Love is not what nearly all people believe

Of course this funny little man's off his trolley! Everyone knows that, don't they, so actually it's not a significant observation! He must be off his trolley, because he has this absurd way of keeping on paying attention to what is really there and what is really going on, and, most inconsiderately, in various ways 'blowing the whistle' about it, instead of keeping on accepting the beliefs and received wisdoms that the huge majority — the 'sheep' of this world — are convinced are objective fact.

Okay, now let's turn to a little sanity instead!

Through my own life I've been in the unusual but far from unique position of having life circumstances that have denied me close 'relationships' in the sense that 'normal' people would mean. Also having a high degree of mental clarity, I was increasingly motivated to step back from my inevitable strong loneliness feelings, and over the years and indeed decades, to work out what was really going on for me and for other people in this whole arena of 'relationships' and what people were calling 'love'.

A great motivator for me over that whole matter was a product of that confounded mental clarity of mine, in that I was increasingly recognising when things — particularly people's outlooks and behaviours — didn't make genuine sense, or, one could say, simply didn't 'add up'. I directed that process to my own outlook and behaviours as much as anyone else's.

That was my challenge to start experimentally seeking to work out what does make real sense or 'add up' properly. I was then eventually aided in those tasks by the procedure of inner inquiry, the basic elements of which I picked up in 2007 (then under the misleading name 'energy testing') and further developed over the years subsequently. That enabled me to check my own hunches and intuitions with my own deepest aspects, and so get myself pointed into more securely-based understandings that cut right through all the beliefs and cultural traditions, no matter how revered or widely-accepted they were.

But what is love anyway?

You thought you knew, huh? — Indeed almost universally people believe they know what love is, and yet, as one with the viewpoint of enlightenment and a reasonably advanced state of self-actualization and clearance of garbage influences, I can see that virtually none of them really know what it is, and they're calling all sorts of things 'love', which are actually pointing diametrically away from actual love, and about which people would be horrified if they came to really understand the origin and true purpose of what they've been calling 'love'.

Okay, so it's my unedifying task now to perhaps unsettle or even horrify or anger the reader just a little — but let me say now that my 'message' is actually 100% positive and constructive, because by showing how and why almost everyone is in at least some degree of error about love, I can point to the actual, genuine, love — and not only point to it but show how you can easily get opening it up in your own life (provided you have the clear motivation and strength of will to do so in the face of a veritable barrage of pressures to point yourself in any other direction!). What could be more constructive than that?!

Some of the hopelessly distorted ideas about love

Those so-widely held but actually crazy ideas — tightly-held beliefs, one or more of them carried by the hugely vast majority of people, have ALL come to us, individually and en masse, via social conventions, religious and 'spiritual' traditions and individual channellings or intuitions, from the garbage, which latter is interfering with us ALL, whether or not we believe in such a 'force' or influence, and is seeking consistently and unremittingly to get people steered away from the true self-actualization that would open up their qualities (including real love) as manifestations of fundamental consciousness (or universal consciousness) — effectively 'the Ultimate'.

Here we go with some of the hopelessly wide-of-the-mark beliefs about love, then, which are so widely accepted.

• It's about wanting to be together with a particular person.
• It's about 'having sex'.
• It's about desiring another person.
• It's about getting married / being married.
• It's about procreation / having babies.
• It's about Man and Woman.
• It's about living with a particular person and not wanting to be apart from them.
• It's about regarding another person as 'my own'.
• It's about another person fulfilling needs of one's own.
• It's about another person to fill a gap in one's life.
• It's about feeling that you can't live (at least a fulfilling life) without a particular person or indeed a close relationship at all.
• It's about mutual attraction / 'chemistry'.
• It's about getting or/and giving pleasure with another person.
• It's about getting or/and giving the greatest possible thrills with another person.
• Sexual compatibility is the basis of a loving relationship.
• Love is about having a special, close relationship.
• Love is a particular feeling you have towards a particular person.
• Love is a particular feeling.
• It's about relationships with people.
• True, pure (supposedly 'spiritual') love involves just one rarefied and highly 'appropriate' or 'correct' close relationship, which doesn't push anyone's religious or 'spirituality' taboo 'buttons'.
• Because true, pure (supposedly 'spiritual') love is unconditional, it involves no close relationships at all.
• As well as unconditional love, which only enlightened 'adepts' experience, there's such a thing as 'conditional love' or special love for a particular person.

If you look at all those statements with real objectivity and mental clarity, you'd realize that each is talking of particular manifestations of painful emotions — particularly fear of being on one's own and feeling lonely. To a large extent, the vast majority are misidentifying their compulsions, and cravings to avoid feeling lonely, as being love, or at least what love is all about.

What love really is…

Actually, as with the non-dual fundamental consciousness (or universal consciousness) itself, it's not very meaningful to make an issue of love at all, because love is NOT something separate that you can usefully describe or cultivate in its own right, and it's meaningless to talk of it as something special.

