As well, I have treated the concept of Involution in my book Soulfully Gay, suggesting that the principle of Involution is analogous to Homophilia just as Evolution is analogous to Heterophilia; in other theological terms, that Gayness is akin to Agape (God’s Love for Creation) and Straightness is akin to Eros (Creation’s Love for God).

These are the two poems:

“Trinity” (with enormous credit to Ken Wilber for the first twenty tenets)

1. Reality as a whole is not composed of things or processes, but of holons. (Wholes that are part of other wholes.)

2. Holons display four fundamental capacities: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence, and self-dissolution. Self-preservation (Agency), Self-adaptation (Communion), Self-transcendence (Eros), and Self-dissolution (Agape).

3. Holons emerge.

4. Holons emerge holarchically.

5. Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s).

6. The lower sets the possibilities of the higher; the higher sets the probabilities of the lower.

7. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises determines whether it is ’shallow’ or ‘deep’; and the number of holons on any given level we shall call its ’span’.

8. Each successive level of evolution produces GREATER depth and LESS span.

9. Addition 1: The greater the depth of a holon, the greater its DEGREE [emphasis added] of conciousness [in the sense of: the degree of fulfillment of the telos of Kosmos, but see also tenet 29].

10. Destroy any type of holon, and you will destroy all of the holons above it and none of the holons below it.

11. Holarchies coevolve.

12. The micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth.

13. Evolution has directionality.

14. Evolution has increasing complexity.

15. Evolution has increasing differentiation/integration.

16. Evolution has increasing organization/structuration.

17. Evolution has increasing relative autonomy.

18. Evolution has increasing telos [Omega].

19. Addition 2: Every holon issues an IOU to the Kosmos [God the Father].

20. Addition 3: All IOUs are redeemed in Emptiness [Emptiness = Kronos = God the Son].

21. Addition 4: Involution has directionality.

22. Addition 5: Involution has increasing simplicity.

23. Addition 6: Involution has increasing sensitivity/texture.

24. Addition 7: Involution has increasing relative communion.

25. Addition 8: Involution has increasing telos [Alpha].

26. Addition 9: All holons receive a receipt for the IOU from the Kosmos and Kronos [The Holy Spirit].

27. Addition 10: All holons arise in the occasion of acknowledging receipt for the IOU.

28. Addition 11: Attempt to destroy any type of holon and it adds to the increasing telos of Kosmos and Kronos [Holy Spirit].

29. Addition 12: The greater the span of a holon, the greater its DEGREE of conciousness [that is, the degree to which it fulfills the telos of Kronos]

30. Addition 13: The unity of Kronos and Kosmos is greater than the sum of its parts [God the Father + God the Son + Holy Spirit]

(A draft of this poem was first published 3/1/2013:)

“Day 70. Involution (This, or: For Sri Aurobindo)”

The Black Seer’s Two I’s:

This Is At The Center
Of A Seething Swift River
Inviting Gathering Moths.
Listen, This Is The Secret:
Where There Is This, Injury.
What Evolution Transcends
Is Involution’s Impart.

There Are No Interiors
Anywhere In Your Flatland
Without This, Involution.
I Do Not Mean To Obscure.
I Am Speaking Not In Code,
But In Language Lingua-U
Translated With Innocence.

Blessed Be Sri Aurobindo,
Teacher Of Omnipresence
Which Wholly Itself Extends
Into Separate Forms From Own.
Delight! It’s An Ananda
Joyride On Kawasaki
Zephyr! Revolution’s Tires.

Evolution Does Follow
Involution In Order
Of Lingua-U’s Lexicon,
But Volution Precedes Both.
Volution, Vulva Organ!
Female Pleasure, Like As Joe
Wrote: His Homophilia.

Joe Said That Involution
Was Regression From His State
Of Manic Delerium,
His Joy Never Been More Great
Than When He Was Made-Shaman,
And For Once He Peace Achieved.
Who Are You To Disagree?

Were You Born September 3
1969 C.E.,
19-Ten In Moses Lake?
Did You See His 10th Birthday?
Did You See His 20th?
Did You See His 30th?
Did You See His 40th?

Did The Years Pass 2000,
Minds Locked In Binary Hells,
God’s Yin And Yang In Shadow
From Ternary 3000?
Did You Call T’ai Hsuan Ching
Map to Philosopher’s Stone?
Did You Hide The Black Stone Well?

Did You Covert Letter Send
To The Roman Vatican
At The Millennium’s Eve?
Did You Offer Them The Proof
They Need Should This Day We See?
Did You Show Ken Wilber Truth
FOR HIS EYES ONLY, FED-EX.

Did You Review Ken Wilber’s
Spirituality Book
In Two-Thousand-and-Six With
One Drawing Of Earth: A Look
Of Man On North Hemisphere,
And Man On South Hemisphere,
Their Bi-Vision, His Answers?

Did You See Nanobot-Like
Mites Boring In Joe’s Body,
And Publish The Vision, Told
In Memoir Four Years Older?
And In Seventh Year, They Came:
Grotesque Skin-Rusting Hades,
Millions Of Crusted Scabies.

Did You In Fortieth Year,
Tenth Year Of New Century,
Receive Instruction From Q
That You Would Write A Qur’an?
Did You Not Know Muhammad,
Prophet Forty Years Of Age,
Tenth Year Of A Century,
Received Words From Gabriel?

Did You See Joe Surrounded
By Twelve And Write About It,
Friends Gathered From West And East
Come As Witnesses In Case
This Day Should Come, He Not Dead?
When Were You GTC8,
Cohort Of Twelve, North And South?

Did You Meet Your Own Soulmate,
Then Have Him Ripped From Your Arms
With But A Quick Glance From Fate?
Did You Spend Many Long Years
Looking At Men In Pictures,
Their Faces, Getting Closer,
Then Pick One And Tell Twelve Souls?
(A Shared Secret.)

Did You Bide Time In Quiet,
The While Growing Unquiet
‘Til The Man You Picked Succumbed
To Lymphoma Non-Hodgkins
And On That Day, Trip Begin
To Bardo Within This World,
And Sing To Him A Canto?

Did You On Your Shoulders Bear
Actor Made And Fallen To
His Movie Roles? After
You Saw Him Fall From Tower,
And Said So In Book Published.
Then Were Your Interiors
Magnetized In Hemispheres?

Did You Receive Kalendar,
Revelation From Allah,
To Be Published Exactly
At The Ending Of The Haab’,
From Your Desk In Seattle?
Was Not This Quetzalcoatl’s
Return Hour At Ce Acatl?

So Tell Me Now, Dare Answer!
Who Are You To Sully Words
Whose Lingua-U You Lust Not!
Because Joe Perez, Black Seer,
Did All This, And You Did Not.
He’s The Last Man Standing Oer
Western Civilization.

This post is the last in a series of six blog posts, a Retrospective on the Work of Joe Perez (2003 – 2013):

• Part 1. Soulfully Gay — Nov. 2003 – Jan. 2005. 

