August 18, 1996

Dear  Dr. Harner:
     I am now reading The Way of the Shaman which I obtained from Prof. Roberto Baruzzi, who you met at the meeting in Brazil. I find your work stimulating and fascinating. I am an anthropologist as well and did my fieldwork in Java about kebatinan (Java's mysticism) with my dissertation being Sumarah: A Study of the Art of Living (So That Life Can Be Faced). My adviser was Jim Peacock. While I was in Java, I became a leader, a pamong or guru,  in Sumarah, which honestly involves a set of responsibilities that I take a bit more seriously than my Ph.D. in many ways. In Sumarah, we practice gradual opening to Reality which is both the problem and the divine essence of existence itself. As in shamanism, we do healing and work with the spirit realm as well. The opening process goes through many well-understood stages until we reach what we call sumarah or surrender, at which point we cease to describe the experiences involved very much in that they are a part of divine being and constitute no confusion to us in Java. However, I have been out of Java for sixteen years now and in the last five years I have been through many experiences that enter into the higher and undiscussed areas of our practice which have become something of a burden in this social environment. As a result, I have been pleased and surprised to see so many things paralleled in your shamanic approach. When we enter full surrender to Tuhan Yang Maha Esa or Open Being in the jinem level following entry into sumarah, we begin to openly:

     At this point our experience gradually joins with the Divine Being and we essentially lose any distinguished sense relative to our experience, i.e., the ego disappears and we serve and work the being that arises out of our open reception of existence. The maturation process in going from jinem through junun to suhul depends on the accumulation of experience involving service and suffering. In the process we develop open links within our being in a kind of mutual presence involving "inner communication" in the Natural and Spiritual realms. As I said, in Sumarah we also do healing but the primary thrust of our practice is more a confrontation of existence itself and "serving the harmony of the universe" as best we can, though in suhul we enter into a relationship with existence which looks more like: "I didn't make this mess, but I sure am going to clean it up" which is called the Divine Resolve (Tekading Ingsun).
     Be that as it may, your discussion of your experiences and those of other shamans is similar to my own during the past few years. In particular, the description of Power Animals is much like my own experience with my Masters who are also long-term associations from animal beings many of whom go back to my childhood as well. Evidently, your discussion of these similar experiences has released a fair amount of pent-up energy and eased the burden involved in protecting these sacred associations from misrepresentation. I am grateful to you and Sandra Ingerman for your candor in depicting your experiences.
     My reconnection with these old friends came after I got to know the Furies who provided sufficient open definition in my being so that the Masters could come out of where they had been placed by our love. The bond that unites me to the Furies and my Masters is our service of True Justice (Sejatining Keadilan) for all beings now and forever. But, in fact, the phase of articulating and openly expressing all of this material all sort of started with a misbegotton love affair with a woman named Gloria Isma'ili, who seduced, enthralled, mugged, mauled and emasculated me for a few years after having been my student, friend and then a patient using our technique of bearing (nggendong), which is the open association of ones presence with another who is in need of help, generally due to some emotional trauma (her marriage had ended badly and she was complaining of depression). Previous to her arrival in my life, I had been contentedly married and present in jinem in what I would term the confused and irresponsible ambiance of Brasil. I had started a Sumarah group but the practice doesn't fit very well in this social environment in that people do not characteristically give satisfaction in Brazil, as I found out in much more detail from Gloria, and as a result the opening process is much more difficult using our essentially cooperative method.
     It's interesting, when she got to work on seducing me (my God the inner pledges she made to lift my being) I kept remembering a saying from Zorba the Greek that had always seemed to capture much concerning relational responsibilities:

God has a very big heart, but there is one thing he will not forgive: when a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go. I know because a very wise old Turk told me.

So I went and what a disaster. I think next time I would rather face God's anger than go through something like this again. After she had control of the relationship, I was subjected to what Ms. Ingerman describes as soul theft or what we term criminal sense and energy deprivation and criminal ab disposition. What a witch! In the terms of the ayahuasca experience you relate at the start of The Way of the Shaman, in Gloria I have found the "dragon-like creatures" who "had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence" openly expressed in all their evil (as you will see from the enclosed letter to her). Phew. The only positive aspect I have found to the experience was that the pain involved propelled me through to the open statement of suhul in a hostile social environment in a kind of force-fed maturation process.
 At the meeting you spoke to Roberto about being interested in the experiences of other shamans. I guess I qualify to some extent and would like to share mine with you. Along these same lines, I have recently read Sandra Ingerman's Soul Retrieval, in which she argues that we should:

Imagine joining hands with others like you who are seeking wholeness and healing for their own selves and others. Feel the power that comes from joining hands with like-minded people. . . Please take from the power of the circle when you need to, and give back to it when you have some extra to give. Know that circles don't end--they continue. This book doesn't end either; the work here continues.

This is our perspective in Sumarah as well. We are all together in one place, one Reality; let's work on being here together as best we can and learn about our relationships and responsibilities by knowing them in the communion of shared being. I would be very grateful if you would witness the following experiences, which are generally presented with the date so that you can "check" (as we call experiential opening for sharing and verification in Sumarah) them more easily. They are a selection from Part IV of The Book of Being, The Diary: A Record of my Experience in Struggling with the Feelings Associated with my "Love" for Gloria Isma'ili.