Rather, it's an intrinsic quality of fundamental consciousness itself, and thus of every human, because every human is a manifestation — never mind how distorted — of fundamental consciousness. Real love is simply the fundamental characteristic that we all have, even if greatly obscured, of experiencing delight, joy and beauty in the life experience and in one's interactions with other people, and naturally tending to reinforce and where necessary cultivate that quality in others.

You see? Love isn't something you do at all. To use that word as a transitive verb shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of love. You can't love a person any more than a tree goes around treeing anybody!* Love is simply one of your most fundamental qualities — part of what you are — and it's nothing at all to do with trying to fulfil some perceived or postulated 'need', and it's nothing to do with having to come together with anyone, let alone get erotic with them.

Love is a quality, an outlook, that underlies and permeates a healthy person's life experience, making it a 'thing' of joy and beauty. Simple as that! So, if you feel that you 'love', or particularly, are 'in love with', a particular person, straightaway you have an extremely useful WARNING sign that something other than love is going on for you — never mind how much your genuine love is also manifest. I'm not judging upon such I love that person reactions, but am simply pointing out what's really going on.

Now, before anyone blows a fuse and imagines that I've now claimed that we shouldn't have close relationships, please note, that's NOT what I'm saying at all, any more than I'm claiming that it's okay to have close relationships (i.e., as people generally understand that term). Reality knows no should or shouldn't, for things are simply as they are. What I am saying is that at least most that we experience in life and have been conditioned to label as 'love' is actually not love at all and in most cases is distorted emotional energy that actually points us away from love and into unaware self-gratification and control / manipulation agendas, even if the latter feel subjectively wonderful and gain us social status and approval.

I'd thus add that virtually ALL close human relationships throughout the planet are to some extent distorted and aren't full manifestations of love, never mind how exalted, ecstatic or idyllic some of them may subjectively seem to be. That goes even for people who are apparently enlightened.

My own observations so far point to such latter people usually having an amazing blind spot regarding close relationships of their own, never mind how wise and 'enlightened' they may seem generally to be in the view of most people. It appears that enlightenment, even in cases where it is really genuine, doesn't in itself guarantee the sort of comprehensive and consistent self-scrutiny that could take enlightened people further, towards the state of optimal self-actualization.

Indeed, it appears that for many people their enlightenment is taken as a cue to ease off on constructively critical self-scrutiny, because there tends to be an assumption that because I'm enlightened I'm already 'there'*, and thus there's a big denial among such people almost universally of the ongoing interference they're still getting — at least covertly — from the garbage in order to keep them away from genuine self-actualization. Their close relationships, thus, where they occur at all, tend to be remarkably conventional in character.

I want to avoid here getting drawn into people's confusions and complexities over relationships and what, in their unawareness, they're mislabelling as 'love', because the underlying reality is so beautifully simple — and I want to point you to that simplicity of outlook and help to show how easy it really is, to be self-actualized and experiencing the whole of life as an expression of love.

If you seriously want to get the best out of life and of love and of relationships, then I've got a few simple recommendations for you — certain of which will seem at first highly challenging. I don't mean that you should do any of the following things (because telling anyone they should or shouldn't do something is nothing to do with love and is straightaway aligning oneself with the garbage and its control-based agenda), but I do mean that if you do take up these recommendations you'd turn your life around in the most wonderful way, bringing yourself more abundance in your life rather than the limitations, rarefaction, or indeed seriously harmful sexual behaviours (viz., Tantric practices) that various 'spiritual' traditions point to.

• Drop 'love' from your vocabulary! (Yes, seriously, because continuing to use that word and to treat love as something separate — an issue in its own right — is part of the problem and bound to keep you confused and off-course!)

  Saying I love you, any number of times is meaningless and worthless as against your expressing your intrinsic love simply in the clarity and objectivity of your outlook and behaviour towards people.

• Embark on powerful comprehensive genuine self-actualization methods such as I present in Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way.

• Abandon all notion of 'morality', and substitute deeply aware clear-mindedness, letting the love that's an aspect of your true nature be your guiding principle instead. Morality is simply sets of garbage-sourced prescriptive and restrictive rules that have been passed on to us from religions and social conventions. Rules are asses because they're inflexible, rigid, and can never point to what's really the most appropriate and helpful thing for a specific person to do in a specific situation. Morality isn't about love and indeed points diametrically away from it, because morality is about control and unawareness. Every 'moral code' actually aligns you with the garbage.

• Genuine love is inherent in genuine objectivity, and therefore that is what you need to cultivate, rather than anything that one might call 'love'. Objectivity recognises consequences of outlooks, thoughts and actions, and so naturally points you towards being mindful of what would be most beneficial for other people, rather than just seeking to fulfil particular wants or cravings of theirs. Objectivity makes that possible by enabling you to observe accurately what is really there and what is going on, and making the most constructive choices on the basis of those observations.