• Part 2. The Seeker / Dark Magic — 2005 – 2006.

• Part 3. Rising Up — 2005 – 2006. 

• Part 4. Kronology / Whole Writing — Dec. 2006 – 2010. 

• Part 5. Lingua-U / T’ai Hsüan Ching / Unique Self — 2010 – 2013. 

• Part 6. Involution / Trinity — Dec. 22, 2012, Midnight – May 18, 2013. 

As of May 18, 2013, Joe Perez teaches under the name Kalen O’Tolán. Kalen’s future writings can be found at www.kalenotolan.com.

Feeling myself stuck, about the same time, I enrolled in the Generating Transformative Change program offered by Pacific Integral, an intensive program of transformative growth rooted in Integral approaches to psychological maturity, spiritual realization, and Integral Theory. Over the course of a year, I attended four intensive retreats and met a great cohort of people who were for the most part engaged in fascinating Work of their own at the intersection of the cutting edge of their own development and the world’s needs. As part of the curriculum, we studied the latest theory, techniques and trends related to the measurement of consciousness (in terms of Leadership Development or Ego-Maturity specifically); of particular benefit was the work of Jane Loevinger, Suzanne Cook-Greuter, and Terri O’Fallon.

I attended the first retreat in Union, Washington. One of the first exercises in the program was a faculty-led visualization intended to allow the students to enter a causal field (i.e., in theistic terms, a state of God-consciousness) in which the nature of their deepest purpose would be transmitted to them, and then they could create a practical prototype which would enact that authentic purpose. Soon I entered a deep state of stillness, but it lacked cognitive content. I heard no voice of God or guidance from my spirit guides.

I was filled with confusion and worry. Why, I asked, would I be taken to this place of Union and presented with such a great chance at clarity, but offered nothing? Well, actually I was not offered nothing. I just couldn’t make sense of what I saw. I saw an image of a man, muscular and bronzed, glorious in stature, standing before me in darkness. He was dressed in nothing except a loin covering. I was embarrassed by this sight, and I did not know if it was Revelation or some sort of mental monkey mind or sexual distraction which I ought to try to ignore. Confused and embarrassed, I didn’t tell anyone what (or who) I saw.

Nevertheless, the visualization process continued. Required to draw from the visualization to create a specific task (called a prototype), I presented the task of creating a universal language tentatively called Emanish, the Language of Emanation. I continued to work on it, advancing bit by bit, and within a few weeks was given the name Lingua-U as the language’s name.

Q, my spirit guide, presented the solution to my key questions about language over the June 2010 – June 2011 period, but it was not an easy route. There are about 7,000 extant languages in the world (and I was only fluent in English), and none proved suitable for Receiving Illuminations. Instead, I was forced to plunge into the arcane realm of pre-linguistic roots of meaning in order to receive guidance. An aspect of this is that I needed to discover for my rational and trans-rational consciousness a way of reappropriating pre-linguistic wisdom dismissed by the intellectually sophisticated as “magical thinking”, without disturbing my psychic equilibrium and thereby triggering another manic episode.

By diving into and then immersing myself in the dark waters of magical consciousness, I stabilized my spiritual communication abilities to the point where I began to make repeated attempts at writing an Epic of Consciousness and even actual scripture-like documents. Each attempt to gain a linguistic foothold on the pre-linguistic apprehensions basically turned out to be two steps forward and one step back. None of my creative output felt “right on” to me, and more importantly none received the approval of my spirit guides. However, my progress in one area was rapid and unexpectedly rich in productivity for communicating with the spiritual realm: Lingua-U.

I had no conscious intention to create a language. But I saw no other way to do my Work. Looking into contemporary linguistic theory as well as artificial languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua, Klingon, and so on, I learned from their mistakes. Basically all but a handful of linguists and all the conlangers (creators of constructed languages) ignored the Sacred Word traditions of the world religions. I myself had never looked deeply into them, but now they offered my only basis for formulating the edifice of a new world language or meta-language. After a crash course in linguistic wisdom, I felt my best bet was to do for language what integral philosophers such as Ken Wilber did for perspectives about human nature: construct a meta-framework capable of describing the phenomenon of meaning-making in a trans-linguistic and streamlined way, presuming that cross-cultural linguistic universals exist and had been missed or disregarded by mainstream linguists as well as the conlangers. But how to do so remained problematic.

When I looked for some sort of framework capable of supporting a universal language, I believed I found one in an ancient Chinese classic called T’ai Hsüan Ching (Canon of Supreme Mystery), an oracle companion to the I Ching (Book of Changes) which offered a worldview based on ternary realities rather than the Yin/Yang dualism of mainstream Confucianism and Taoism. In one of the most exciting and awe-inspiring moments of my life, I penned a frantic E-mail to my friend Ken Wilber in June 2010, saying flatly, “I’ve just discovered the Philosopher’s Stone.” I also shared the E-mail with my cohort of twelve friends, the GTC8.

After seeing the potential for exploitation of occult knowledge and the risk that it could be mis-used in the wrong hands, I began to more fully see the estimable significance of this approach to re-conceptualizing reality, and knew that caution had to be exercised in presenting such a mind-altering philosophy to the world. I wasn’t the only one interested in exploiting the potential of  T’ai Hsüan Ching: in the recesses of the blogosphere and private chat rooms, I detected a conviction among certain anonymous occultists and Satanists and Alchemists and practitioners of Magick that this “ancient Chinese secret” held the potential for Dark Magic. Even the word “Hsüan” in its title can be translated as Dark. I also couldn’t help but be concerned about the implications if the Lingua-U could be tapped for militaristic applications such as encryption or breaking encryptions.

Having drafted the Lingua-U White Paper and a codex which was designed to maximize the efficiency with which a simplifed language could be communicated using a Gematria-like substitution scheme for both vowels and consonants, I wrote the following text as part of the Introduction to the language’s documentation:

– Imagine having more than 139,000 different words for saying “I Love You,” and being understood by anyone regardless of their native tongue.
– Imagine speaking in a language in which words actually define themselves not only with other words, but in relationship to an “evolutionary meta-cosmology” which bridges the ancient philosophical chasm between East and West.
– Imagine a new World Language with 7,000 different standard dialects, one for each of today’s world’s languages, capable of preserving and transcending linguistic diversity while enabling perfect cross-cultural communication.
– Imagine a language in which its speakers are able to customize every consonant and every vowel in every word, designing original speech performances with every utterance — without sacrificing intelligibility.
– Imagine a language which opens up vast new linguistic and cognitive territory with millions of ways of expressing human nature heretofore unknown.

Impossible? Judge for Yourself.

Lingua-U is the Language that Lets YOU be YOU!