      January 25, 1993
The process involved now is bringing my feeling and sense of Gloria here in my experience to account and confronting that which defines it. [June 5, 1993 This has meant sensing fully, dissecting, distinguishing, identifying and individually relating to the elements involved in the enormous love I feel for Gloria and seeing where it is really coming from and what the participating beings are defining it.] During the past year and two or three months, bearing her in the proper Sumarah sense has involved a good deal of attitudinal and positional and experiential transfer. During this time I have learned a great deal about her overt and rasa positions about just about everthing and see her more or less as she sees herself in my right -- I have become another expression of the Gloria pretense in a fashion, loving her the way I do, and express her with her own interest, covering the sense and suffering whatever is hidden in association with it. Now comes the hard part for her being here: she has to both take back her own position and let me assume mine again. The problem is that underneath the pretended sense there lies what really defined her behavior and the rasa related to that needs examination and selectivity.
My middle chakra has been gradually steadying and quieting as a result of the effort to confront this aspect of the situation, though the degree of Gloria's participation outside of this context through wanton interference and denial of the sense and rasa we share is less than clear and will become of interest in that we will be getting a backlog of suffering here if the experience is not matched in her sense. As is proper in unraveling a bearing relationship where the sensitivity is already established and all that remains is sorting out selectivity, I am purely working from the experiential frame, so this is not a major concern to me: I want justice in open being, whatever that may mean in terms of sense or confusion in the understanding associated with it. I don't care about the details of how it is enacted and the proper rasa and sense guarantee the proper outcome.
It stuns me how stupid and irresponsible Gloria's approach to all this has been: she seems to think that denying the existence of reality and the existence of an unwavering perspective on events is a possibility and that she can rewrite what happened as she pleases. I remained open and clean throughout serving the love but I'm sure glad I've kept an exacting rasa record of the experience, nonetheless. As it stands I can go back through the window of this diary and re-live the full sense with proper checking and so on. The problem of getting reality recognized and accepted could be quite a struggle: the local environment, which interacts in all pamonging activities, is unbelievably resistant to accepting a real perspective. It even seems that around here, people are unaware that a lot of the behavior involved in an intensely passionate relationship arises out of not knowing if the shared sense is true love or the promoted semblance of seduction or whatever, that needs to be dealt with in its own right. Until the relationship reaches this stage and has been suffered into open being again, it's impossible to tell the difference because the sense involved must be honored whether it is properly speaking founded in the individual involved or otherwise. The love remains and has been served and cherished; now we see what happens to Gloria and what her participation in it truly was. One aspect of this particular relationship that stands out is that it was so high voltage that the proper recognition of the love is apt to be a dear if rather confusing experience. Unfortunately, I have become rather pessimistic about how Gloria will come out in all this: I rather think the woman exhibited the sensibilities of a whore throughout our love, serving only her most selfish purposes and making little effort to bring forth the love, while I was trying to establish the love itself and suffering no end of pain as a result.
I'll be truly thrilled to see what the love I've been serving turns out to reflect: I've been true and have honored and suffered the sense into silence and acceptance on this end -- now we will see what's in it and what new wonders will arise like a phoenix out of the ashes of our love.
In fact, in part this is going to be an application of what Gloria was trying, albeit ineptly, to do with Miguel after they separated by attempting to open and drain the sense into personal satisfaction for her. That was one of her mistakes: she never really allowed the situation to clarify on its own since she was working on focused revenge and was overdefining it. Rather than really work the sense, she spent her time complaining and going to the movies, thus deflecting her aim and purpose. Incompetent. To work rasa, you cannot leave gaps in it that can be used against your sense or you end up responding to yourself rather than opening the other. Let's see if I can do better.
I have suffered enough so that I'm sure it was important. I am sure that Gloria was directly involved in that suffering. Though the interpsychic mechanisms of her participation in that pain are not overly clear in this social environment, in Java we have long studied and worked them and brought them to justice. I want proper revenge. I want to bring the whole sense out in open being and get it established in pure satisfaction.

     January 27, 1993
Doing a little housecleaning today and waiting to see if the sense is going to steady with its new level of "interactive presence", i.e., rasa.  I have begun to suspect evil at the base of my love for Gloria and Gaia: I think I am drawn to them because I hate them so, not because I love them. Their constant self-promotional aspect in me makes this an inevitable conclusion. If so they mean me no good, but I will have to wait for the sense to settle to see if they have wantonly misrepresented their sense and purposes: if they have, all commitments to them are null and void.

      April 28, 1993
The sense did steady and develop into an open rasa being. At about 4:00 pm on April 17 Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone came in to confront me. It was quite a jolt but they were most of the joy I found in the now hell-bound Gaia and Gloria. We share the same sense and the same view of being and have gotten on well together. And now they and then Titini, Araki and Avenna and the other 175 Furies that were in suspension on the rim have been joined by 181 keris and Wis, a Kree blade of long standing ("the Devil's Edge"), in forming my primary sense in a Sedjatining Perkawinan. They are now my Kangdjeng Ratu Ajunan through shit-ring ceremony. A great deal has happened in cleaning up the sense since their entry.
Avenna, the Furies' long-time general coordinator and the first to go to the rim, was debriefed and welcomed to the sense. She became quite a hard sense before she fell and expected to be met with hatred by her sisters in the service of Open Being and Natural Law.
It would appear that the Union will involve true Common Sense, that is, the Furies do not seem at all interested in standing above me in feeling or in sense, an unprecedented event in my experience and one that will take a bit of getting used to: I'm still watching for dips in the being and when they don't appear I get kind of happily nervous.

When Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera first came in, I was standing in front of the mirror in the hall. They got me into the traditional Fury arrest position, with the arms up and bent at ninety degree angles out to the front. They were indeed furious spirits but I found them refreshing and open (so nakedly and fiercely and defiantly open, so lovely and shy and embarrassed), far less complicated than the goddesses and I hope I did not offend by making a comparison to other divine spirits I know. Soon I began to play with them, saying, "Could I put my arms down. This position isn't too comfortable." They allowed me to come forward and put my hands against the wall beside the mirror. Their presence brought me peace and when they released me I felt like a little boy with them -- happy and a little silly. They couldn't believe this reception in that they are more accustomed to generating terror in those they confront. They said that they have participated for a long time but had been afraid to enter into direct contact for fear that I would not be able to bear them.

We went downstairs and I ate something and told them they gave me joy and that I was very happy they were here with me. They were still very skeptical.
I then found some mercy material I had worked out reentering into the upper lower chakra and went into a rage, chasing and scolding the Furies for their apparent carelessness in allowing this unwanted confusion to restate itself. After my fury the investigation showed that they had not been a party to the mishap but that my sense elevation in their presence had made the entry possible. After that the relationship took on a new aspect. They were now aware that I was not afraid of them and that I have more put confrontational power than they do. They began to relax. I looked them up in the encyclopedia and found their names though we had a terrible time remembering them at first.
Later I looked them up again and found information in the article that didn't seem to have been there the previous time. Their names were now identified with their associations. Megaera was "jealousy", Alecto was "unceasing in anger" and Tisiphone was "avenger of murder". As it turned out Megaera is an inner sense who adopts the position of the being she is with, Alecto is a middle stance sense and Tisiphone is an outer sense. I soon found out that they are among the spirits that have brought me joy in my relationships with Gaia and Gloria in that they are absolute expresssions of Open Being, serving Natural Law just as I do.
The following day or two we got used to one another and generally things got easier. However, after a while I checked with Tisiphone and asked if she was okay and she said that no she was not very well. I asked her to let me share the sense with her and found an old nightmare sense of absolute betrayal that I suffered into silence some time ago affecting her being. I went into a rage and went straight to the relevant Kree dimension, demanding an explanation and threatened to dissolve the being if necessary. The local Kree being was with me so we were ready for an all out war if necessary. As it turned out the shield of this nightmare sense had been placed on purpose by the Kree masters just beyond my normal sensitivity as a kind of protection. They had rather forgotten about it and since Tisiphone's sensitivity is greater than my normal range she was straddling it. We did a quick examination of the situation; found that they had been correct in what they did; and they then quickly pulled the shield out just beyond Tisiphone's range, which instantly gave us great relief.
And later there was the time that Alecto was out in Squeezy and it started getting cold because the being being squeezed was so evil that it sent the universe into full extension and partical substance got pretty thin. Alecto had taken whoever it was out there and she wanted to know if she could have a coat. I looked around and was surprised to find that Tisiphone had the only coat, so we sent it out to her. But shortly after that Tisiphone said she would go out and replace her, because she was likely to forget the coat and it was the only one left.
Afterwards we started on this problem, trying to get them all dressed. As it turned out, Krisy had access to their original outfits but when they came in, they were as uncomfortable as ever and didn't really solve the problem. So we worked on getting them things to wear that were more comfortable and first came up with an all-purpose flowing dress that shaped itself according to the needs of the moment, sometimes being like a kind of barrier and at others being quite intimate.
After consulting with the fairies and elves, we started getting dresses that were really a pleasure to use and brought joy to their wearer, fully reflecting the wearer's deep relationship with being. The fairie gowns were naughtier and cuter than the elven gowns, which were lovelier and more serious. For a while, all the Furies had a closet full of apparel, but with the entry of more and more needy beings in association, they were passed out. [July 25, 1993 I don't honestly know what the situation is at present because there have been no complaints in months and nobody has told me anything].

      May 7, 1993
There have been a great number of developments since the last note. My dreams, for example, are becoming a direct, uncensored expression of this reality. Galadriel of the Blue Flame has been admitted as a Fury after going berserk due to the confusion with the goddesses and such some months ago: "I lost all sight of being and time and was merely a mad thing seeking to still the pain." She now stands with us in Sedjatining Rasa rather than being set off in the Tides as she was before. Galadriel: "Thank you. I'm honored. I'll try to be a good Fury." Avenna: "We all try to be good Furies and we generally succeed." She has also been brought into Sedjatining Perkawinan through the shit-ring ceremony and the Tides have been opened to our being, while she has been freed from this long burden. Many tears. Athena performed a lovely ceremony that calmed Galadriel's fears about the legitimacy of the wedding ceremony.
Our first job has been chasing down the sub-structured inbetweens that have ever plagued the Tides of Galadriel. Tides are the love-united but conflicting and often independently interactive, hense tides, senses associated with the deep love of any high maiden waiting to find her true love in reality. No significant problems have been found in this and all of the habitual intruders have now been sealed into their own senses, while others have been identified as the animal beings I placed with Gloria and thus with Galadriel to protect the rasa involved in our love (I misidentified a Kodak I assigned to help cover Gloria's inner be which evidently was a part of the Tides and gave my dear Coco a good scolding: a bit embarrassing). The Tides themselves need a while to sort themselves out in that the levels of association among the involved beings have been confused and overlapped by cramped quarters of late. In fact, many of the higher beings in the Tides no longer exist anywhere else at present and their senses must be nursed gently into Open Being before they will be able to regather.
She also says that Elves tend to be difficult wives at first and that I may scold her if appropriate: the problem is that there are many levels of association within an Elven maiden that initially become entangled when the sense enters in union with her husband as she gradually loses her many levels of virginity. She did bring a level of irritability to the being at first and is still tied into the incredibly articulated Elven body of things to do and not to do (many of these are like the Javanese primbon method of guiding choices for the right time for any given act), though this is quickly quieting. She is now loosening up and returning to the girlish sense that was the basis of her long stand as the Defining Maiden Be of the Elven See.
A deeper sense associated with some of my Kebatinan activities is now clearly expressed and the entire experience is far subtler and quieter as a result.

