territoriality and attention. Then, the moment it was their turn to pose in front of the camera, they would shift into a totally different character. As if by magic the catalog goddesses appeared in their full irresistibility! They could hold their poses for about as long as they could hold their breath. Then just as suddenly, blink once, and they were gone. They dropped back into their ordinary world of fiddling with their fingernails, being insecure and self-deprecating. My friend came away from the experience destroyed. He concluded that the catalog images he had fallen in love with were temporary fantasy whip-ups using modern photographic techniques and the imagination of the layout artists.
But my friend overlooked one thing. He overlooked the fact that the irresistibility was real. It was temporary for sure, but it was very real. Every human being has direct access to being irresistible.
Here is an experiment for you to do: Find your access to natural irresistibility. Find out why you turned it off. Find out how to turn the organic internal switch back on again. Practice tolerating the intensity of the experience of being irresistible. Then, see what you say and do with your partner when you let your irresistibility move you. And, see what happens for your partner.
What does a Man really need to know about turning on a Goddess? What does a Woman really need to know about allowing herself to be the Goddess she is? What can he do that will make her so passionate about being-with him that she spits and sizzles? What can she do that will encourage him to be the true King she knows he actually is? How can her love for him and his love for her be so electric that they glow in the dark? What is the gameplan?
The gameplan is a paradox. Archetypal Woman is turned on when Archetypal Man is turned on – first about his life so that his soul is fed, and second about her so that his heart is fed. A radiant Goddess reflects off of a blazing Man.
“Deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue,” says John Eldredge on the cover flap of his book Wild At Heart. The fight is the noble fight between a man and his Gremlin, the internal yes or no to the discipline it takes to stand for his true life-project. A man comes alive as he makes a fierce commitment to the success of his work in the face of all odds. The adventure in this work results from the man being put to the test and not knowing if he will make it or not, but having a heart wild enough to keep trying. And the beauty is what unfolds in a woman when she feels a man trying his best in her name. When a man sees his woman turn beautiful because she sees him as her valiant hero, that man can suddenly do miracles, and doing miracles is a turn-on.
Notes On Power
• Women already have power.
• Women create human beings.
• Women’s minds are naturally nonlinear and multidimensional.
• Women ARE the power behind the throne.
• Still a woman needs a man to sit on the throne or half of the energetics are missing and she cannot be the doorway for Archetypal Woman.
• Men have no power.
• Men have aggression.
• There is a world of difference between aggression and power.
• Men have no power until they leave behind aggression and learn about power.
• Aggressive is the imm
ature man.
• Powerful is the mature man.
• A man starts having power when he starts over from the beginning again, and chooses life instead of survival. Living is a completely different game than merely struggling for survival.
• Power is engaged with the body,
• Not the mind.
• Power comes from clarity of mind, open heart, and a willingness to be accountable.
• Power manifests as responsibility, responsible speaking, responsible acting.
• When a woman or man taps into and unleashes Archetypal power they start taking the world apart and putting it back together again any way they want it.
• This much power is scary as hell.
• Creative power only happens at the level of Radical Responsibility.
• Radical Responsibility is more fun than fun.
• We are limited only by our own tendencies, habits of perception, thought and speech. We are only limited by our self-design. We are here to evolve, to redesign our design.
• To enter the game of radiant joy and brilliant love we navigate to a special kind of space.
• This is the Archetypal Relationship space, the Space of Possibility.
• This space sustains neither beliefs nor assumptions, the opposite of a cult.
• A cult seeks to induce you to believe, to join, to stay.
• Archetypal Relationship does not expect that you will stay for the next instant.
• Archetypal Relationship tries to make you go away and do other things until you have no choice but to take Radical Responsibility and become the source of Archetypal Love.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 54
