the dildo song

what a lovely thing to receive in email this morning...

beyond our collective ken

i just ran across this newsletter entry on enlightenment.com's blogsite, on zaadz.com. it's dated october 31st, 2006 and it's the last entry there, but after reading the section entitled "beyond my ken" (sorry, no direct link available, you'll have to scroll down), i decided to give it a huge recommendation here.

jordan's well-thought out ideas about ken wilber, and what he's become, echo mine right down the line. i don't know for sure what it takes for any individual consciousness to withstand a collective onslaught like wilber's endured these past few years, but i suspect it takes a stronger, more integral consciousness than most of us possess to not become compromised by it.

so rather than judge, or gloat, or try to tear him down, i urge everyone i know simply to think good thoughts for him. regardless of what you think of his recent behavior, he's still contributed more to our knowledge of human consciousness than 99.9% of anyone you know. my opinion, of course, but i think that deserves a bit of compassion.

getting it off

our muse-ings today come from germany via yahoo news. apparently our german friends are developing a brand new penis toy. According to the developer, jan vinzenz krause, they are "trying to develop the perfect condom for men that's suited to every size of penis."

men need another reason to play with their penises.

no, seriously.

in this instance, there seems to be some practicality involved in putting an erect penis in a can and then pushing a button. though this would seem moderately terrifying to me (mild paranoia about such things -- it's why i don't use the `shift' key unless it's to evoke an alternate reality, such as a parenthetical phrase like this one) apparently it's the kind of go-gadget that tends to appeal to my brothers. listen to how krause describes it:

"It works by spraying on latex from nozzles on all sides," he said. "We call it the '360 degree procedure' -- once round and from top to bottom. It's a bit like a car wash."

i can see it now. "time to put on the wrapper, baby. here, just put that sweet baby in this can... no, honestly honey, it's just like a car wash for your prick! drive it in, once around and... oh come on, just put it in honey, it won't hurt... at least, i don't think it hurts... no, seriously! they say it's just like a car wash! what's not to like, here? you like cars, don't you?"

i'm all for helping people have better and more fulfilling sex lives and am in some senses looking forward to seeing some guy actually put his precious pee-pee into an anonymous canister to coat it with vulcanized latex. the laugh-factor alone ought to be right off the scale.

pirate pages and sexerati

the toxick muse is getting some other media exposure. no one is more surprised by this than i.

the pirate pages, with the article "words as workings" from yours truly, as well as some astonishing art and words of crazy wisdom from other freqs out there.

click here to download your pdf copy today.

reprint at will, distribute widely.

many thanks to arjay for all his hard work in editing and assembly.


and then there's sexerati, a joint podcast interview with ember faye, writer of erotica and purveyor of fine erotic imagery. the hosts of this interview are wu and brenden simpson.

any and all feedback welcome.

"Traveling the marshes"

"Traveling the marshes" = the newest (and probably one of the oldest) euphemisms for sexual intercourse.

Archeologists appear to have excavated evidence amid the ruins of a Temple in Luxor of an annual rite that featured anonymous, orgiastic sex, drugs, barrels of booze, and what must have been the ancient Egyptian equivalent of rock and roll. This "festival of drunkenness" celebrated the salvation of humanity (a noble cause) with the ruins dating as far back as 1470 BCE.

Betsy Bryan, an archeologist from John's Hopkins University has been spearheading an excavation of the "Temple of Mut" since 2001 and presented her findings during the New Horizons in Science briefing, presented by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

"We are talking about a festival in which people come together in a community to get drunk. Not high, not socially fun, but drunk knee-walking, absolutely passed-out drunk."

According to this article, the excavations date back to the reign of Hatshepsut, the only female pharoah known to have held power in ancient Egypt. These celebrations were held in the first month of the Egyptian calendar, after the first annual flooding of the Nile.

It makes sense to me that they found a woman running things during these rites. Rather difficult to imagine a man in such a patriarchal society encouraging his subjects to throw down, chug down, and boogie down to celebrate the yearly escape from drought, hunger, poverty, and destitution. A woman, on the other hand, has a deep intuition for what it takes to keep her people happy...