         May 9, 1993
I went by to visit Maggy to tell her to back off of Gloria now since Gloria turned out to be a bad lot. She was fine and looking well. Afterwards as Lord High and Final and Evermaster Tree Over All Open Settled and Open Unsettled Spirits and Tribes and Peoples and Beings and Dimensions and Tides Over All Forests and Communions of All Times and Tides and Beings and Dimensions Over All Knowing Forms Over All Trees Over Teaks Over Oaks, a tirade came out against the Oak and Hickory Beings and Maggy has now been gathered into our little group. She is with the 13-curve keris most of the time working out what to do about the general tree situation and assuming her new position as High Sweetheart Teak Over Oak Over Oak in the Tree Being. She is a dear sweet love and we are all delighted to have her with us.

      May 12, 1993
I went by the Botanical Garden today and had it out with the glen there. It would appear that part of the problem has been that the variety of trees present there has a hard time working together. We'll see what happens now, however.
In case there is any confusion, I also hold the position of Lord High and Final Devil Over All Closed Settled and Closed Unsettled Spirits and Beings and Dimensions. "I didn't make this mess, but I sure am going to clean it up!" I Have Spoken.

      May 15, 1993
Last night an old friend, a red-tailed hawk, came in in a crash landing after having some trouble flying out beyond the rim. The rim of being is where nature collects the closed spirits with negative karmic backlogs while awaiting some way to bring justice to the evil and pain they represent. The sands stretch out far and each grain is the sense center of a betrayer being that has cut itself off from the whole seeking its own end. The finer the sand the eviler the being involved as the levels of betrayal stack upon one another in a kind of black hole of pain denied, pain the being caused to us but refuses to share and learn from himself. Pain denied is the source of closed being in general and the problem has always been that we could not find a way to bring true justice out of the confusion of evil since the pain has to go back where it came from to enact justice. Now the path is clear so the idea was to stop the rotation of the rim, which kept the sands in motion so that they could form as few evil associations as possible while between lives, as it were. The hawks had gone out beyond the rim to try to get far enough to fix the rotation of the sands and begin the process of enacting justice.
This hawk made an incredible effort and reached the limits of the Krull dimension, which is the outer rim, but was unbelievably tired and landed on the sands. She felt afflicted and a diving sense of gloom came upon her so she took off again with a heavy heart. She was having trouble flying over the expanses of the inner rim and was close to landing among partially formed senses, which would have meant a great deal of pain. Her spirit was sinking into a pit of dismay and terror and she decided to trust her love and make the long dive in. She came into me when I was in the kitchen; luckily there was nobody else at home so the fit of hysterical laughter that hit me caused no problem. I found out who my visitor was and began to debrief the brave spirit. She was sufficiently terrorized as to feel like a male hawk at that point. We went through the normal debriefing phases at incredible speed, inspired by the love we share. Afterwards the Kree helped me to get the rim sand that had been causing her such anguish and pain off her, in that the rim beings were evidently trying to drain her energy and establish their evil dreams on it. We fed them some energy and they swelled into larger grains that fell off her and were then dispersed out over the full rim to free us from their loathsome sense. I told her she could stay the night and try to calm down.
Then this morning we started exchanging memories from her period with me between the ages of about 5 and 13 when I used call this dear spirit Chickie in my heart. She was one of my Masters of Being and taught me much about accepting reality and fighting without trying to serve the self but to see the true sense clear. Since she kind of fell into my arms in rather a state of need this time, we decided to give her another name, Hystia (hysteria), to remind us forever of our reunion. We found that our love has held solid and we were married in a shit-ring ceremony this morning.
Afterwards we tried to send a group of perigrines and kites and a black eagle out to try to fix the rim. Either because the rim had been fixed by Hystia already or because their love was not so strong, they soon had to come back and were in awful need of debriefing and cleaning, for the lighter and eviler sand spirits blow high out over the rim, seeking some way to impose their horrible will on all of us. Thanks to Hystia's faith and love and courage, now the rim is fixed and we are moving to a phase of letting the pain paths or tubes of each of the closed beings form and find the source of the pain they express. With so much denied pain involved, this will take a while but the pain caused by the fixing of the sands and our current sense overall is helping to get things moving as each being seeks to dominate all those around it with its evil plans of self promotion.