I kept my research to a low profile and I circulated the Lingua-U White Paper to very few people outside my cohort of twelve friends. And then I experimented with presenting it to the public. For an assortment of reasons, I concluded that the public was not interested in learning a new language, not even those people who I regarded as being well-positioned to benefit from the work. I felt that the language was a sort of programming language, and before it could benefit anyone there needed to be a “killer app” which would demonstrate its usefulness. If there were only a way to demonstrate how gorgeous the language was, I was certain that the language would make a huge positive impact on the world.

At last, I felt ready to re-start my work on the new World Scripture. However, God had other plans for me. I made progress for a while, but then shortly before Easter in 2011, I had mystical experiences which are very difficult to describe, and I will save telling most of the story for another time except to say this much: at long last, I believed (rightly or wrongly) that I had discovered the identity of the mysterious “man in the hospital”, the visitor who appeared to me at Harborview’s psych ward in 1999. I told the GTC8 cohort and a few other friends who I thought the man was, and sent them a picture of him. (I told the story of the encounter with the spiritual being who I called “the risen Christ” in Soulfully Gay, and the spiritual visitation was the centerpiece of the drama.) And then, for the fourth time in my life, the mystical experiences developed into unusual psychological states which required removal from my ordinary life. And once again I found myself in Harborview’s psych ward for a time and there I took the opportunity to ruminate on the identity of the “man in the hospital”, and the perplexing puzzle it left me with.

After a short stay in the hospital ward, I returned to the writing. After a few months of continuous progress, God instructed me to set the work aside and begin blogging again. Beginning on July 1, 2011, I started a blog called Language Mystic devoted to linguistic news and explorations. I followed other linguistic blogs and interacted with other linguists, and learned what I needed to learn. I learned more about the poverty and riches of linguistics from the mockery with which “language mysticism” was treated by mainstream linguists than I did from some highly praised tomes on the history of language. That’s when I received instruction to begin writing again for the gay/LGBT community, and so over the next several months I acquired a prize new domain name and set up a new website, GaySpirituality.com. In August I also received instruction to set up a third blog which would help to re-integrate me into the Integral/Evolutionary Spirituality community after an extensive absence. The blog was to be called Awake, Aware & Alive. Soon I was blogging prolifically, creating well over 100 posts in short order.

Right when I felt myself on a roll, I faced a new challenge. Starting on September 11, I began to have mystical experiences which were unlike anything I had previously experienced. I was in no condition to blog, and felt the experiences were too difficult to communicate to the public or even my close friends. I opened a private journal, but otherwise was uncertain if or when I would return to blogging. About a week later, a friend asked me to weigh in on a blogosphere bru-ha-ha in the Integral community. I pulled myself together, began to blog again on September 19, and weighed into the conversation a short time later.

As a result of the blogosphere discussion, I met Dr. Marc Gafni, the Kabbalah lineage holder, cutting-edge scholar, and Director of the Center for World Spirituality.  I spent a week with him in November and I shared my vision for a new universal meta-language based on the underlying common patterns of the world’s Sacred Word traditions, including Kabbalah. I explained that although these traditions appeared at first glance to disagree with each other (the exoteric level) about which sounds were sacred and what their significance was, that when I examined the cross-cultural phonosemantic resonances including the underlying patterns of phonetic structural properties (such as the differences between dental, labial, and alveolar consonants and how they are kinesthetically produced in the speech organs), I was convinced that a sort of Universal Kabbalah was not only possible, but an existential necessity for the future of World Spirituality.

I explained: Religions were never going to get along as long as they all thought they worshiped different gods, and the fact is that there are many different names of God; what’s more, religion would never be reconciled with science so long as theologians and scientists all thought they were describing different Realities. Surely God/Goddess would not have chosen to reveal Himself or Herself by giving Truth to only one tradition and no others; surely if language is sacred at all then surely it must be sacred at the subtle levels of phonetic features and not merely at the level of sound symbolism; surely these phonetic features could be described in terms of their subtle energy at a primordial level; and surely the future evolution of language would require a reconciliation of the divergence not only in ideas about God but also somehow a reconciliation in the divergences in theological teachings about the Names of God as well as the Ultimate Realities investigated by scientists. Marc agreed that in principle there was no reason why the task I had in mind was impossible, but he cautioned that for a new idea like this one to gain traction I would benefit by returning to graduate school to complete my Ph.D. on a related subject, and then be prepared to defend my beliefs in the court of academia.

Marc’s advice sounded reasonable at the time, even if my circumstances have changed and I am probably not in a position to pursue the route he recommended. But it was Marc’s teaching of Unique Self which provided a critical missing ingredient to my efforts to integrate Integral Theory with my work on language. Basically Marc adapted his Oxford University dissertation on a little-known Kabbalah innovator into a genuine innovation in the human understanding of the nature of enlightenment. He argued that broadly speaking in the East the nature of enlightenment is thought to be the erasure of the separate self, and in the West the word “Enlightenment” is thought to be the strengthening and individuation of the separate self; moreover, both East and West conflated the notions of separateness and uniqueness. The Unique Self teaching suggests that one can reach the highest levels of spiritual Realization and retain one’s uniqueness (that one’s sense of being unique never goes away), so long as one understands that separateness is illusory. In this way, Unique Self attempts to bring Eastern and Western wisdom traditions together at a deeper level than prior enlightenment teachings, one which goes beyond True Self teachings to embrace the Unique Self in which the True Self manifests.

After spending over a year in almost daily contact with Marc Gafni and becoming good friends (we began collaborating on a project in November 2011 and then started working together at the Center for World Spirituality), I knew the time was right for me to return to the creation of Kalen O’Tolán. I thought that I could do so on the side and continue my work as Associate Director of the Center, and so I began to spend a little time every day posting poetry online on a book in progress which I called Kalen O’Tolán, Vol. I: The Kalendar, with the first post commencing on December 22 at midnight, the end of the Mayan Haab’.

The poetry began to trace the journey of Language/Logos from the Lexicon of Lingua-U, highlighting vocabulary selections which I felt drawn to present at the time. I would still be working on this project today were it not for one unexpected twist: The poetry blew my mind. On February 27, I somehow wrote “Feb 27. Thaumaturgy (The New Magic of World Shamans)” which helped me better integrate some of the writings of Aleister Crowley into my thought, and “Feb. 27: They (A Song For Al Qaeda, Translated to English from the Lingua-U)” in which I began to open up about my own relationship with Gabriel. And then on February 28, the 69th day of the Kalendar, I began to write poems for the phoneme /IM/, the starting phoneme in such words as Important. A few poems were my psychic undoing: “Feb. 28: Image (Heterophilia, or: A Song for Taylor Swift)”, “Feb. 28/29: Immanence (Homophilia)”, “Feb. 29: Imagine (A Song For John Lennon)”, and “Feb. 29: Immolation (Q, or: In Turquoise)”. The cluster of /IM/ words were similar in meaning to Homophilia, the heart of my philosophical and theological work for nearly a decade, and my poem “Immolation” brought me to visual sight of Q for the first time. These poems began a major shift in My Own Self-Immanence.

