Squat in the center of the room, holding yourself very tightly, rocking, fully dressed, maintaining boundaries, making whatever sounds, all tight, all “self-contained”.
When you are ready…it doesn’t matter how long this takes…let yourself expand into the room, while still squatting and rocking. Relax.
Let yourself expand into me when you are ready…it doesn’t matter how long this takes…and take me into you when you are ready…it doesn’t matter how long this takes…all the while squatting and rocking.
When you are ready, move around the room, making deep sounds within a relaxed freedom. Slowly remove your clothes… when you are ready…it doesn’t matter how long this takes. Let yourself expand outside of the studio, taking everything into you.
When you are ready…it doesn’t matter how long this takes…dance with me, drawing everything in the room into the rapture state of our combined being, making deep sounds within a relaxed freedom.
When you are ready…it doesn’t matter how long this takes…sit on me and rock/rub our combined being into a rapture state, making deep sounds within a relaxed freedom. Remain in this state.
“A Dance Ritual” was performed at this performance, Exploring of Possibilities of Passion, January 31, 2003
First written by Frank Moore for FAERIES, a performance with/for Linda Burnham, 1982.
We will use words, people, ideas, erotic excitement, images, messy fun play to fight the plot that has been brewing ever since the Roman days. For women, the plot has gone on longer except for whores and sex priestesses…ever since the cave days when she lost her equality. The plot of…of what…of romance, of thinking you can’t do something because you have no talent or no money…the plot of not trusting, not trusting yourself and not trusting others. The media, politicians, churches have been pushing it. You are not good enough. He is not good enough for you. Buy Topol toothpaste because smoking is a sexy front to hide your unworthiness, but yellow teeth and bad breath give it away. This is about trust. It will get pretty gross, fun, intense, boring, sexy, turned on, everyday…do you trust yourself? Do you trust me? I am a dirty old man who wants to get your clothes off, roll around with you naked…and other disgusting but fun things like making the whole universe disappear by playing cards. But trust is where the magic comes from…so will you revolt by trusting?
I am the director, I like to direct, I like women, I like to be turned on, I like to scream and be a spoiled bastard…I hope I have not forgotten any bad things…all the rumors about me are true. If all of these things are ok, stay. If not, go. If they become not ok during the piece, leave. But don’t interrupt or interfere with the piece. I may be lying. I am saying these things to save time. Time is a vital element of this magic. The longer the time that we are in the piece, the greater the magic. Don’t tell anyone about anything that went on in this piece, except if you add that you may be lying.
I will use bits and pieces which I will channel, not knowing why, not knowing how an individual bit fits into the whole. So I can not explain them. In some of these bits I will use some of you, using who you are, sometimes sending you to places outside of the cave of this room. Some bits only you and I can do alone. Nobody will see all of the parts. But in the end, there will be a whole. I will not use violence to create this magic. You will not be hurt.
We are putting an arrow in the dragon; we are tripping up the plot that has been trapping us for so long. One obvious way is the piece will change we who are involved, changing our lives and relationships…and that change, no matter how small, will cause a chain reaction in the outside world.
But there is another way that what we will do here will effect and affect the outside world. Science has come up with a theory which explains why one group of a species in another part of the world, with no physical or material contact with another group, picks up change that occurs in the first group. In the past, it would have been called magical. But what some scientists are now saying is that in DNA there is what amounts to a broadcasting unit which both sends out and receives data to and from every member of that certain life form…and perhaps to other life forms and maybe even to non-living material as well. It also has been long known that the observer effects what he observes.
The core of this piece is you and I will set a power erotic wave with each other that will be transmitted on the DNA network. It does not matter if you believe this. But the bits…or rather one of the bits…which I will have people other than you and I do, will create an open channel for our broadcast. So what the other people do in the piece is very important. Now I am talking to everyone else except you. If you feel threatened and want to leave, do so. Don’t argue, or judge. Don’t try to protect other people in the piece. If you do leave, I am counting on you to honor your commitment to not tell anyone anything about this piece without stating that you may be lying.