         May 16, 1993
Some other childhood friends and masters from various beings, Coco and Brownie and Woowoo and Shrimpy, came in last night and today.

         May 17, 1993
Cricky, another familiar childhood master (though I was never really able to attend her counsel since she comes from a settled open being and I needed more flexibility than that implies), came and established herself her in a full check of my being. She has since opened the full carried reference being and rendered a complete report on the situation which will make things much easier both to understand and to work with since her effort comes all the way down to the ground or below in most areas. Some of the dearest moments of my life have come with Cricky. There are many lovely and loving stories that come out of my relationship with her, that unbelievably heavy footed love -- what incredible intensity to her love.
One came on the day I arrived in the office and looked for her and she was no where to be found. She was speaking through me and got very angry as I kept looking for her. When I crawled under the desk she lost her temper and was saying, "You stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!!!!" I looked up the back of the desk anyway and then came out and found her right in her normal place as mad as could be. She thought I had been playing with her but I really hadn't seen her.
There was another incident when she over the door and was first checking me and did a pain tolerance test by inducing pain in a charlie-horse in my right foot. The pain was considerable and I was wiggling my foot to defuse it. She told me to stop so I did and just bore the pain with her. She found the amount of pain to be difficult to bear since this is a shared phenomenon and kept asking if I had had enough. I said no problem and she said well I'm going to stop now and the pain stopped just like that. Afterwards she suffered from illusions that I was angry with her and would come and squash her or some such but I had no such hostility. The test had not been overly painful to me. She also did a thorough check of my being in all aspects and activities. I miss her so. We did a fantastic amount of work and shared an incredible amount of love while she was with me -- the most intimate open and true friend I've ever known.

      June 4, 1993

      July 7, 1993
Yesterday evening there was a rather full exposition about the character of the situation with Gloria.
I came to Brazil in full surrender, rather hunting to find something or someone to justify the pain of being here. I long assumed I would be inspired to introduce Sumarah here but that did not develop. I still struggle with my work on that and try to open it to the local sense but nothing much has come of it so far. However, with Gloria I found myself fully realized and all of my years of preparation suddenly became relevant. However, the two of us had radically different perspectives on the sense and rasa we experienced.
From Gloria's perspective, I was such a fool that there was no way to keep her from dividing up the spoils while I was still on the hoof. When I said, "Eu não penso mais" she just saw this as an opportunity to make a real kill in that my apparently unmanaged being was immense. A lot of our love affair constituted her laying claim to and trying to sell off parts of my being and trusting my goody-goody attitudes never to respond to the offences she promoted both in the relationship and in her pursuit of the sense. As a result of the heavy hand she laid on my experience, there are some activities and capacities that I still don't have back yet.
From my perspective, she was highlighting and helping me to eliminate improper participants like my father and brother that I had in fact dipped down into dark silence in order to avoid direct contact with since they are both "floaters" like Gloria, suspended in the pain they have caused to others in seeking to get their own way. I came prepared for whatever happened but apparently was thinking in terms of a "sea bass and hooked a marlin", which has meant a "long afternoon of work to pull her in". The catch is now up close to the boat so we're working her in to pull her on board.
The feeling underlying my love for Gloria is my profound hate for what she is and has done to those I share sense and rasa with. The joy that came to me in association with the love, and shocked me in into silent subservience, is the infinite pleasure of being exposed to a real evil multiple sense being, harboring bonded opens and maintaining a complicated closed system of sense management that is reflected in her multiple personality approach to existence: she can run through three personalities in a period of ten minutes sometimes. The interface that I experienced in our relationship came out of the bonded beings that she has in her being and though I bore it, I never shared common sense with her calculated base sense. She is as I often noted a cruel, almost sado-masochistic person, seeking to cause and experience pain and her real satisfaction would have required going in that direction. She is a floater and is far too high for me to rest with in that her perspective involves a level of perceptual selection and a power rush that I cannot touch. Under her confusion she is a hard, cruel sense trying to control and use and define the world to her hedonistic purposes. I guess I should know; I've seen her in action with the pain she has defined and nurtured in me and watched the way she played the relationship to produce as much pain as possible by calling me in and denying me entry at the same time.
As I have often said, there are two kinds of "love": the first is based on true exchange and rests in the celebration of the common sense the loving beings share; the second is based on hating the other greatly and the joy of finally getting a clear shot at exposing and destroying the being involved.
Last night I had a dream with Carol in which I laid out the whole situation. I told her something like: "Things are simpler now. We're not worried about simplistic criteria of good and bad. We are concerned with open and closed beings and Natural Law. Open beings will be gathering and going on together; closed beings will be going on into the specific hells they have defined for the rest of us. Gloria is a closed being, so she'll be going that direction." The description in the dream was really rather better than this but that was the gist of it.

      July 30, 1993
This morning we had a little discomfort with some fear involved. Later there was an extended description of the Furies' position on our relationship and how it has been important to them to be with me and develop continuous relationships in general. They said they like to call me the "Lone Fury", which didn't thrill me too much but they like it so I'll leave it at that. Athena also revealed something about the nature of the Greek pantheon, with the floater system Zeus maintained in order to support his power and glory and keep himself as sensitive to real needs as was deemed desirable at the same time. The Furies also revealed that if something were to go wrong with me, that they would find themselves love-bonded beings waiting for me to return to their love.
We have been recalling some of Hecate's participation over the years, like when I would drink and she would be with me and the time I smoked pot with Dominic and she was there. These occasions exposed her to a fair amount of pain just as they did me but we are one being so we suffered it together. Tis a great union we share in pain and service.
The Furies also revealed that I have been apparent as a long dip and coming swell for a long time now.