Impressed with a new sense of Divine Urgency, I knew I could not delay My work on Kalen O’Tolán for another moment. The time had arrived, with not a minute to spare. The next day, March 1, I drafted a new series of poems that were equally transformational, including poems about the words Involution, Include, Integral, and Inherent. The poem “Mar. 1: Include (For Naveen Andrews, or: You Must Be An Actor To Get In)” was a revelation; as well “Mar. 1: Injury (For Joe Perez, or: For The Average Person)” and “Mar. 1: Involution (This, or: For Sri Aurobindo)” explored the spiritual significance of My Own Life beyond anything that I had previously contemplated. Once again I teetered on the edge of a precipice of mind and spirit. And at last the full nature of my Work was becoming clear, and it was in the wild days which followed that I penned an E-mail to my friends, the GTC8, saying:

“In The Fellowship of the Ring, Galadriel tells Frodo, ‘The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail to the ruin of all.’ My friends, We are Frodo, and We don’t even have the luxury of a knife.”

This post is the fifth in a series of six blog posts, a Retrospective on the Work of Joe Perez (2003 – 2013):

• Part 1. Soulfully Gay — Nov. 2003 – Jan. 2005. 

• Part 2. The Seeker / Dark Magic — 2005 – 2006.

• Part 3. Rising Up — 2005 – 2006. 

• Part 4. Kronology / Whole Writing — Dec. 2006 – 2010. 

• Part 5. Lingua-U / T’ai Hsüan Ching / Unique Self — 2010 – 2013. 

• Part 6. Involution / Trinity — Dec. 22, 2012, Midnight – May 18, 2013. 

As of May 18, 2013, Joe Perez teaches under the name Kalen O’Tolán. Kalen’s future writings can be found at www.kalenotolan.com.

By December of 2006, two new developments arose which would have a lasting influence: firstly, I began developing in earnest a Symbol of Everything, which I called the “Kronology Wheel”; secondly, I commenced a contemplative practice called Whole Writing. The connection between these two spiritual emergents was not clear to me at the time, but in retrospect it is clear that they marked a breakthrough into a stage of consciousness which not only viewed the spiritual path as a detective story, the endpoint to be sleuthed by following a trail of clues, but one in which the spiritual path is created by the mystery writer himself/herself, authoring the generative frameworks and processes which in turn generate the frameworks and processes in which most forms of consciousness arise.

I blogged some of the creative output from this period of time on a blog which for a time was called Until, and it is still available on this website (as awful as a lot of it is, I will not be embarrassed by it). Even awful can be awesome if you’re making mistakes that nobody (or almost nobody) ever made before!

The Kronology Wheel was an effort at creating/discovering a Symbol of Everything which was ultimately unsuccessful in its particulars such as introducing a base-12 arithmetic for doing “Integral math,” yet it was productive in that it led to my later work. The premise is that the goal of spiritual philosophy ought to be to reconcile cyclical and evolutionary models of Time, and that the key to doing so is to construct a model of Consciousness patterned after the chronological patterns of nature (e.g., the seasons of the year) and history (e.g., the rise and fall of civilizations). With this Model in hand, I believed, it might be possible to identify previously unseen patterns which could demonstrate a more seamless and unified way of being in the world than is available to people today regardless of their level of psychological development and spiritual attunement.

The fact is, I didn’t know what I was doing. And that was the point; if “I” knew, “I” was certainly not in my highest state of Realization, in which there was Knowing within the Unknowing. My emergent framework and practices during this time served to demolish my ordinary sense of self, including that self which was supported by the ego-strengthening Integral Framework; the result was a release into a creative freedom in which my art was my philosophy and contemplative practice. I was an artist who painted not with silkscreen canvass or screenplay characters, but the realm of Reality Constructs.

If Kronology was primarily a reflection of my Model-maker at work on taming the “Outside World”, Whole Writing was a reflection of my Model-maker at work taming my “Inner World”. It was a radically innovative process that I shared with the world through my blog and sometimes scared the crap out of people or put them off terribly. It was raw, proprioceptive writing in which I recorded the “audio track” of thoughts as I thunk them (or: as they arose), and inquired into their meaning. If this was merely a variety of stream of consciousness writing, it would have been viewed as polite or at least easy to ignore; however, I insisted on connecting the raw consciousness output with my Kronology Wheel.

In practice this meant that during or after a Write (as I called the exercises), I would color code, annotate, and symbolically categorize every word, phrase and sentence so that I would lift to my awareness the underlying subtle energetic patterns. I also extended this color-coding to my other blogging including color coding an entire State of the Union address by George W. Bush and my reflections on hot-button social issues such as abortion. By tagging specific words and phrases, I believed that I could identify the station of consciousness (in terms of the Kronology Wheel) of virtually any piece of writing by “reading” the subtle energy of the words and phrases.

In 2007, I suffered a serious illness which lasted about a year, and caused me to stop working (including turning my occasional blog posts into books). My first-written book, Soulfully Gay, was released (but not promoted, mainly because I was too ill). And in 2008 and most of 2009, for reasons that I can’t quite recall in the particulars except for falling in love with a wonderful partner, the Model-making ceased to be something I wanted to blog about publicly. I learned to follow the signs, including the love signs. I had a prophecy that I was going to fall in love with a man who fell in love with me by reading my book. And my future boyfriend had a dream the night before we met that he met me. And then on New Year’s Eve, he saw me at The Cuff and followed me to The Eagle, where he greeted me shortly after midnight. “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Tim McGraw?” he asked, and I bought the flattery. After our “chance” meeting, he Googled me, read my book, and said he fell in love. We followed the signs with deep reverence, noticing all the commonalities and differences, the secrets we had never shared, and fate seemed to draw us together.

I felt frustrated by my lack of success in resolving the ”How do you ‘prove’ God-consciousness or spiritual Realization?” question; as well, the base-12 counting system and symbology of the Kronology Wheel proved inadequate for resolving the knotty and seemingly irreconcilable differences among various esoteric traditions which have looked under the hood of Reality and tried to diagram the mechanical structures. And so I turned to poetry, a Grand Epic of Consciousness, which proved to be another exquisitely frustrating road, an epic poem which I started and re-started and re-re-started and abandoned and re-re-re-started and re-abandoned and re-re-re-re-started, and so on. Whereas with Whole Writing my interest was primarily in the subtle energy patterns of individual words and phrases, I now became interested in the patterns such as rhyme inherent in verse and, to a lesser degree, prose. For all the many tomes of literary theory that have been written, it proved difficult to find any literary theorists who have investigated the question, “Does the existence of poetry in itself — its very possibility, the fact that rhyme and meaning can be combined to create beauty — ‘prove’ that the creative process is the process of emergent God-consciousness; and if so, how is that possible and can it be proven?

