Namaste,
I had a lovely productive day yesterday. I hope you did too!
We are gearing up for the 2011 CHEK Conference here in San Diego, which will be fun Labor Day Weekend. Although I’m not really into birthdays, we will be celebrating in style.
We are all excited to share many informative new presentations with you by myself and many of our faculty and partners. I think all who attend will be quite pleased with the quality of presentations the presenters will offer, plus the networking opportunities to renew acquaintances and friendships forged over the years with so many.
I’m constantly amazed at how my students and instructors have evolved to be self-responsible, self-responsive, loving and caring people. Many of them have developed genuine expertise of their own and are very good at sharing their love with others.
This morning, I’ll be doing some relationship coaching with a client and then I will go get a welcomed massage and have a nice long steam bath. Then I think I’ll go home and draw. I’ve been having a vision of a Thunderbird Shaman. He’s beautiful and I hope I can do him justice with my pens.
My visions are often so clear as to be as real and present as the life in front of me, but when I draw, it’s hard to transform the vision with the clarity I see and feel inside.
Vidya always amazes me because her art is amazingly clear and she produces amazing shape and color combinations with tremendous feminine beauty, which naturally reflects her own! I’ve learned how to express more of my own femininity from her. It’s amazing what one can experience when in the presence of one who loves themselves enough to share openly and honestly! Thank You Vidya!
Tomorrow, I will spend time creating a stone cauldron to store and charge the natural medicines I create to heal myself and others.
I’ve had a great time learning from the nature spirits and the creations they have guided me to constantly amaze me because they are way beyond what I can create with my ego-mind.
I hope you can spend some time in nature this weekend enjoying the amazing variety of life-forms and their expressions of consciousness. When I’ve taught my students how to communicate with the plant kingdom, they are quite shocked and amazed at how communicative plants and trees are!
Many come to me in tears having now realized how much of life, and how much wisdom they’ve overlooked throughout their life. Their joy often emerges from a deep sense of safety and security knowing that Mother Nature, in Her many forms, is willing to guide them to well-being.
I dream of sharing that with everyone. She’s so empathetic and compassionate to all Her children, I ache when I see people who suffer from detachment and are in pain because they so often feel terribly alone, isolated.
But life is a process of learning to love. As we learn to feel love, we learn to recognize love. Then we see it everywhere, even where we once only saw the surface of life.
Today, I’d like to discuss OSHO’s and my perspectives with regard to gay and lesbian relationships.
OSHO’s vs. CHEK’s VIEWS ON GAY PEOPLE?
Diversity in Love
First and foremost, before I begin addressing OSHO’s views on gay and lesbian relationships, I want everyone to be crystal clear on my views of OSHO.
As I stated in the post on vegetarianism, I’ve studied OSHO intensively. I devoted almost every spare minute reading, listening to, and watching OSHO on DVD and other media forms for almost five years.
I’ve read and studied many of his teachings several times over to allow myself time to both process and practice his teachings in my own life. Of the hundreds of hours of study and practice, I found great clarity and prosperity with his teachings. OSHO has confirmed many of my own ideas and beliefs and gave me a sense of companionship.
The only two areas I’ve found myself unable to gain union with OSHO’s teachings were his views on diet, and on gay/lesbian relationships.
What I shared yesterday, and what I share today are not intended as attacks on OSHO as an individual.
I view them as a means of rounding out perspective. Giving others another viewpoint so they have a more holistic vantage point from which to form their own opinion.
All my blogs are my opinions that are based on my experiences. My experiences are the basis of the wisdom that resides within me.
It is my personal viewpoint that if OSHO were alive today, his own opinions may be different on these topics because the nature of love is inclusive.
OSHO was full of love and wisdom and I’m sure he had his own good reasons for his opinions when he gave them.
OSHO, in a few of his lectures, made it clear that:
– Being gay or lesbian indicated a distortion in the individual.
– Being gay or lesbian was essentially incorrect.
There have been many times when my own gay and lesbian students, largely influenced to study OSHO by me, have come to me feeling sad and confused after hearing OSHO’s opinions of their sexual orientation. The most common statement I hear from them is, “Paul, how could someone so evolved hold such bias toward gay people?”
I generally respond by telling them that we are each a product of our culture and our era. OSHO’s own body-mind programming had it’s basis in a culture and was certainly influenced by parental and family beliefs, as well as a combination of religious beliefs.