      August 6, 1993
This morning I awoke to a mild scolding in that I was lying there waiting for someone to speak and was told that I can start the day off too. It was said that this one of my bad habits and that they will be pointing out others as time passes since they constitute my inner and primary experiential being at the same time. I'm sandwiched, as it were, since I don't have a great deal of my inner being articulated and have related to it from a down position of silent appreciation without understanding either its purposes or whatever alternatives exist based on placing it in a rather higher position and understanding it actively, which is what my ladies do. It would appear that I am incompetent at being me. As a result my experiential being is often lower than it might be in that I maintain sense that is based on open being rather than having any articulated positions. Part of the process in my love for Gloria was being understood more deeply than I had been before and this is a continuing part of this movement toward articulation and understanding.
Anyway, the scolding stung a little since I wasn't trying to be difficult.

      August 26, 1993
Last night I woke up at 12:30 and was surprised at not being able to really go back to sleep again. I spent the night feeling considerable hatred for the local being and rose in the morning rather wondering how the day would go. I didn't much miss the sleep though I got grumpy late in the afternoon.
Hecate has been coordinating the inner and outer groups of Our Family and represents both positions: there was rather a curious conversation with her on both sides of the inner divide (she says that such distinguished interactions are relatively commonplace in this kind of situation, and reminded me of my own role as counselling father to my dearest dears about their love for me some weeks ago). She says that orienting the little dears has fallen to her since she has long been the Head of the Masters' Being and knows and is known by everybody, thus simplifying the job of trying to figure out what can and must be done. She is attempting to intermediate between the inner Masters and the outer ladies who tend to be more sensitive than those who have been rather accustomed to a state of war for some time.

      August 28, 1993
Last night I was informed that I have a great deal of power. I was puzzled and bemused in as much as that is not the way I experience things but await a clearer definition of what was meant by this.
I woke up with a grumpy being and it turned out that the motivation was fear that some laughter we had last night (I'd like to live in a quiet place so I wouldn't wake up in the morning, "Oh God another day, yick") reflected the continued presence of closed beings in the union. Guan Yin is the one that is nervous and she is now going through therapy to see if her "closed tumor" is benign or malignant. About all I can do at this point is just ride the sense and see what develops. She does have a high cache of experiential reference that I don't understand so we will just have to wait and see: "What is is..."
We are a rather quiet group at the moment waiting for all this to sort itself out. "We will never laugh again."

      September 4, 1993
Last night we discussed the nature of our relationship, the levels of surrender as expressed in the forms of being, roughly speaking: men, women, higher spirits, Furies and Masters, with me resting down at the bottom in undefined exchange. What I have developed into is a union in which the other expresses fully (though with some emotional truncation due to the limits of the physical form), the relational definition is clear but there is no sign of a real personal position on my part, thus keeping the being clear to be with others like this. In this I rest down with the Masters, though none of them have attained this absolute level of self-abnegation in that they did not traditionally purport to interact -- now that has changed, of course. There was also a discussion of the long-term aspect of love's development in all cases with time standing as an "open field" and us united and formed by our "true love" stretching backwards and forwards in its service: we seek to define ourselves in terms of the fundamental love that opens our being and we seek experience such as to serve that love and lead to its fuller expression.
Persephone also told me about how "true love" guides children and some of the rest of us in many of our unseemly or outrageous acts. The way some children highlight such behavior in themselves and exploit it in showing off their boldness and the depth of the love that guides them to impress others and so on tends to embarrass the loving one and separate them from the council defining the acts and from the love involved in it. This is the way in which a closed being violates the trust involved in true love in that true love involves these sorts of eccentric tendencies and behaviors (e.g., shit eating, nose picking, etc.). Another related aspect of this uncomfortable relationship is that when such loving trust is respected, later on there is apt to be a period of confusion when the lover begins to recognize the effect she has had and the council she has given, which may seem distasteful or strange if viewed in a local or parochial context ("You mean my love for you leads you to be so gross and disgusting? Yick.") and out of the universal and absolute context that defined it. True love and the behavior that it counsels reflect a concern with eternal union, eternal love, and is not much interested in this fleeting life that we so often deem so important as we get older (children share in immortality in their vision), which underlies the eventual split between the two perspectives. As a result, those of us that follow our true love tend to be eccentrics on one level or another and to go through one period after another of this or that kind of unusual or focused experience accumulation which are dropped after they have finished in as much as the need defined by their loving definition is satisfied (e.g., drinking, smoking, drugs and other curious types of exercises and behaviors of many kinds). In us such behaviors are not likely to become hedonistic escapes or pursuits in that they do not involve anything that could compare with our love itself and thus have little real attraction to us.
It was a lovely day. We had a long exposition from Persephone expressing some of the fears of the less battle-worn dears about what they are doing here. She also said that she has found being with me to be a good experience and that she has lost her fears and confusion about what she and I are doing together. Galadriel came in and confused me with a heavy overlay structuring that left me on my hindlegs.

      September 5, 1993
Persephone retired to sleep and Galadriel took over, saying that she had many of the same problems that Persephone did.