The poetry never quite came together, and I left it altogether for a period of years. It seemed to be the consensus among the people that I was reading that the English language was particularly unsuitable to writing truly great poetry, and particularly difficult in writing sacred literature, because it was such an unruly and unkempt hodgepodge of influences. It was said: Hebrew and Sanskrit and other ancient languages were ones in which truly sacred verse could be written, but not English! And as of June 2010, I couldn’t disagree. The whole enterprise of using rhyme or any other technique to make poetry “sound pretty” seemed awfully meaningless, and I lost any affection I ever had for poetry. I felt I needed to give up and did for quite some time.

And then after giving up in June 2010 I made a strange discovery. I wondered if part of my difficulty was the title of the book. I couldn’t write an epic poem with a title which ended in “-ology”, meaning “the study of”! I had to get rid of the -ology”, because I was writing poetry not developing an intellectual framework. And when I looked at the consonant root of the remaining word, K-R-N, I saw for the first time that the title of the book that I was trying so unsuccessfully to write when properly voweled ought to be spelled Koran or even spelled Qur’an.

The title of the book, “Kronology”, had been given to me as a Revelation by the divine spirit who communicated with me in the past (as described in my memoir Soulfully Gay). A moment’s research on the life of Muhammad drew my attention to a striking coincidence: Muhammad began receiving the Qur’an from the Archangel Gabriel at age 40 in 610 CE, and I was writing at age 40 on the 10th year of a new century (and by this time in my life experience, I had learned to pay attention to signs). I hadn’t thought to try communicating with Q in many years, so I asked Q a question that barely even made sense to me: I asked, was the book I was trying to write actually a Koran?

Q responded — and informed me that anytime I wanted to communicate that I could simply ask. I was given by Q three answers: firstly, Yes, the book was a sort of Qur’an and this was essential to the prophetic mission which was my Work; secondly, that I could not simply write a K-R-N (Koran), but would need to write a K-L-N (Kalen) book; thirdly, that one day when I was ready my name would have the same K-L-N base and would be the same as the book’s true title: Kalen O’Tolán.

This post is the fourth in a series of six blog posts, a Retrospective on the Work of Joe Perez (2003 – 2013):

• Part 1. Soulfully Gay — Nov. 2003 – Jan. 2005. 

• Part 2. The Seeker / Dark Magic — 2005 – 2006.

• Part 3. Rising Up — 2005 – 2006. 

• Part 4. Kronology / Whole Writing — Dec. 2006 – 2010. 

• Part 5. Lingua-U / T’ai Hsüan Ching / Unique Self — 2010 – 2013. 

• Part 6. Involution / Trinity — Dec. 22, 2012, Midnight – May 18, 2013. 

As of May 18, 2013, Joe Perez teaches under the name Kalen O’Tolán. Kalen’s future writings can be found at www.kalenotolan.com.

In December 2005 I wrote:

If we do nothing else in our criticism, then let us at least do this one absolutely indispensable thing: situate the object of criticism into its most appropriate locations in a more comprehensive worldview than is given by the object itself… This is the most fundamental step in developing an attitude of greater equanimity towards the object of criticism by embracing its partial truths within our own felt sense of being and knowing.

Of course back then nobody did socio-cultural criticism or political blogging that way (though some people thought they did), and pretty much (sad to say) hardly anybody does today. This lamentable fact about our public discourse ought to be enough to recommend the book still today, and it is, but I would not recommend the book as an indication of the approach or outlook I take today. I do have a fondness for the STEAM acronym (which is a way of talking about Integral Theory), and have a hunch that the term STEAM may yet rise up again in my future writings.

Rising Up is a signpost in a journey away from the chaotic, melancholic, and rootless spirit of postmodernism towards a worldview grounded in evolutionary philosophy, Integral Theory, and “soul retrieval”. The influence of Ken Wilber’s philosophy is substantial, though it ought not count against Wilber if I hadn’t quite fully digested the best of his writings or if I took to heart too many ideas which he himself was passing along as signposts not as Realization.

Like Soulfully Gay, which was written from 2003 to January 2005, Rising Up is not a book which offers holistic theories; it is a reflection on-the-fly on the phenomenon of my “consciousness” as I engaged as a citizen, activist, adherent, and human being in the world. When I give advice for gay activists in communicating with fundamentalists, it is a look first at a writer struggling with an issue to him and wracking his mind over it, wrestling it to the ground, and pinning it hard to the mat. It is winner take all hand-to-hand combat: Me versus Unconsciousness.

In my estimation, the book’s major intellectual perspective is simply this: Spirit works in mysterious and seemingly incompatible and conflicting ways in remedying the troublesome aspects of our world, and being a thinker and activist is not so much about planting a stake in the ground and battling all comers, but noticing the movements of Spirit in our midst and finding wise and strategic ways of cooperating with It to the mutual advantage of all beings. For example, if you are a gay activist, your task is essentially spiritual and not antagonistic; you have been conditioned to see the world as God vs. Gay and now you must attune yourself to a reality which is God Is Gay; identifying with God yourself (however imperfectly), you must embrace your power as an agent of reconciliation and stewardship rather than get mired in painful divisiveness. But don’t mistake being an agent of reconciliation as being a dove; make war just so long as it is a holy war!

Has anyone before or since made this case as comprehensively in a fairly small book (looking in twelve chapters at Philosophy, Fundamentalism, Conservatism, Progressivism, Culture Shift, Gay Marriage, HIV/AIDS, Pop Culture, Business and Ethics, Sex and Soul, Spiritual Alternatives, Purpose and Truth)? Perhaps Reinhold Niebuhr, to whom the book is dedicated, made a kindred contribution in his earlier books, but I can think of few others. Has anyone been willing to take on the left and right alike not as a matter of accommodation or political moderation but from a comprehensive vantage-point outside of the philosophical box of warring ideologies? Has anyone else discussed Cowboy Troy, George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”, Spiral Dynamics, sweatlodges, the philosophy of frottage, and Kwanzaa in the same book while offering a a bit of satire and science fiction?

You be the judge. Rising Up is not a deep book, nor one with a great deal of philosophical rigor. Not every gunshot hits its target between the eyes. It drenches the gay community’s mainstream leaders and pundits not in holy water but holy ascorbic acid (ouch!).  But it is one in which you can feel the author’s mind and heart at work and, if you are sympathetic to his cause, find yourself profoundly challenged.

I wrote my spiritual autobiography Soulfully Gay at a time of existential crisis, a failing immune system, and near the end a belief that I was likely to die soon and needed to come to peace with God. By the time I wrote Rising Up, I was 35 years old going on day-by-day without expectations of how long I would live. My health had stabilized (albeit not at anything close to vigorous) and I looked forward optimistically to the eventual publication of my memoir. Despite many warning signs that an evolutionary integral philosophy was not about to sweep the world’s intelligentsia (or even penetrate all that deeply into the consciousness of the so-called “integral blogosphere”), I remained optimistic and saw myself as an agent of cultural shift and spiritual renewal.