Some of the inscriptions that were uncovered at the temple link the drunkenness festival with "travelling through the marshes", which Bryan said was an ancient Egyptian euphemism for having sex. The sexual connection is reinforced by graffiti depicting men and women in positions that might draw some tut-tutting today.

There are some of us, collectors and connoisseurs of such things, who wouldn't mind seeing some ancient Egyptian porn. I'd compare it to the samples of ancient Greek and Roman smut I've got, noting stylistic similarities and disparities and wondering what they used for lube...

In any event, it appears we moderns didn't invent designated drivers, either. The rules for the "festival of drunkenness" called for a few folks to volunteer to stay sober while everyone else got hammered and thoroughly laid.

Is there a downside? Apparently so. After participating in this ritual (and likely nursing an ungodly hangover) you got to wake up to musicians walking around, banging drums loudly. Presumably this was to drive you off so you could go suffer in the privacy of your home.

I think I much prefer the way we tend to do such things up here (though this has definitely given me some inspiration for future party themes) -- much less drinking and no obnoxious drummers courting mass murder the next day. As for the sex, well... there's variety in the world for a reason. Some folks like drunken, anonymous orgiastic sex -- I much prefer being able to remember it the next day. ;)

Occulterati #1: "Foolish Persons"

John Harrigan and Nick Pell discuss situationist threatre, esotechnology, and enochian magicks.

Duration :: 00:32:56

Hosts :: Brenden Simpson, Wu
Release: Monday, October 30, 2006

http://www.media.brenico.com/occulterati/

monday already?

the good news is that the public areas of the toxick temple have a whole new look and i spent all weekend creating it.

the bad news is that i am so far behind on reading/researching/writing it will take me the rest of the week to get caught up.

and i've barely started the inner sanctuary yet.

:: sigh ::

got to find time to work on that bi-location thing, honestly...

500 channels and there's nothing on....

the internet is a lot like cable television, i suspect.

i have to "suspect" because i have never had cable television. i've heard those who do have it say this too, though:

"how can there be 500 channels and nothing on i want to watch?"

the internet is like that for me tonight. terrabytes of content, and nothing appeals.

it would worry me except that i suspect (again) that what i'm looking for tonight just isn't to be had online....

co(s)mic meditation

okay, i can't resist...

whammies

as in, two from out of the blue this morning (well, three, but i'm only going to talk about two of them here) to shake up whatever passes for reality here at the toxick temple.

these two came from rob brezsny's FreeWill Astrology newsletter. the first was the opener:

"If you desire to know where your spiritual work lies, look to your emotional pain."

--Alan Cohen, "Wisdom of The Heart"

i suspect that's probably pretty good advice. where was the man when i was asking this question ten years ago?

next, the actual weekly forecast for sagittarius:

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The phase you're entering may prove to be ridiculously confounding -- ridiculous both in the sense of absurdly extreme and very funny. Yet the immediate future also promises to provide you with unprecedented opportunities to outgrow limitations you may have imagined were permanent. To honor this synergistic blend of slapstick confusion and juicy potential, I'm offering you two pieces of advice. The first is from Eleanor Roosevelt: "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." The second is from Edward Teller: "When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly."

well, it promises to be amusing, anyway.

no one knows i spent about three years of my life with that second quote taped to my bathroom mirror... the rearview mirror in my car... stuck to the inside of my dayplanner... i would have gotten it tattooed on my forehead if i hadn't been so intent on blending in with the 'danes at that time.

looking back, i know it was true. back then, it was both mantra and profound supplication.

Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck

from one of my new favorite websites, crimethinc.com. no, i'm not going to reproduce
the whole thing here -- click your mouse and go read it, fer crissakes!

but, a few excerpts....

You know it's true. Otherwise, why does everyone cringe when you say the word? Why has attendance at your anarcho-communist theory discussion group meetings fallen to an all—time low? Why has the oppressed proletariat not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation?