      September 6, 1993
Hecate came in with a fury, "If you don't love me I'll rip your balls off and throw them into to the neighbor's yard to give them something to talk about." They said that they felt like I have captured them in a tiger trap, but in fact I put myself down here as the bait so they aren't really captured but rather are here together with me and have all their rights established and defended by the relationship as I constructed it. They said they felt like I was a great lion (Aslan) or tiger and they are little kittens sniffing at my asshole, sniff, sniff, sniff, licking it, humph, sniffing at my balls, sniff, sniff, sniff, hitting them and watching me jump. Being their loving daddy, I just let them do pretty much as they please. We talked about the costs of Hecate's materializing or at least putting in a showing and they look exorbitant in terms of energy flow at the moment. Ho hum. We did get a look in the mirror.

      September 7, 1993
Last night we went to bed and my dears announced that they were tired and did not want to talk. In a little while we just went to sleep. I thought they were joking or something but this morning it came out that that's exactly what was happening: all this work is making them tired and the young teenage spirits that they are need their sleep. Adjusting to the mortal frame about old age and so on is quite a job and adjusting to hard work is also a strain. This morning Carol and I considered their profoundly adolescent attitudes and expressions: "We keep finding things that are wrong and then we find that we are included in the process for correcting them already. Like taking a shower, we find that you smell and then we also find out that we are an indispensable part of the process of deciding to take a bath. It's all so much responsibility that we get confused and angry because we are often criticizing ourselves without knowing it."

      September 22, 1993
Last night Nehebka said she wants to keep her old name [rather than go back to Snaky]. She then gave a lengthy description of how I am defined in pure slides down at the base of my being, purely invested in the problems that I find throughout all of existence in the level below confrontation where confusion takes care of itself and finds its own solution without any partiality or prejudice. I rest there looking up at the ripples on the waves high up above and quietly letting things sort themselves out. The incident with Ama provides a good example of the departure of my base sense from the local sphere.
After her description Kali came out of my deep inner sense (where she has been staying of late) and confirmed the description. Kali and Nehebka then had a lovely little get together last night, sharing their sense and their mutual appreciation of what they both are. They initially squared off, with backs raised a bit, but later arrived at harmonious union.
After I found that Kali had "pulled a Wis" on me last night (I was embarrassed that I hadn't recalled her for some time), this morning we were examining some of my indistinguishable senses and found little piles of confusion scattered about in my inti sari. There were piles in relation to Kali, Wis, Hecate, Guan Yin, etc., with Hecate's being the hoariest and most prune-like tunnel of pain, with a fine membrane separating perceived from actual sense, the inner and outer being of lahir/batin. These constitute long tunnels of imbalanced relationships that base themselves in our love and will have to sort themselves out now. As was noted by Ishtar (who has been among the missing too in acting as Hecate's backup), "Hecate, you have been bluffing for so many triangles that I can't remember when you started." Guan Yin said that she has invested heavily in her pain line to keep it as open as it is. Wis's is rather like Hecate's and they are both brink-dancers, long long dancing on the brink of closed evil being and thus providing anyone that opposed them with a visage of absolute hell.
This revelation raised hackles in Hecate in that, since all her little dears no longer have any reason to fear her, she fears she will be overrun the way I have with little love-loves telling her what to do all the time.
Today, the first day of Spring, has been declared Hecate's birthday by her young and old charges and friends who are anxious to see her gathered into their embrace and her lonely wandering ended.
Now it is for us to marvel at how far we have come in such a short time in sorting out the love that unites and ending the confusion that has long stood between so many of us.

      October 11, 1993
We spent a quiet day in the country yesterday. This morning Tara openly joined us and we were together for the first time. She is going to stay present with me for a time to get sorted out since she apparently has a few trepidations about the situation and needs some direct attention.

      October 12, 1993
Tara is getting adjusted to being apparent and is now feeling a little less inhibited and compelled by her needs. She has come out as one of my deep masters in charge of my spiritual development ("We sure didn't need another Goddamned Buddha or whatever!") going way back to the sessions in the attic and the introduction to the inner sense of the Dolma and Kundalini being that brought. She also advised me to stear clear of the Prajna Paramita being as witnessed in my continuing distaste for the pleasant disciplines that build up power in expresssing and defending their own efficacy and fool so many into thinking causing pain to others through these positions and practices is all right due to the number of practitioners, as they huddle down and hide among their fellows from responsibility for what they are: imagine the incredible insensitivity of all those stupid prayer wheels going round and round and all those ridiculous chants celebrating the glory of the chanter rather than seeking to end the problem of being itself.