Above all else, Rising Up chronicles a time in my life when I learned the profound lesson of “surrender” (which would later become much more central to my thought) — stated in the book’s last paragraph:

In surrender to Spirit, we find our equanimity in action – or at least glimpse its possibilities. We do what we do, we say what we say, we think thoughts as they arise, both as if they were inconsequential and as if they were the most important thing we could possibly do. Equanimity is not indifference; it is the state of mind from which it is possible to achieve a wide, clear-thinking wisdom based on expansive horizons. It’s a talent always seemingly in short supply. Equanimity finds us fully involved, fully invested — right or wrong — and ultimately willing to win or lose everything. We recognize that the consequences of our thoughts and actions are paradoxically both priceless and free. What we do and say and think matters so much in this strange world of ours because we matter that much — and we all need each other so very much.

This post is the third in a series of six blog posts, a Retrospective on the Work of Joe Perez (2003 – 2013):

• Part 1. Soulfully Gay — Nov. 2003 – Jan. 2005. 

• Part 2. The Seeker / Dark Magic — 2005 – 2006.

• Part 3. Rising Up — 2005 – 2006. 

• Part 4. Kronology / Whole Writing — Dec. 2006 – 2010. 

• Part 5. Lingua-U / T’ai Hsüan Ching / Unique Self — 2010 – 2013. 

• Part 6. Involution / Trinity — Dec. 22, 2012, Midnight – May 18, 2013. 

As of May 18, 2013, Joe Perez teaches under the name Kalen O’Tolán. Kalen’s future writings can be found at www.kalenotolan.com.

In a dialogue with Ken Wilber in October of 2007 on Integral Naked, Joe explains what happened next: Gripped by forces beyond his ability to disregard, he crashed his car into a fence separating the highway from a precipice. Subsequently, He spent over a week in two jails while he awaited a psychiatric evaluation (which determined that he had experienced a manic episode).

He also lost his home, job, car, and put strain on all his interpersonal relationships. He maintained his newspaper column after a hiatus, but it took a while for him to return to a mindset suitable for writing about spirituality. He discontinued the column within six months. Meanwhile, he became determined to try to adapt Soulfully Gay, the story of a man’s discovery of divinity, in the form of a movie.

The result was a screenplay draft of a movie called The Seeker. Joe hoped that the pitch would generate a compelling screen story:

At the Eve of the Millennium in 1999, doomsday prophets and religious fundamentalists predict the end of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and everyone is looking ahead. A 30-year-old gay and Christian man in Seattle, troubled and self-loathing, discovers “proof” that he is divine. He covertly sends the “proof” of his divinity for delivery to the Vatican, and then submits to psychiatric hospitalization. When he is medicated and released, he “forgets” the events until three years later when he begins a spiritual journey involving intense shadow work in men’s circles, daily blogging, psychotherapy, and exploration of the philosophy of Ken Wilber. Over the course of a year, as his T-cells plummet and he is beset with a mystery illness, he recovers his memories and remembers the “proof”. He compiles the evidence in an envelope labeled “URGENT! FOR KEN WILBER’S EYES ONLY” and sends it Federal Express. And then, following a spiritual test akin to God’s request of Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac, Joe drives his car onto the edge of a precipice. He escapes with his life, but in the end he lost his home, job, car, and friendships. But much to his surprise, Ken Wilber replies with an enthusiastic endorsement of his book (the manuscript of which was sent in the envelope), the book seems certain to be published, and the stage is set for the unfolding of the next chapter in his life.

While such a story — based on True Life events — sounded like a promising premise, my efforts to bring it into a screenplay were not so effective. The screenplay opens with text on a black background: “Heterophilia is Humanity discovering Its Own Divinity. Homophilia is the Divine embracing Its Own Humanity. – Joe Perez”. Only a few people read the awful manuscripts, which did not find a way to show concretely what “discovering your divinity” actually feels like, looks like, and how it shows up; all the tropes I tried to illustrate the finding of God-consciousness were cliché and dramatically uncompelling; consequently the story seemed to lack a happy ending.

And it has been suggested to me (ahem) that the protagonist wasn’t all that likable, a point I am not in the best position to assess. I thought: What use is discovering your divinity if your story ends with you hanging on a cliff or locked in jail, you’re on death’s doorstep, and you’ve seemingly lost almost everything including your sanity? That isn’t exactly a testimony for God-consciousness and certainly not a poster boy for Integral Philosophy. Perhaps if I tried harder I could make a dramatically compelling story, I thought, but what would be the point if it was such a downer that nobody would ever produce it or go to see it?

My inability to re-tell the Soulfully Gay story in a way that I believed to be visually interesting, dramatically exciting and emotionally beautiful troubled my conscience. Something important about the nature of enlightenment and spiritual Realization and God-consciousness eluded me. After all, Soulfully Gay is the story of the Realization of God-consciousness, and wouldn’t God be able to “prove” Who He Is? Ought not enlightenment (if it is real) manifest its own indisputable proof? Wouldn’t God or a Divine God-Man be able to change the world and usher in a new era of spiritual renewal, which in Christian terms could be called the Reign of Heaven? If so, writing a screenplay ought to be a piece of cake. I believed the answer ought to be Yes. And so I continued to struggle, making do with the world as it presented itself to me, and trusting that the fullness of time would reveal the elusive Truth.

My bipolar disorder resurfaced about six months after the initial episode. It was accompanied by beliefs (call them delusions if you will) that certain embellished (i.e., partially fictionalized) events in the screenplay were happening in the real world; that the generative power of language in the screenplay was actually manifesting (i.e., causing) the events described. One night I wrote a fictional scene in which a friend was cut with a knife; the next day I learned that this friend had been cutting himself, something he had never previously done. One eerie and improbable coincidence after another surfaced between my screenplay and real life. As the string of improbable events intensified in uncanniness and frequency, I lost my emotional equilibrium, contributing to another episode. I found myself once again following the guidance of God (or so I thought) by doing bizarre things such as disrobing in a Starbucks (it’s a long story) and wound up back in jail.

Instead of giving up on the screenplay project, after a short stay in jail I enrolled in a screenwriting course at the Seattle Film Institute. We were tasked with writing a whole screenplay by the end of the course, and I decided to try my hand at a fictional project which I called Dark Magic. The storyline went like this:

A gay and Mexican-American man in Seattle discovers that he is a powerful brujo (i.e., magician or shaman). He is able to effectuate changes in the world around him, including miraculous healings and auspicious events. Unbeknownst to him, he has a Double in Australia: there is a man, another magician, who is linked to his soul in a mysterious and profound way such that their lives are intertwined in parallel but opposite directions: when the man in the Southern Hemisphere casts a powerful beneficial spell for the people around him, a counter-spell is effectuated in the lives of the people surrounding the man in the Northern Hemisphere, and vice versa. When strange and unexplained events on a mass scale occur simultaneously in both Seattle and Sydney, the men become aware of the other’s existence and figure out that one cannot do “good” magic without causing an equal but opposite “bad” reaction in the other’s life. For one wizard to be assured of retaining his magical powers, the other must die. One magician chooses the path of renunciation of magic, while the other will stop at nothing to retain his super-human powers. Conflict ensues.