• Use Helpfulness Testing in your everyday life so that you can 'live with positive intent' all the time — making choices that are strengthening to you and for your ultimate good, and to avoid making choices that are weakening for you. You'd need to use Helpfulness Testing in a thorough and aware way in order that you don't go avoiding testing where you'd be liable to get an initially discomforting but necessary answer.

  That's particularly true about relationships with other people. For example, if you 'test' on somebody you're attracted to, and, upon a 'strengthening' response to countenancing that person, you immediately conclude that it's fine to try to set up a close or indeed erotic relationship with that person, you'd be nicely sabotaging yourself and going way off-course.

  You'd also need to Helpfulness-Test on the various possibilities of how you could most beneficially relate with that person, and indeed make sure to test the possibility that, although that person is indicated as apparently 'strengthening' for you in some way, any significant involvement with that person at the present time wouldn't really improve your life and indeed could be a serious obstacle to how you really need to be developing. Also test the notion that your involvement with that person would be in his/her best interests, for it might not be. Real love always totally honestly considers what would be in the best interests of anyone who one could theoretically get involved with.

  Basically you need to Helpfulness-Test every single assumption or 'want' that you have relating to that person before you can start gaining a truly useful picture of what significance that person has or might have for you. On the other hand, if you get a 'weakening' test response to countenancing a person, then, provided you're being vigilant for garbage interference, you can give a happy sigh of relief at having been spared possible 'grief', and turn your attentions to more rewarding people or, probably much more healthily, to other areas of life.

• Let go of all preconceptions — however socially acceptable or attractive-seeming — about what would be the most suitable sort of relationship(s) for you at any particular time, or indeed as to whether any close relationship(s) at all (i.e., as generally understood) would be helpful for you then. In other words, learn to let your mind be completely open on the issue, and to have this fully open-minded outlook when using Helpfulness Testing on relationships of yours (actual or potential).

  Even the very use of the term 'relationship' tends to imply a very definite limiting preconception about how you might positively interact with a person, so actually you'd help yourself greatly by dropping that word from your vocabulary along with 'love'.

• Relating to the last item, let go of any preconceptions about gender and sexual orientation in how you relate with anyone. You can't know without rigorous Helpfulness Testing that, for example, a particular person would be suitable or unsuitable for close friendship / companionship with you, indeed even with some sort of erotic component in such a relationship, on the basis of their and your gender or sexual orientation.

  Maybe you just assume I'm heterosexual so I'll keep my distance from him — but if you carefully Helpfulness Test, you might get a different picture, which would be pointing to work you need to do to let go of such preconceptions and open to what's truly for your deepest and ultimate good and is indeed more truly 'you'.

  I myself have had a fair number of potential really good friends turn away from me because they'd learnt (usually from my personal website) that I open most readily to men, and they were afraid that I'd expect them to get into bed with me — even in cases where they expressed such fears to me and I pointed out that that wasn't the way I operated, and that I certainly wouldn't want people putting such expectations on me.

  Such fears are very deep-seated, no doubt very much reinforced by garbage interference. What a waste, to throw away such potentially rewarding friendships and companionships on the basis of such irrational fears and preconceptions!

  Of course, there could be all sorts of sensible, rational reasons for going different ways anyway, but the point is that we need to allow those sensible, rational considerations to be our guiding principles — not our prejudices, fears and preconceived notions.

• Further, keep in mind that for a truly healthily functioning self-actualized person the concept of sexual orientation is simply meaningless. Some such people have more imbalance one way and others would have more imbalance the other way — but none of them would be fixed in an absolute polarity that then is a supposed defining characteristic of their 'personality', as is the universal situation for 'normal' (and actually highly dysfunctional) people.

• Use on a regular basis the affirmations for self-actualization and fundamental healing and clearance of garbage influences given in Affirmations & declarations of intent for healing & self-actualization — making sure to read and understand first all the introductory notes so that you approach the affirmations with at least a reasonable degree of understanding and awareness.

• Recognise ALL unbidden erotic feelings or sexual arousals as likely interference you're receiving from the garbage, which is manipulating your feelings for the purpose of creating attachment in your life and steering you away from true self-actualization.

  Those feelings will derive from emotional traumas of yours or (more often) belong to parasitic 'lost' souls attached to you, or/and any connections that you have to primary archetypes. The garbage uses all of these as weapons and instruments of control. For more about such interferences, see The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks.

  It appears that some unbidden sexual arousals can have other primary causes, but, whatever the cause, they represent an issue that needs understanding and addressing, even if one chooses on any specific occasion to go along with those feelings and 'have sex'.

  In the latter case, depending on the actual situation (use Helpfulness Testing), a solo erotic act may be the best way of handling the particular situation, rather than getting entangled with the other person's emotional issues.