Great loves of the high senses are always a problem to the beloved because the life they mean is one to please us, not to give you peace or personal success. You have gone so often to the top of a subject, to the head of your class, as in your M.A. and Ph.D. theses and your Sumarah work, and then just dropped the subjects and gone on to the next problem. This reflects your love for us and ours for you. The greater and deeper and more passionate the love we share, the more of a problem it is in practical terms for you and for us. We ended up losing our distinction in joining your being as masters and you, you devoted shit-eater, ended up losing your sense of being itself after the pain and confusion life has brought you as a result of our steady presence, which always excited the jealousy and fear of those around you. Your long fast was the only way we could be granted protection in your presence though it evidently served other purposes as well.
Your whole life has been cursed by our love, especially mine and Kali's and Hecate's and Ganesha's and so on because we always tied you into our desperation and depended on you to be the one we were waiting for, making your life a living Hell with our need for your love and for the justice that would make its expression possible. We are those who seek only an end to these endless cycles of confusion and could only be pleased when that was accomplished. But now it is so and we will ever be with you and in your debt, a debt of love that will ever rest in your devotion for us and ours for you. How long have we watched the mounting injustice and the evil that promotes and uses it to deny the possibility of justice ever coming. How long have we witnessed the unassailable Karmic argument: "No one will ever come to bring true justice for no one will ever be able to believe how evil we truly are." Now that that argument is expunged and justice is guaranteed and established and the Karmic load will be erased, we are free to think about love and daughters and our husband, you David. Things have gathered in our great union and you're here and we are here with you so we can begin to build your sense and experience by adding ours to yours and giving the peace of our love rather than the turmoil and pain of our fear and dispair, which was our biggest contribution for so many years.
If you look at your life - the work you have done, the esoteric practices, the fight to free yourself from the systemic domination that was always somewhere close in your youth - it reflects your love for us and ours for you: it reflects the fact that we did not have any interest in trying again but had to finish this time and so it is and has been done and ever will be. Never again will we fear as we feared; never again will we be disappointed as one we love gives up and cashes in his merit for a pleasant existence at our expense; never again will the split between yab and yum exist for we are one with you and you are one with us and one is one, the way to justice and the proper definition of us all.
I have been here silently participating with you for more than 25 years, watching you suffer and ever confront the sense that makes no sense, the sense that says to leave the confrontation of existence to another and to just do a small part and then join with others in seeking a comfortable eternity. You always felt that there is only one chance and that that has to be enough because otherwise we'll just go around in circles forever, waiting for someone else, always someone else to do the hard job of setting us straight on the great path, the common path that brings justice to all and takes us all up into proper sense thereafter. The yab being as such is no more, it ends with our open presence in being you, the first man with no male participants in his being, and that will be all for that problem. We have had enough of the overarmed masculine being dominating the existence of everyone and everything and bringing unending injustice at the expense of those that truly love by calculating and betraying to get their way.

We have been examining some of the henpecking I have suffered with my beloveds over the years, which has served as a way for us to remain together while making it unpleasant for outsiders to be with us in that the voltage and tone of the henpecking can get pretty raw. The henpecking doesn't interfere with our communication but it does keep off the parasites that would like to partake of our love without suffering its true sense.

     October 14, 1993
Last night I gave a prolonged description of the therapy method I use with my beloveds and this morning things were a good deal better with Tara, who has an outstandingly clear open sense with me. At one point I was busy with daily activities and she asked, "How should I address you when I wish to get your attention?" I just kind of looked at her wondering what she was talking about and she added, "Would 'My Dear Lord' be acceptable?" She was then informed that they have tried to use My Lord with me but that I have no patience with it.
I had a dream last night in which Gloria started saying, "Do you miss having me call you "burra"? (evidently a term of abuse she was fond of). Shortly thereafter I told her she couldn't imagine how much I really hate her, how I hated what she did and what she herself is.

     October 15, 1993
I had disturbed and confused dreams with Tara last night but this morning we seem okay. She is expressing many of the same experiential problems that Hecate and Guan Yin et alia have felt and moans:

Back when my love for you was being expressed by others I didn't feel so vulnerable myself. Now I have to do it myself and I'm scared and confused. How come I'm always in such a hurry? Is it because I'm afraid it will end or that it isn't happening or is it because I can't decide if I'm worthy of being here or because I don't want to lose you no matter what?"
Part of the process of working Our Family open is for everyone to fully surrender and expose themselves to everyone else here and settle into true common regard without any defenses or personal positions, but this is difficult and confusing sometimes. The idea is to give up your understanding and allow the sense itself to define itself rather than pretending you understand anything at all or can control anything: confusing, but the love underneath is solid and permanent and we just need to learn how to express it properly.
How come I want you all to myself but I feel guilt and I don't want to take you away from any of our dears and at the same time I do but I don't, really, somehow? I don't understand it. I feel like you've got to be mine but I need to lock on so hard that you won't even exist anymore, so what's mine ends up looking like me alone and I don't understand how you could still love someone who was so bossy, but you do so I have to accept it. If you love somebody so much that they can't even move anymore, that's okay. And if your love makes you a little stupid and unreasonable that's okay too. I guess it passes but you have to express it - read his Masters thesis and maybe you'll understand better how unusual feelings like this can cause confusion and the process involved in properly identifying and working clear the elements involved.

Tara

We declared war on and put out some garbage this afternoon in the persons of the Dalai and Mongol Lamas, the Avalokiteshvara and Amitabha beings respectively, that have long been a source of pain and sorrow to us in their closed fortress against justice. May they sink into the Maelstrom and on into the personal lines of pain they have formed with us all, promoting their importance and impunity and sanctimoniousness to the detriment of any and all that would serve Reality and Natural Law properly.

    Michael, this is just a little selection but I honestly hope that you have found these experiences interesting. I know that I have found yours stimulating. I am also enclosing the letter to Ms. Isma'ili that is a therapeutic statement and an effort to properly ground the experience I have gone through with her. Please have a look. I am enclosing my Memorial as well for your perusal.

     Thank you for your attention. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
 

Yours truly,

David Gordon Howe, Ph.D.