...

When you make politics into a lifeless thing, a joyless thing, a dreadful responsibility, it becomes just another weight upon people, rather than a means to lift weight from people. And thus you ruin the idea of politics for the people to whom it should be most important. For everyone has a stake in considering their lives, in asking themselves what they want out of life and how they can get it. But you make politics look to them like a miserable, self-referential, pointless middle class/bohemian game, a game with no relevance to the real lives they are living out.

...

What should be political? Whether we enjoy what we do to get food and shelter. Whether we feel like our daily interactions with our friends, neighbors, and coworkers are fulfilling. Whether we have the opportunity to live each day the way we desire to. And "politics" should consist not of merely discussing these questions, but of acting directly to improve our lives in the immediate present.

reading this absolutely made my day... maybe my whole week. thank you, nadia c., whoever you are.

nostalgia

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

-- Hunter S. Thompson

i saw him speak in kentucky when i was at university. he sat there drinking (scotch? or was it gin? i can't remember) liquor in a dry county and trashed kentucky thoroughly, along with the current administration (i'm not telling), religion, journalists and journalism; we laughed and he would excoriate us for laughing. god, we loved every minute of it.

fear and loathing in las vegas was a riot of a read from one end to the other and still amazingly pertinent today in some ways.

i'm no longer a part of the drug culture... i wonder if i'd still enjoy it as much...?

requiescat en pace, old man.

the dance of death

"To make love. we dance with Death. There will be flowing, there will be draining, there will be live birth and still birth and yet born-again birth of something new. To love is to learn the steps. To make love is to dance the dance".

-- Namita Gokhale, The Book of Shiva

i arose from the mists, body sinuous and serpent-like, scenting and tasting the air, caressed by each mote of water as it clung to the surface of my skin.

the beloved arose beside me, his long dark hair sweet with all the fragrance of desire and destruction. his strong, muscular body wrapped around mine. the mists upon his skin coalesced with that which clung to me, and the world was deluged in the flood.

we swam within it for eons, entwined, locked together point for point, lost in the ecstasy of shared communion. passion encased us within its shell. we died together even as the breath of rapture left our lips.

i arose from the mists, body sinuous and serpent-like, scenting and tasting the air, caressed by each mote of water as it clung to the surface of my skin...

another quote, so relevant...

Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it.

-- William Durant

walking between the worlds

i've never done much dream work. for someone who usually doesn't remember her dreams, it's an undependable way to approach what i've come to call "the deep work." instead i've used meditation, contemplation, symbol analysis, visual arts, all good ways to access what's locked away in the deepest parts of me, to bring them to light for analysis, healing, and integration.

so, when my friend chaoflux23 invited me to participate in
key23's dreamspace project, i hesitated. i don't usually remember my dreams, i thought to myself. And then i remembered the other half of that maxim.

when i do remember my dreams, they're fairly important.

i resolved to post the next dream i remembered on dreamspace.

a resolution like that resounds throughout the multiverse. within two days i was calling up that link in gmail, ready to type in
the dream. it had some resonance, some quirky symbolism, and left me feeling a little unsettled --- all good indicators that the murky, chunky soup in my subconscious was ready to give over something fairly significant.

it was jung who said, i think, that one good dream would yield a lifetime's worth of analysis. i suspect it's probably true -- information gotten during the deep work has many layers, accesses many levels of reality. the questions posed from that dream (aided by my crazy magus-friend chris titan) led me to entertain an action i'd not considered for 7 or 8 years -- taking a deliberately conscious astral journey to follow up on the dream's messages.

could i still make it into the astral, that crazy-quilt place where symbolism is both language and currency? where consensual reality and dream are in your face about being the same thing? if i made it, could i retain enough energy to function? most especially, would i remember?

i won't bore you with the details. i decided to use the full moon energy on october 6th, 2006. the results are recorded here.

i'm as surprised as anyone that it worked.