• Understand that feelings of intense ecstasy are NOT love, and are almost universally used in attacks from the garbage for the purpose of controlling us and getting us confused and stuck into unsuitable, attached relationships. I say this not from opinion but from hard experience. Fortunately I had the clarity to see what was really going on when the garbage was trying this on me with regard to various people, most of whom would each have brought me serious problems if I'd allowed myself to fall into the normal confusion of infatuation.

• If you want to have a baby, STOP! …and think very carefully! The garbage is all the time interfering with people, getting them to put a notional seal upon basically unsuitable relationships by having children and thus getting encumbered by family responsibilities.

  Also, people's preoccupation with procreation and family life is itself very much given to us from our garbage interference to divert us from self-actualization — and also to cause the progressive wrecking of our planet through its being forced to carry far too large a human population for it to support*. At the present time you'd do your environment and thus yourself and future generations a great favour by not having that baby! (always subject to the results of rigorously and awarely applied Helpfulness Testing relating to your specific situation)

  * I have strong doubts as to whether the human race is going to come to its senses about this in time, and sadly assume that a massive cull is in the pipeline for us.

  Whether that cull will be directly self-inflicted — e.g., by global-scale war or a global economic collapse — or by some environmental factor (no doubt caused or greatly exacerbated by the hugely over-large population), I have no idea, though it's looking as though the imminent diminishing of our oil supplies and the general spiralling of debt will lead to a collapse of our civilisations, and this collapse could well achieve such a cull.

  Such a massive cull and all the attendant pain and suffering would no doubt well serve the agenda of the garbage. However, there looks to be a real possibility of the human race's total extinction because of the scale at which we're now interfering with our planet and degrading our living environment.

  Indeed, as far as I can make out, it looks as though causing humans to overpopulate their planet and suffer a consequence catastrophic collapse of their civilization is an active part of the garbage's agenda that has been repeated again and again for human-type beings in other parts of this Universe and indeed in other universes. I discuss this compelling issue in The future of humanity — Countenancing the unthinkable.

• Let go of any notion that eroticism needs to be part of the closest or indeed any relationship that would benefit you. Instead of letting any social convention or your (garbage-sourced) feelings of craving for 'that' be your controller, let your own good sense and rigorously and awarely applied Helpfulness Testing point to your own most helpful choices for your own real way forward.

You'll note in the above list that I'm not saying you should or should not do particular things (reality knows no should or shouldn't), nor that any particular choice is good or bad (nothing is intrinsically good or bad), but am simply pointing to the tremendous benefit of using Helpfulness Testing and carefully chosen true self-actualization methods so that you can rapidly cultivate and gain your own clarity, free from the confusions of all the people around you.

Like that, your whole life experience can rapidly become a manifestation of genuine love, and immensely happier and more abundant than any life that's centred around the notion of 'having a relationship', with all the confusions and limitations that that implies.

The one relationship we all do need…

Marriage, of course!

— No, only joking!

If you want to be ruled and controlled by unawareness and garbage agenda in how you relate with people (largely though not completely via social or religious convention), and want to be sidetracked by the garbage from self-actualization, then marriage is a great way to go!

The whole concept of marriage isn't about real love but about unawareness, attachment, control and restriction, social status, and about turning away completely from the one relationship that every single person does need — which is a relationship unimaginably closer and more aware than any marriage or supposed soul mate relationship can bring you.

— Well, have you got it yet? Is this crazy man about to tell us that we need to devote our lives to God or Jesus or Allah or Jehovah — or some other apparently external deity or 'ultimate'?

— Sighs of relief (or outcries of righteous indignation)! No, I'm not that crazy. Maybe you didn't realize this (most people don't), but those just-mentioned non-physical characters all have one glaring common factor — they're illusory manifestations given to Humanity by the garbage for the purpose of luring them away from the one relationship they really do need (at least for healthy functioning). And that relationship is…

…With oneself! That's what you open up through a proper self-actualization process. That relationship is indeed also with fundamental consciousness, which is 'the ultimate' as far as anyone outside the limited view of religious or mystical belief systems can determine. Through self-actualization you open out in yourself a previously unimagined pervasive stable and vibrant happiness and an ongoing delight in living and interacting (always positively and constructively) with other people. Then your sense of needing this or that close relationship with other people falls away, because that sense of need had really been the result of your being to a fair degree closed to yourself!

Who, then, is your 'twin flame' if anyone is? — It's none other than you yourself!

The New Age movement has been the disseminator of a garbage-sourced myth about the 'twin flame' — supposedly a person who everyone due for 'ascension' (itself mythical) is destined to come together with at some point in their supposed evolution over many lifetimes, and with whom there would be an unimaginably deep and close loving relationship — more so than any 'common or garden' soul mate relationship.

What the garbage has been doing there in disseminating that myth in the New Age movement is just the same as religions have been doing in setting up supposedly external representations of 'the Ultimate', such as God. The aim in all these cases is to lure people away from self-actualization and opening to their own ultimate relationship, which is already right there but just needs to be uncovered and opened out. You have no 'twin flame' but yourself. Indeed, that relationship is so deep and close that the whole concept of a 'relationship' becomes meaningless!