Back to the plot which we are fighting against today. If we had freedom to touch each other erotically without limits, without romance, they could not control us, they could not have power over us. They know this. If we know we can do anything we want…that we don’t have to wait for enough money before doing what we want…that it ain’t true that we have to have talent to do things that we want to do…then their power over us would vanish. That is why they make commercials promoting ideals and images that you cannot fit unless you use their product. “It’s so easy to get their attention…it’s so easy to lose it…use Head and Shoulders.” That is why they keep changing fashions. That is why they say wait for Mr. Right. That is why they say art takes talent and skill…which most people don’t have, and say those who are blessed with it must refine it before using it…why they say films must have a certain technical quality before people will see them…why they say don’t touch your cock in public, don’t stare, don’t ask, don’t need, don’t rub. The people who are on the top and the people who have accepted that they cannot do what they want, have ganged up to preserve this plot of snobs, experts, and morality. It is easy to see why those who are in power want to keep the plot going. But why the schmucks who spend their whole lives not doing what they want, thinking they aren’t good enough…why do they want the plot to keep going? Imagine someone like this seeing someone who…like me…is not as smart, skilled, good-looking as they are…so dumb that he doesn’t know that the plot says everything is hard. He bumbles through life doing what he wants, making movies and art…playing with sexy girls…all easy. They want to kill him because he, as a symbol, says they could have done what they wanted all along.
Premises:
Pleasure, arousement, excitement are good in themselves.
Curiosity is good.
Religious-political-business-establishment is keeping its power over us by promoting romance through the mass media.
There is no Mr. or Miss or Mrs. Right.
We can fight the plot through magic.
48-Hour Process, Frank’s Studio/Storefront, Haste Street, Berkeley, California. Photo by Ken Jennings.
Written March 28, 1998 for P-Form for their “Illness” issue. Published in P-Form #46, Fall 1998.
Chero
Chero is the physical life energy. I created the word “Chero” by combining “Chi” and “Eros”. Magic is the science/art of nonlinear change. In Cherotic Magic, it is the practical focus of the person to reshape reality into more humane forms by using the magical dynamics of relationships.
It is funny to be asked to write about art as healing. It is funny because when I went to grad art school, one of the main “criticisms” I got for the work I did was, because it “heals”, it must be therapy, not art. That was news to me! I always thought one of the functions of art is healing.
For the purposes of this essay, my work consists of rituals. These rituals are in the contexts of public performances, of shamanistic training, and of private performances.
There is an attracting, pleasurable, excited, calming, healing energy that I call “chero”. In these rituals of body play, one of the things that often occurs is a healing transformation. One of the channels of this transformation is aroused “chero”.
In the western culture, chero is known as “sexual energy” or as the “sexual urge”. This is because in this culture, adults usually call chero forth by means of sex and use chero mainly for sex. However, sex is just one way to use chero. Moreover, sex is just one of the ways to call forth chero.
Chero is the life force. It is what attracts. Chero is what attracts other people to you. It is what the shamans used to heal and melt other realities into the normal reality. It is what Tantric Buddhists used to reach the higher spiritual spheres. They use the sex act to arouse chero, which they then use in their spiritual quest. Sex is a cherotic act. But Chero is by no means simply a/the sexual energy. There are many ways of calling forth chero, and many ways of letting chero direct or guide you.
Within these rituals, chero is aroused by various physical/magical (“tanpanic”) trances. One of these trances is eroplay.
Eroplay is not foreplay, even though foreplay is eroplay.
Kids play very physically both with their own bodies and others’ bodies. They get turned on by this play, turned on both physically and mentally. This turn-on is not sexual in kids. Studies have shown that babies who are held, touched, and played with are more healthy and alert, weigh more, and have a lower rate of death than babies who are denied this eroplay. Studies also show that old people who live alone, who don’t get physical and emotional contact, are less healthy and die sooner than people of the same age who live with others and get that physical contact.
When we grow up into adults, eroplay is linked to sex, maybe to assure procreation. But there may be different results when eroplay is not connected to the sexual orgasm.
Foreplay is eroplay, but eroplay is not foreplay. We need a certain amount of straight eroplay (not connected to or leading to sex) to be as healthy as possible.
Foreplay leads to orgasm…eroplay leads to being turned on in many different ways and in all parts of the body. It can be different every time.
Skin touching skin seems to be what releases the full impact of eroplay.