Now, I’d like to share my perspective on gay and lesbian relationships:
If you look at my diagram, at the top you see “TAO”. TAO is ALL INCLUSIVE. It represents PRIME SOURCE, THE SOURCE OF ALL THAT IS. TAO REPRESENTS UNCONDITIONAL LOVE.
TAO is the equal of the true meaning of the word “GOD”, yet is not a God that can be known as this, or that.
The spiritual path is one of learning what and who you truly are and how to love in and as that. Therefore, the greatest reward of any and all spiritual paths is SELF-Realization; realizing that if GOD is GOD, you can be none other.
If you study astronomy, you will find Big-Bang theorists, and you will find people like John Wheeler and Fred Hoyle that are multi-bang proponents. Either way, the origins of life are such that at various points in the cycles of time contained within infinity, the evidence suggests that we were all at one time or another sleeping together with incredible intimacy within either the First Star, or repeatedly in uncountable stars.
This by definition would mean that we all began in a homo (one) sexual (relatedness) relationship.
If you look at my diagram, you see that TAO expresses itself as the full (yin) and the empty (light/yang). Because GOD is ONE, GOD can only love GOD. By definition, if you view GOD from a male perspective, then GOD is gay. If your view of GOD is inclined toward the feminine, then GOD is Lesbian.
Because GOD represents UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, to have any viewpoint against any form of love would be a departure from the offerings of THE TEACHER.
Opinions regarding gay/lesbian relationships are also very linked to culture, era, and religious programming.
If you study the history of the Greeks, you will find that gay/lesbian relationships were the norm for some time.
If you study shamanism (Joseph Campbell beautifully highlights this), you may be quite surprised to find that there is a high percentage of shaman that are either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered (berdache).
If you study the Right Eye and Left Eye schools of Horus, which were the training schools for Egyptian priests, you learn that in their training, they were tasked to live almost every sexual orientation you can imagine as a means of developing authentic wisdom and compassion for the challenges people face. This is the only way one can truly develop compassion, which means to understand.
My personal view is that regardless of how it emerges, Love is Love.
What does it matter as to sexual orientation when we understand that love is the ultimate source of nurture, nutrition and experience?
Who could honestly feel good about an anti-gay/lesbian viewpoint once they understand that some are born with different genetics, different brain chemistry. Or come from broken families that resulted in them having different needs in order to feel safe and fulfill the emptiness within?
I’ve come to realize that as humans, we all seek love. Some of us have been hurt in such a way as to be afraid to continue relationships with the opposite sex and can only feel safe, or heard by those of same sex orientation.
When I see people of gay or lesbian orientation loving each other, I’m glad to see love, for I know the nature of love.
The nature of love is to create good, truth and beauty. Who am I to judge the culture when I can clearly see that the culture is nurturing the seed of Self-realization?
Who am I to judge GOD’s creation when I too am part of it?
Sure, I observe. Sure there are times I don’t understand. Sure there was a time when I too held biases against various people for their views and behaviors. Yet, love opened my eyes so that I could see, feel, and understand GOD enough to trust and truly love GOD.
I used to feel the world was totally fucked up. A seemingly endless land of struggle. I found myself being pissed off at Hitler when I studied him and his exploits. And many of that bent. But was I too close to the screen to see the image for what it was?
I’ve learned that when I have views of bias, it is a symptom of my own misunderstanding and now I use such feelings or ideas as a motive to get still, go deeper and ask better questions of my soul, God within me.
I’ve found that whenever I’m brave enough to hear the answer, I’m led to see beauty where I once saw the ugly.
I’ve learned to trust that the Intelligent Creative Force that created the Universe has the wisdom to manage IT’s creation. After all, most of us have a hard enough time managing our own tiny world, let alone trying to understand the Universe or GOD.
As I’ve come to understand myself better, I’ve come to understand others and the world better.
Today, my view is that I should never judge the wrapper, for you never know what’s inside the package until you are brave enough to look with an open mind.
May we all be brave enough to look at and experience GOD, TAO, UNCONDITIONAL LOVE TOGETHER, for there is no greater teacher.
To gay love,
To lesbian love,
To heterosexual love,
TO LOVE in All the many splendorous ways of honest expression!
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