Does all this mean you wouldn't then have any closeness with other people as you become more self-actualized? — No, that's not at all what I'm saying, but in fact there's no earthly point in trying to speculate in any detail as to how your personal interactions and relationships would be when you're self-actualized enough to have significantly opened up your own relationship with yourself (i.e., your deepest aspects)*, so becoming an increasingly overt manifestation of fundamental consciousness. One particular thing that's clear, however, is that attachment would be 'out' and a much greater happiness and joyfulness in all your life would be 'in'.

* Let's get clear here that actually, although I talk of a relationship with your own deepest aspects, that's only a figurative expression, and is really an unhelpful description of the situation if persistently used, because that sort of self-perception still implies separateness, and the garbage would exploit that to keep you off-course.

Really it's not at all a relationship between you and your deepest aspects, because that implies that your deepest aspects are something separate from you, whereas the reality is that you are just you — the whole of you! What we're really talking of here is a progressive unblocking and opening up of the continuum of consciousness between your conscious 'mind' and your deepest aspects, so resulting for the first time in a proper, healthy integration of all your parts.

Prior to that happening, your conscious 'mind' had been largely shut off from your deepest aspects, so that you'd been functioning only as a very partial human. Yes, as a sub-human!

Think of it this way. At the moment your life experience is shaped or coloured by a sense of lack, even though you may have been automatically regarding it as a happy life. If it were not so shaped or coloured, how is it that you (almost certainly) regard a close relationship with another person as desirable or essential for your or other people's happiness / well-being?

Merely to hold such a belief shows that there's a fundamental lack in your life, which you want to hide from by having a 'relationship' (i.e., an attached one) with another person. Any such relationship will thus incorporate — often unawarely — a sense of seeking to get that perceived 'need' of a close relationship met by the other person. In fact to a certain extent (but not fully) it can be met by another person — but only because each person is, however distorted, a manifestation of fundamental consciousness, which is also your own deepest nature.

One of the big problems about trying to use other people to make good that lack in your life is that almost universally people are not much self-actualized and thus they can't fully make good that lack even when you are together with such people. But what about your life without such a person? If you feel you have to remain tied to that person for your happiness, then you're actually in very great trouble — never mind the fact that that's almost universally the state of people's lives.

With self-actualization and opening up your full 'relationship' with yourself, you have an intrinsic happiness and joyfulness without qualification, with no sense of need for particular 'relationships' with people at all. However, you'd also then be open to joyful and happy friendships / companionships with truly suitable people, not out of a sense of trying to fill a gap but, instead, of simply celebrating in the life experience*. So, instead of filling any sort of gap, your interactions with people would be bringing you further joyful happiness on top of your base state of joyful happiness and clarity.

I don't know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good deal to me! All the more so because I'm actually experiencing this progressive transition for myself, so what I'm relating here isn't a matter of opinion but instead is a matter of observation from a viewpoint of fundamental clarity (my preferred term for what most people — though not psychiatric doctors!* — would call enlightenment).

Also the whole fixation on the concept of 'relationships' would dissolve, because the healthy way to come together is NOT with the aim of 'setting up a relationship' but through happening to share truly life-enhancing activities.

By the latter I do NOT mean the normal 'sharing of interests / activities', because, generally speaking, that's more a matter of mutual resonance in a variety of personal emotional issues that are usually more or less unacknowledged. The life-enhancing activities I'm referring to would be very much self-actualization-oriented ones, but with caution they can include activities like hiking or surfing (the latter in small measure only) because, when well and awarely used, those can be a potent part of a person's self-actualization process.

On the other hand, pretty well universally activities such as gym workouts, stamp collecting, going to the theatre / cinema, watching television, going to skittles evenings, dancing and so on are used by people to bring themselves and each other to a sort of lowest common denominator of awareness. It's not that there's anything actually wrong about any of those activities — it's simply a matter of what you want in life — a sort of cosy restrictedness of outlook (and the eventual horrendous problems associated with that*) or the true happiness and abundance of self-actualization.

Tantric lovemaking and the dubious place of ecstasy in love

The term 'lovemaking' is universally inappropriate and incorrect. I'm not saying that love is necessarily not involved at all — it's just that using the term 'lovemaking' reinforces the old confusions that identify almost anything other than actual love as love. In fact love isn't something you can 'make' at all! Like a nose, it just is!

Tantric lovemaking is supposed to be a really advanced and 'spiritual' way to 'make love' — which latter, as I say, needs a different term because it's emphatically not making love, even though it can be highly enjoyable or indeed ecstatic. However, all that glisters isn't gold… Indeed, with all the hard experience that I've gained of the ways in which the garbage interferes with people, the very notion that a particular practice or modus operandi is 'spiritual' nowadays sets a little alarm signal flashing within me*. And, sure enough, the BIG problem here is the matter of getting fixated on experiencing ecstasy.