There are some physical health and lifestyle advantages of using eroplay to arouse chero in your body. These advantages are caused by the physical and psychic changes in the body started by aroused chero. Over the years of experimenting, we have often noticed that people’s physical appearances change, sometimes radically, after they eroplay. Their physical features soften, the way they hold their bodies relaxes, their bodies have a glow very similar to the glow that many pregnant women have. All of these signs are visual, physical signals which attract open people to the chero‑enriched person…and thus attract more opportunities to him. It is also important to point out that these changes are temporary, lasting from a few hours to a few weeks depending on the physical and emotional environment. Continued release of chero is needed to have these changes be longer and longer lasting.
There are other changes that occur during eroplay. By touching, rubbing, rocking, moving, the energy centers of the body are randomly activated, releasing a flood of blood with chemicals that produce the sense of well‑being in all parts of the body. This is a warming well‑being. This is deepened by the special breathing that is gentle laughing. This is why eroplay is playful and fun at its most healing level. Laughter has its own special healing quality.
Sometimes the release of chero is blocked by confusion and guilt when the person feels the pleasurable, turned‑on feeling which he in the past associated with sex. But now he feels it in a nonsexual, nonromantic situation. If he can just let the pleasurable turn‑on wash over him without thoughts, it carries him to a new realm of relaxed enjoyment.
Eroplay as a spiritual, healing technique balances chero through all the energy centers throughout the body. This is different than other techniques such as Kundalini Yoga in which the energy which I am calling chero is raised through a very dangerous process from the base of the spine to out the top of the skull. In eroplay, chero is called forth in all parts of the body, creating an energy center out of the whole body.
There is a widely held misconception that the physical and the spiritual planes are in opposition to each other, that to reach the spiritual, you have to avoid the physical. This is overlooking a great number of disciplines that use the physical in various aspects to reach spiritual treasures. The physical is one aspect of the spiritual, the aspect most accessible to us.
As we eroplay, many changes take place. The changes are both physical and psychic. We have already talked about some of the physical changes. One of the physical signs that can occur is the male erection when certain energy centers (and not necessarily the cock) are aroused in certain ways. This male erection has become the most sexual symbol in our culture and perhaps the most taboo. The female erection is not outwardly visible, and hence is usually ignored. But in reality, the “sexual” organs are no more or no less sexual than any of the other energy centers in the body. In eroplay, erection should not be thought of as sexual or a turn toward sex. This region of the body is just one of the main centers of energy.
The other physical changes caused by the arousal of chero through eroplay are a slight enlarging of the pupils, a slight change in scent from the sweat glands and nipples, the chero blush, and a difference in body tone. All of these are so slight that they usually are only picked up on the subliminal level. The changes in one body can be transferred to the bodies of others through these subliminal sensory signals. This is one reason why physical nudity is important in this work. It gives these signals a more direct channel to affect others.
But to understand better what is happening when chero is aroused by eroplay, it should be remembered that the physical is only one aspect of what we are. Around our physical body there is a force field made up of thoughts, emotions, and other psychic material. This field is usually a fraction of an inch out from the body, but we have the ability to broadcast this psychic force outward.
When we release chero through eroplay, we focus this force and with the willingness to be unlimited, we radiate this force outward, creating a rapport into which others can be drawn. This rapport has physical, mental, and psychic qualities.
In my performances, this rapport, in the form of an altered reality or a spell, is created by arousing chero between two people by rubbing bodies, by rocking together, moving together, making noises. These two generating people are sometimes isolated in a tent or a box. But the rapport generated physically and psychically by these two leaks out of the enclosed space, putting those on the outside into an altered state. The deeper the chero rapport is between the two, the more complete the outer reality will be.
At first, the generating chero rapport may feel uncomfortable, forced, and/or strange. This is because we are using things that in the western culture are usually contained only in sexual and/or romantic contexts. One should not be thrown by this forced, uncomfortable feeling. It is the breaking of old patterns. It is one of the first stages of this work. Each energy center “breathes” several kinds of energies in and out, very much like the lungs‑nose breathe air in and out. Each center both takes energy in and projects energy out. Some energy centers are commonly thought of as one‑way channels. The eyes obviously let in visually the outer world to our brain, our mind, our inner reality. But the eyes also visually let out what is happening inside us, who we are, and our personal power into the world. All of the centers work on this breathing principle.