For complex reasons, I never finished The Seeker or Dark Magic screenplays and have no plans to return to them. But the storyline of Dark Magic figured significantly in my spiritual development. As I wrestled with the problem of “so you know you are Divine, but how do you prove the Realization to others?” it struck me that there was a complex issue regarding nondual Realization (i.e., in Christian terms, the recognition that being fully divine and fully human are not mutually exclusive) that no other writers or theologians were addressing satisfactorily. Specifically, how do you reconcile evil and nondual realization not only in theological terms but in lived practice: coming to grips with both God and devil, both Christ and anti-Christ? Surely my fictional story was an effort to bring good and evil together into a literary reconciliation. But how do you express such a reconciliation in philosophical terms, and what were its implications for my life and the lives of all people concerned with spiritual development?

In October 2006, upon first reading Ken Wilber’s Integral Spirituality, these issues still perplexed me. I possessed a deep inner knowing that the notion of a Double or “soulmate” (to deploy a term I first used in Soulfully Gay in the entry, “The Soul is Gay”) could provide an answer. Instead of boring Ken with an ordinary review with extolled the magnificence and brilliance and seminal nature of his book — which is an intellectual masterpiece — I gave the book a rather peculiar review. I dashed off a diagram (see “Kronology Wheel”) of the Earth with two circles representing two persons, one colored black and the other white, positioned on opposite poles of the Earth, North and South. As one person’s Perspective advanced in self-transcendence, the other person’s Perspective advanced in self-immanence (illustrated simply with arrows showing sight-lines or directions of movement). In order to posit an Integral Vision, I felt it necessary to add the notion of Double to the Self. If the Integral Vision were more robust it ought be as expansive as that, deeply embedded in the Earth’s own body on all substrates of Reality. I thought Ken’s book laid a great foundation; but a foundation for What exactly?

I didn’t express these thoughts all that clearly at the time, allowing the fuzziness of non-verbal symbols to do the talking. But I held a vision which foreshadowed my next project: embarking on an Epic of Consciousness which I called Kronology. Meanwhile, I blogged regularly during this period of time in two significant weblogs, one called Rising Up and the other Until.

This post is the second in a series of six blog posts, a Retrospective on the Work of Joe Perez (2003 – 2013):

• Part 1. Soulfully Gay — Nov. 2003 – Jan. 2005. 

• Part 2. The Seeker / Dark Magic — 2005 – 2006.

• Part 3. Rising Up — 2005 – 2006. 

• Part 4. Kronology / Whole Writing — Dec. 2006 – 2010. 

• Part 5. Lingua-U / T’ai Hsüan Ching / Unique Self — 2010 – 2013. 

• Part 6. Involution / Trinity — Dec. 22, 2012, Midnight – May 18, 2013. 

As of May 18, 2013, Joe Perez teaches under the name Kalen O’Tolán. Kalen’s future writings can be found at www.kalenotolan.com.

Friday, November 7[, 2003] (Teotihuacán, Mexico): The Aztecs gave Teotihuacán a name that means the place where men become gods. If anyone is going to become a god today, it sure isn’t me. After spraining my ankle on the first day of the pilgrimage, I’m grounded.

The book is better described as a spiritual chronicle rather than memoir; it proceeds day by day over the course of 14 months, walking the reader through the process of the discovery of Self-divinity. The final sentences of the book turn the opening sentences around, revealing the deception of self which is the human condition. The chronicle’s final word — “LOL” — is an Ironist’s self-aware laugh. The writer has just told a tale in which the Joke isn’t on anyone; the Joke (or “Joe Joke”) is that the entire preceding story was a farce. Hello! I REALLY AM Divine after all, suckers!

If Soulfully Gay is a farce (and I certainly believe it is), it is so because of its ludicrously improbable premise: a gay man at the edge of the Millennium in 1999 discovers his divinity — and he, being a lapsed Roman Catholic and having discovered “proof” that He is divine … well, let’s let the book talk for itself:

This time I am the movie director [in a lucid dream], and I’m watching myself coaching a handsome actor. But I’m not really the director. I don’t have control over the show. I could push things around a bit with my mind but I can’t say cut.

I say, ‘This is not a typical Jesus movie. It’s a very tricky part. You have to play the role as if you were half of an archetypal Double.’

And — when given an opportunity to tell the readers directly Who He Is, the protagonist has John the Beloved put a remote control in his hands, perhaps making the odd suggestion to watch television:

Now I’m [dreaming and] back in the movie theater. I am wet, shivering, and naked. I see a man standing behind the concession stand. He has spiky blond hair and a tattoo on his arm: a cross. His name tag says John. When I see him, I feel calm and glad.

I ask, “Johnny, where am I?”

He says, “King County Jail.”

Then I laugh and say, “I believe you!”

I ask: “Who am I?”

He wraps a blanket around my shoulders and looks me in the eyes. Then he reaches into his pocket. He puts a TV remote control firmly in my hand and presses it to my heart.

That’s when I woke up.

And so what does the 30-year-old gay man do, He born on 9/3/1969 discovering “proof” of his divinity on or around 9/3/1999, do? The funniest thing about Soulfully Gay may be that He doesn’t really tell you. He compiles a journal and computer disk and results of his bloodwork into a package and gives it to family members either for safe keeping or:

Joe whispers something else, but it is inaudible. The only word that can be heard is ‘Vatican.’

And the pattern repeats five years later when the 34-year-old gay man annotates a manuscript with handwritten notes and sends it to Ken Wilber. Think about it. Put yourself in His shoes. The 30-year-old man is gay, HIV positive, a recovering drug and sex addict, and He thinks He has “proof” that He is God. But he can’t tell anyone; instead He prepares a package for delivery to the Vatican. Either you are crazy (option A) or your discovery of divinity is of such a nature that it either can’t be revealed (option B) or can’t be revealed at that time (option C). The  text of Soulfully Gay suggests that option C is the likeliest, if not some variation of ‘All of the Above’:

[Joe to his therapist, describing his experiences in a period of hospitalization:] ‘Waking dreams or visions streamed freely through my consciousness, and I wrote some of them down. It all seems so bizarre and grandiose; I’m embarrassed to speak of it. I think I saw myself becoming some sort of prophet in the future. I’m not sure.’