Is your interest in experiencing love, or is it in experiencing ecstasy? When you seek ecstasy you're not very much in 'love' mode at all but in self-gratification mode! And if you understood the true cause of any ecstasies that you've experienced, you'd most likely be horrified.

Nearly all, if not all, of the intense ecstasy experiences that anyone not in an advanced state of self-actualization (well beyond enlightenment) experiences — whether erotic, spiritual, aesthetic or any other sort of intense ecstasy — are actually experiences of a particular type of attack from the garbage. The garbage does it to manipulate and control everyone and, again, by cultivating the particular attachment, steering people away from self-actualization.

I myself have repeatedly witnessed this going on for me. In my case it became glaringly obvious what was going on, because the garbage had a major plan of seeking to disrupt my life and indeed to destroy me.*

Most other people, for whom the interference is at least mostly covert, would have no obvious cause to subject to scrutiny their ecstasy experiences and all their sexual arousals and erotic feelings or see them as anything other than natural, biological (or indeed 'spiritual') responses to particular people. Nonetheless things are as they are, regardless of what people believe or disbelieve about them.

If you believe that you get the most sublime 'spiritual' ecstasy in your Tantric 'lovemaking', you might like to ponder the following. As far as I can tell at the moment, the real cause of your ecstasy experiences would have been just the same as what gave me ecstatic or 'attempted ecstatic' experiences in the following situations:

• Posing as a supposed ascended master, the garbage gave me a convoluted fictional story, complete with waves of alarmingly intense sexual arousal / ecstasy feelings, in order to get me to gatecrash on and intrusively seek to get into bed with a particular charismatic man who I'd been introduced to only once — and even to rape him. (I didn't get to bed with him, however, and fully rebelled when my instructions reached the 'rape' point!)

• Using intense sexual arousals and misinformation coming to me through my purported higher consciousness (actually just the garbage pretending to be a higher source), the garbage was trying hard to get me infatuated and entangled with a particular young homeless man who was scruffy and dirty and in general poor condition (heroin, smoking, drinking and most likely other drugs too).

  What was special about him was that he actually had an 'energy' configuration that, despite all his problems, was remarkably similar to my own. I was given a story (completely untrue) about his having been a lover of mine in certain previous lifetimes and how he and I were meant to be lovers at this time, and I was given the story that my intense sexual arousals and ecstasies over him were caused by him unawarely sending an 'energy body' to make love with me, for, allegedly, under the surface he was deeply in love with me…

  As I nowadays understand, the alleged energy body from him would have been fictional as such, but really that story would have been plying me with a big distortion of a certain degree of deeply-sourced 'resonance' between us (in itself nothing actually erotic) that was there because he and I were both no-soul people, but its effects were blown up out of all proportion by attacks from the garbage, which were 'piggybacking' on the genuine and much more subtle positive interaction that was occurring between my own 'energy system' and his.

  (Thankfully, I saw clearly all along that he'd cause major problems if I involved myself with him at all, so I never sought to get involved with him.)

  Actually, in 2022 I worked out, through use of inner inquiry, that there was more to that situation than I'd understood at the time, and the story about the guy that I was given then was a garbage-relayed distortion of something actually very positive, loving, and indeed inspirational that had been happening 'under the bonnet'.
  See Five inspirational encounters of the REAL human kind.

• Similarly, the garbage regularly attacked me with strong sexual feelings towards various other homeless young men who had serious alcohol and other drug problems.
  (As with the above example, I recognised that such people were unsuitable and so didn't get involved.)

• In August 2006 the garbage went through a phase of attacking me strongly with impressions of Satanistic and black magic practices, together with very strong sexual arousals / ecstasy feelings, even including on one occasion a certain smell and warmth at my nostrils that was part of bringing into my awareness what was allegedly a trauma of one of the parasitic lost souls attached to me*, in which the particular person had been forced to bury his head in the entrails of, supposedly, a freshly killed man during a black magic initiation ritual — and I was being given all this while being attacked with strong sexual arousal / ecstasy feelings. (All that felt so nightmarish despite the ecstasy feelings, that it didn't tempt me in the slightest to get into such practices!)

  * Yes, it could have been, but then again, from my current perspective I see that impression and its 'explanation' as at least as likely to be a fiction generated from one or more of the primary archetypes connected to me.

• The garbage, posing as my 'guidance', got me 'enhancing' my solitary 'lovemaking' sessions in bed in particular ways that were maximally ungrounding — and, in particular, gave me a particular visualization practice to use at climax, which was extremely dangerous in its ungrounding potential (for that reason I don't describe it here as I don't want to encourage anyone to do it) and theoretically could have given the garbage its opportunity to stage upon me a partial walk-in (which latter is presumably why it gave the practice to me).

  I did actually use it a few times, and was saved from disaster only by my having part of my awareness exceptionally well grounded for an individual who is a no-soul person.