again i used the dreamspace wiki and chris's insightful help to find some things that look like potential answers. go read it and follow the links --- it's silly to recreate that net of interconnections here.

the point is that i found dreamwork to be a valuable resource in the deep work especially when the collective consciousness (in the form of friends online and real-time) got involved to help. it's all in line
with where i want to take my work (inner and outer) in this next phase of my life: out into the community, group space, the egregore that informs and illuminates us all.

now i have two potential paths before me. interestingly, it's not necessarily and either/or situation. it very likely could be a both/and.

my book

and/or

sex parties

the contemplative tradition, and/or sex magick...

the mystic... the occultist...

merging these two distinct approaches to higher consciousness is just crazy to think about.

sanity's highly over-rated, anyway.

kali says...

DECLARATION OF CREATION


I am going to burn down the world

I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone

I am going to turn ideals to shit

I am going to shove hope up your ass

I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe SOMEONE will be able to see SOMETHING as it really is

WATCHOUT

--Mel Lyman

the inn of the snakes

I came to the Inn of the Snakes (the Quetzalcoatl) with a group of friends. It did not appear the same as it did last time, but I understand that this chameleon-like quality is one of the hallmarks of the place. Once we got inside there were snake sculptures everywhere -- at least, they looked like sculptures when I looked right at them. In my peripheral vision, they moved and behaved as live snakes would, though they didn't seem to threaten anyone inside.

There were many other people there, and I recognized at least two members of my local sex-positive community. They were its leaders at one time, but their relationship broke down over a month ago and they are now separated. B, the male half of the couple, was shit-faced drunk...

I remember standing in front of a mirror in that place, cutting my own hair off in a very determined and ritualistic way... (another metaphor for sacrifice)

And the next thing I remember is being escorted to a huge room where "the game" was played. I had earned the right to play the game (through the sacrifice? not sure). It somewhat resembled an arcade or pinball game, only it was huge -- nearly room-sized, with an open top and pieces that could be picked up and moved at will.

The last thing I recall is walking out of the Inn of the Snakes and finding B puking his guts up at the curb.

emerging into group consciousness

toxick muse is a happy girl. her friends wu and fenris23 and new acquaintance klintron have all evinced interest in the meta-concepts expressed in Spiral Dynamics, an exciting new way to approach "emergent cyclical theory of human behavior and value systems."

i read this book and all attendant discussions a year ago, but have had no one with whom to discuss it since, let alone anyone to help me find practical value in its precepts by applying them to everyday concepts. just the thought of having these three very intelligent and creative men to bat this around with me...

if you are interested in the cycles of human evolution and know they didn't stop with you, then you may want to check out these articles at What is Enlightenment?" the online magazine version of the paper publication. they do not take the place of reading the actual book, but they'll give you a good idea of the core concepts.

:: happy sigh ::

it's been a long time coming.

thanks, guys!

dead for five

...and no one knew it.

(courtesy of Reuters)

VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian authorities have discovered the body of a man who apparently died at home in bed five years ago, a Vienna newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The corpse of Franz Riedl, thought to have been in his late 80s when he died, went undetected for so long because his rent had been paid by automatic order from the bank account into which he received his pension, the daily Kurier said.

Neighbors said there was no strange smell coming from Riedl's apartment and authorities who found the body after a court order was given to enter said his body appeared to have "mummified" and was well preserved.

"He had been frail and a woman had helped him," the husband of the apartment block's caretaker told Kurier, adding that mail had always piled up outside the pensioner's flat. "We thought he had moved in with her or gone to an old people's home."

Police said they were not certain as to exactly when the man had died, but that they had found only schilling notes in the apartment -- the currency used by Austria before the introduction of the euro on January 1, 2002.

no one noticed he was dead.

i wonder if mr. riedl himself did...?

meeting god in darkness

"The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you're seeing God clearly."

--Caroline Myss, Spiritual Madness: The Necessity of Meeting God in Darkness

sometimes, it is very difficult to live in that truth.

always though, it is very necessary...