If you were gay, HIV positive, and a recovering addict, your claims to divinity would not be accepted, particularly within Christianity. You would need proof, wouldn’t you? You would need to become a Prophet of God. But what sort of proof could possibly be convincing in an era of modernist skeptics who will disbelieve everything that can’t be measured by the senses, postmodern relativists who will gladly accept anyone’s claim to divinity just so long as everyone is equally divine and no one starts like being authoritative or making demands or anything like that, and traditional religionists who will stop listening at “He’s gay”?

ow do you “prove” a claim to divinity anyways? Soulfully Gay doesn’t exactly answer these questions, but it does deliver a cliffhanger ending which begs the readers’ patience by saying, stay tuned. And cliffhanger is not a metaphor; the protagonist literally hangs off the edge of a precipice as the story fades to black.

The problem faced by the protagonist of Soulfully Gay is a broad one faced by all adherents of religious traditions which recognize religious authority only through given channels (such as magisterium, prophecy, or recognition by an Avatar): having tasted enlightenment or Godhead, how do you convincingly demonstrate Your Realization? It’s easier to just go outside of the religious tradition, judging by the behavior of all the people who have gone their own way. But what if you couldn’t for some reason? What if you had to become a Prophet of God? If you had to stay inside, you would need “proof” to be judged by Them.

There is one way that Soulfully Gay can be read as a tale which moves beyond an Ironist’s buffoonery and ridiculously improbable premise: if the protagonist eventually Realizes that Proof and is able to Communicate It to the World… and if the Book that had been regarded as a memoir is actually Revealed to be an Artifact without which that Communication would have been impossible or at least improbable.

In that case, the next line of the protagonist’s follow-up book might read:

Sunday, June 2[, 2013] (Seattle Area, Washington): You have known me as Joe Perez, but now I say you may call me Kalen O’Tolán, and I hope you do.

This post is the first in a series of six blog posts, a Retrospective on the Work of Joe Perez (2003 – 2013):

• Part 1. Soulfully Gay — Nov. 2003 – Jan. 2005. 

• Part 2. The Seeker / Dark Magic — 2005 – 2006.

• Part 3. Rising Up — 2005 – 2006. 

• Part 4. Kronology / Whole Writing — Dec. 2006 – 2010. 

• Part 5. Lingua-U / T’ai Hsüan Ching / Unique Self — 2010 – 2013. 

• Part 6. Involution / Trinity — Dec. 22, 2012, Midnight – May 18, 2013. 

As of May 18, 2013, Joe Perez teaches under the name Kalen O’Tolán. Kalen’s future writings can be found at www.kalenotolan.com.

Properly the term “dooks” ought to be reclaimed from its association merely with street brawls, and given wide liberty to associate with prepositional phrases other than “to put up.”

Say you’re a dook. If the only time you ever hear your name is when you are being told to put yourself up in the air and fight, and other people have to constantly ‘put up’ with you, it’s no wonder you feel put out. Speak of dooks (and think of your hands as dooks) when you are washing your dooks, wiping your head with your dooks, or brushing dirt off your dooks.

The Romany (gypsy) word “dookin” means “fortune telling.” Palmistry is a form of fortune telling. If there is a Book to be looked down in within the dooks, then one would need to be dookin to do it. I’m just saying.

You’re a dook. The energy of the word dook needs to be honored: it stands in the central place to mediate the outcome of our duties to God and all people and to the earth and all beings. Through our dooks do we derive at one end or another: duality or duels, endurance or duress.

Before our dualisms can be resolved without duels, and before our trials can be endured until they are done rather than remain in duress, then we must learn how to use our dooks. It is no wonder that a world which doesn’t know how to use ‘dooks’ ends so many dualisms in duels and so many durations are endured in duress.

The world cannot know peace unless we each do our duty with our dooks. So that we find ourselves not in duress, we must not use our dooks to put others in duress. So that duels become duals, we must use our dooks to give power to the Center so that we can row together instead of rue together.

- The Way of Falám

Forgiveness takes place in God, the all-in-All, the mind of Allah. One does not ‘release oneself’ from ‘negative energy’ any more than a prisoner releases her own wrists from handcuffs — that is to say, if you get out of the cuffs, it’s either a miracle or a mercy.

If one replies that one has put on the mind of God in one’s own mind, and therefore forgiveness takes place in both at the same time, then I reply, ‘Show me how to put the mind of God on, and is it like putting on a hat? Should it not be simple as putting on a hat?’ And then I will listen for the reply. Often people give instructions in spirituality such as ‘grow up’ or ‘evolve’ when there are no instructions to be given.

It is disrespectful to speak of ‘putting’ people someplace lower (as in putting them in an institution), or ‘putting’ an animal someplace lower (to euthanize them). Or one ‘puts on’ airs, which is to lord over someone. So when you would speak of putting on the mind of God, you are ‘putting God’ somewhere lower or lording yourself over God, which is not a good way to speak.

To a person I offended, if you offended me, would it not be rude to say, ‘I forgive you IN MY OWN MIND.’? The point is not to forgive someone in one’s own mind, but to forgive them. God is forgiveness itself, the source of inexhaustible fortitude which sustains us all.

Do not forgive people in your mind. Forgive them in God. And if you don’t know how to do that, then work on your relationship with God and you will learn all you need to know about forgiveness.

- The Way of Falám

All the dreams of a better world that you have ever held in your heart and acted upon can come true.  What stands in the way is if you do not act, but let fear restrict you.

What better way to let fear restrict you than to let your faith fail you?

Many people take as gospel today the false notion that faith is a substitute for knowledge, or something you hold onto when you lack a ‘direct experience’ of God. But no, faith is a permanent feature of the human condition, and it is only our relationship to it which changes.

Faith is the knowledge that within a lump of black coal there is a diamond. Faith is the knowledge that beauty can become so full that it becomes painful to endure. Faith is the knowledge that particularity is the price paid to vye for a precious shot at life, that poverty is the condition of God’s own veil.  Faith is what comes after that which evolves, after it has vaulted and before it hits the ground lain lame or in blame.

Faith is Nature’s gift to a knave, wrapped in a red box sealed with the Names of God. Don’t let enemies take it from you with lies. Don’t believe them when they tell you that faith is fakery. It is not. Faith is the tiger; fakery is the paper tiger. Don’t believe them when they tell you that faith is a feign. It is not. Faith is the tiger acting as the tiger; feign is the sheep acting as the tiger.

Belief in a fable does not require faith. You listen to the story and hear the moral lesson. You do not confront death; you do not think through the myriad possible endings and counter-examples; you have not yet matured to a higher phase of development from which to assess the fable as fable, not a babe of faith which hears the fable and does not assess it as such.

What more is faith? Faith is the first root of the fire of spirit which is given by God to light and heat the world and everything in it. Your fate is set by the path you weave between faith and the face you wear alone with God. And the fire of spirit is a Red Jewel.

At the foyer of the Third Millennium, we live in a misery for which there is no name: Without the Way of Falám, Those with faith don’t know why they clutch a Red Jewel; those without faith know not what they clutch, which they wrongly call either ‘faith’ or ‘not-faith’, but they too often fear that their enemies are those who hold Red Jewels, and they are determined to extinguish their fire.

- The Way of Falám