Now I want to draw your attention particularly to the last point above. In fact the whole concept of Tantric 'lovemaking', as normally understood, is actually harmful and potentially dangerous, because it's very much about getting ungrounded.

Yes, you may experience great ecstasy, but, as I say, much of that will almost certainly be garbage attack for the purpose of cultivating your attachment and also to continue ungrounding your awareness, so that you become more vulnerable to the garbage and maybe would become ungrounded enough for it to land you with a partial walk-in or other delectable attached 'nasty' and indeed make you yourself a member of the cacoprotean network.

On the face of it I don't know what people get up to in Tantric 'lovemaking' sessions, except in the very broadest terms, but results from my inner inquiry on the matter suggest that the aforementioned extremely dangerous visualization practice that the garbage gave me was one that very likely some people actually use in their Tantric 'lovemaking' sessions.

So, basically, ALL Tantric 'lovemaking' is best regarded as harmful and best carefully avoided. That doesn't at all mean that we need to avoid having wonderful experiences being physically together, however. The safe and healthy way to go about things is to maintain a balance between the connecting-up of ones' awareness and 'energies' on the one hand and the maintaining of a clear and conscious connection with all the physical aspects of the whole experience (including one's surroundings) too.

Then 'lovemaking', if not allowed to become a fixation, begins to have true self-actualization potential instead of merely being yet another instrument of the garbage to take still more control over you.

Having said all the above, however, I've no need nor cause to pronounce upon what place, if any, ecstasy needs to have in our lives (apart from the clear need for lack of attachment to it) — because, if people use Helpfulness Testing on each situation, they can find out for themselves whether and to what extent encouraging or opening to ecstasy is or would be helpful for them.

That's the real way forward — not hanging onto ecstasy as an attachment (whether it be erotic or relating to anything else), nor avoiding or discarding it when it happens, but simply Helpfulness Testing on yourself at relevant times to ensure that the choices you do make are all for your deepest and ultimate good. I'm not (yet) aware of any valid rule (bearing in mind that all rules sourced from the garbage are invalid) that says that ecstasy without attachment, and in a well-grounding context, is necessarily harmful for us (but then again, I don't absolutely know that it isn't!).

Companionship still has a function…

For people who are advanced in their self-actualization and have little or no attachment, the conventional notion of close relationships and especially partnership is inappropriate and irrelevant, because it's based on attachment and exclusiveness, which actually result in shutting people off from joyful and loving interactions with many people. It might, then, be tempting to reactively assume that people advanced in their self-actualization would lead unappealingly solitary lives and not have any real closeness.

That's not the actual situation — though most people, because of their attachments and fears of being alone, are addicted to depriving themselves of a healthy degree of solitude, and so when they become more advanced in their self-actualization process they'd joyfully embrace the freedom of having more solitude — but not to the extent of shutting themselves away for long periods meditating as so many people so misguidedly do, especially in various Eastern traditions. A truly healthy life, then, embraces a good balance of companionship (of varying degrees of closeness) and 'flexible' solitude.

That companionship and closeness is NOT a need in the sense that nearly everybody believes (i.e., protecting ourselves from a harmful loneliness), but rather, it serves a very helpful function in grounding our awareness, and thus both assisting our self-actualization process and making us less vulnerable to interferences and influences from the garbage.

The power of simple friendly interactions with people to ground one's awareness was forcefully brought home to me during my own crises brought on by attacks from the garbage in 2004–2007. I live on my own and (at the time of writing this, in January 2008) still have no close friends to turn to in the event of such events — and so I had no alternative to contacting the local Crisis Resolution Team and on a total of four occasions even getting hospitalized.

In fact just the friendly chats with the Crisis Team people or hospital nurses was all that was required to reground my awareness and get me out of those crises. Now, if I'd had healthy ongoing companionship with a reasonably compatible and grounded person or people during that time, it's pretty likely that those crises could never have happened in the first place, or at least would have been much lesser and more transient events.

To summarize how I personally stand with regard to the points made above…

On the face of it my life experience till quite well into 'pensionable age' has been one of isolation and lack of what people would recognise as 'close relationships'. In my earlier years I did have the odd friends with whom there was a fair amount of sharing of interests, but there was a massive 'awareness gap' between them and me, and also they all had control agendas that they were trying to impose upon me in their different ways to stifle my own clarity, and each one, when eventually challenged, cut off from me — usually with some sort of abusive message, which helped underline my understanding that they'd really not been suitable as friends / companions for me in the first place.

I was constantly longing for an 'ideal' close relationship, but learnt through life experience that that was something pointless to search for, for that would make my life an absolute misery. Instead I assumed that if it were really meant to happen for me like that, it would happen in its own time as my own process of clearance of emotional issues continued.

This outlook was much underlined by the 'insights' that I gained from Re-Evaluation Counselling, and again when I got into spiritual healing. As I now understand, those insights contained many distortions because of the garbage involvement in our healing traditions almost universally. I was then really 'sold' on the notion of soon meeting up with my supposed destined 'soul mate' — something that had come to me too from certain mediums who gave me readings. Little did those mediums understand that ALL channelling and clairvoyance comes from the garbage and thus contains very problematical agenda.

When I myself got channelling in 2003, the garbage (posing as higher sources) presented to me a convoluted story in which I supposedly had been the historical king Gilgamesh and was destined in this lifetime to reunite with the purported current incarnation of the 'soul' who had been Enkidu in that lifetime — and the garbage very strongly manipulated my feelings to make it seem as though that was true, and to try to get me really hooked on the notion of having intensely attached male lovers.

Fortunately I already had the clarity not to be more than superficially and briefly taken in by that, for non-attachment is for me not something I believe in but an actuality of how I am and indeed have been since I gained fundamental clarity (crossed the enlightenment threshold) in 1997.

That non-attachment was very helpful too because the garbage was making claims that I was due not only to reunite with the alleged Enkidu incarnation but also to have a number of other male lovers — and the garbage was also, as already noted further above, trying to get me erotically infatuated with quite a variety of unsuitable or unavailable people — particularly rough-sleeping young men with drug problems.

Although I was progressively gaining more clarity through all those tribulations from the garbage, my really big breakthrough came in May 2007, when I took up Helpfulness Testing and commenced development of the overall methodology that I present in Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way.

This hadn't only been speedily weakening the interference from the garbage, but had also enabled me to use inner inquiry and Helpfulness Testing to check whether it would be appropriate to get involved with any particular person, and also to what extent, and when, it would be helpful for me to continue having solitary 'lovemaking' sessions in bed.

In fact, even without garbage interference or involvement with a specific person, it turns out that there is, generally speaking, beneficial purpose in a man having periodic erotic or sexual activity, because without reasonably regular semen ejaculations a hormonal imbalance develops, which speeds enlargement of the prostate. Helpfulness Testing is great for establishing when it would be helpful to 'do it', and also to establish when and in what situations 'doing it' would actually be weakening (i.e., not a healthy choice) for one.

For myself at the moment, my Helpfulness Testing indicates an interval of about a week (plus) between such sessions — though I use Helpfulness Testing on the issue more frequently, and always use it when I get an unbidden arousal come up, so that I'm not following any sort of rule but simply working on the basis of what my own deepest aspects indicate to be most helpful and healthy for me to do or not do at the particular time — that is, taking into account all the current circumstances.

Meanwhile, however, my self-actualization process seems to have dissolved the old loneliness, though I'm still aware of my connections to particular primary archetypes that had apparently been the underlying source of that loneliness and indeed my whole lifetime state of perceived isolation.

In place of noticeable loneliness I have an ongoing vibrant and playful joyfulness and the capacity to experience my transient encounters with particular people in my everyday life — particularly on my hiking outings — often as very beautiful experiences, with the odd hug included. Indeed, I'm on hugging terms with certain members of staff at three of my regular restaurants (including the manager of one of them), and, would you believe, also with my current dentist!

See also Five inspirational encounters of the REAL human kind — though please heed the notes there pointing out that I soon had to backtrack on the notion that ongoing friendship / companionship was all that likely to lead on from those, or any such, encounters. They were nonetheless great life enhancements, and by being open to such encounters on my outings — i.e., rather than being attached to one person and not engaging much with anyone else on my wavelength who I may encounter — I was and am maximizing my opportunities for making the most of what life has to offer me at the time, without stressing myself by hankering after what I can't clearly see coming my way.

So I'm not at all like those individuals who've meditated much of their life experience away and who equate self-actualization with a 'monastic' and more or less solitary existence. For myself, I shall be alone only while I'm being alone! Love, however, doesn't depend on such issues, and, as I say, it's like my nose: it just is.

But this is still unnatural. Man and woman were made for procreation…

On this page I haven't been talking about procreation but about the place and meaning of love in our lives. If you're really off the rails enough to want to have a baby at the moment, go and 'make love' or copulate with someone — of the opposite gender of course! Yes, you need opposite genders for that. Simple! There's no other worthwhile significance for genders. Yes, they do add variety to our experience, but that in itself doesn't make them sacred and something that we need to dwell upon; we can simply enjoy our diversity as it manifests.

However, that headline statement about man and woman having been made for procreation is tantamount to saying that man and woman were made to destroy planet Earth! As I've already indicated, there's a pressing need for very many of us at the present time NOT to have babies — or otherwise we're due for a massive cull or even extinction. Please see The future of humanity — Countenancing the unthinkable.

In any case, that headline statement also carries the assumption that we're just animals — a greatly unaware belief that's blown right out of the water for anyone who becomes enlightened and perceives their own true nature directly (as I do). The reality is that we are consciousness, and consciousness can't be defined in terms of biology, gender, sexual orientation, or 'natural' / 'unnatural'.