Chero healing as eroplay is a two‑way channel whether in play, art, magic, or everyday living. It must be this way to be effective. To create this deep two‑way chero breathing you must be willing to both deeply project and deeply take in chero with anyone who is willing to do the same.
In eroplay, the centers of the body are randomly opened up so that this chero breath can be free and deep. Eroplay creates a complete cycle of chero. This cycle is created when you touch your own body. But it becomes more dynamic when this chero cycle is between two people. This interplay opens and relaxes the centers of both people, letting them both cherotically breathe deeper and easier. This deep, easy breathing is what is healing. (We will get into the difference between healing and curing later.) Both people get healed in this interplay and the energy released through the interplay helps to heal the outer world. This is important to understand because many people think healing is a one‑way helping/giving channel. Because of this, they are careful “not to give too much”. “I must protect myself and my personal power; maintain my own space, my control over the situation.” This attitude is thought to be individualism.
We are now turning to how to use cherotic rituals in healing. The principles are the same whether we apply them to apprenticeship, performances, or bodyplay as a healing method.
Healing is not necessarily the same thing as curing. Modern western medicine is focused on curing illness, solving health problems, restoring normalcy. It is a very logical, goal‑oriented process.
When we talk about healing, we mean becoming better able to cope with and adapt to the life situations we find ourselves in. This may or may not mean curing. When we are healed, we are in the position of actively accepting the situation. This puts us into the realm of all possibilities in which we are more open to cures, if the accepting itself has not become the “cure”, or we find happiness within the situation.
We will get technical in this. But we should always remember that at the root, the student comes to the teacher, the audience comes to the performance, the person comes to the bodyplay to be deeply and intimately with a flesh‑and‑blood person or a group of flesh‑and‑blood people in a way that is usually denied to her in normal polite social life. She comes for touching, holding, rocking, playing, having fun, and healing. This has been usually forgotten under rigid serious rituals, techniques and theories. Again, western medicine is a prime example of this forgetting. But even spiritual methods of healing in our culture have put the rituals and techniques over the playing and fun.
This is why, before we get into the techniques of chero bodyplay, we have to be clear about what we are doing. By doing the apprenticeship, by doing performances, by doing bodyplay, we are calling forth the liminal state of controlled folly. Controlled folly is liminal because it is a combination of the awake reality and dream reality. Rituals make this combination possible.
In the state of controlled folly, the activities of playing and creating fun are intensified and expanded, because rituals take the place of the normal rules, taboos, fears, and inhibitions. This makes it possible to go into the unknown where anything is possible. Ritual is what makes this magical playing safe by giving the playing a living, breathing structure. Playing is only possible within a structure. But when ritual becomes important in itself, rigid and serious, it starts limiting and killing the play and fun. So it is important to remember that the ritual is just the channel of the play and fun.
Playing is a primal state in which things are drained temporarily of their normal meanings. Life goals for a time fade in importance in this state. Tensions and stresses of normal life are safely transmuted into creativity. In play, newness appears. This newness is translated into inspiration, into new ideas, new ways of doing things. The young, both in the higher animals and humans, learn the most through the state of play. Both man and the higher animals use play to transform violent energy into safe acting out. The human mind and civilization were evolved by playing.
In bodyplay, chero is aroused by playing with the body. Fun is created and released by this play into the world directly. Fun is energy focused upon itself, rather than upon some goal. The fun we are talking about in this work is a deep, intense fun that corrects imbalances and induces newness. This kind of fun comes from risk‑taking and work. This deep fun feels very different from the surface, light, fast fun of the world of politeness, glamour, romance, and social rules. This difference confuses people.
In bodyplay, this deep fun, which is focused chero, brings about a balance where there was an imbalance; it slowly moves things into balance. People usually think the healer heals the sick, the teacher teaches the student, the performer entertains the audience. This mistaken concept has the chero that heals flowing from a source (the healer) to a passive container (the sick) for the benefit of the receiving party. The truth is the two, by touching and playing, create a complete chero circuit, allowing the chero to flow freely finding the needed balance in both. When this balance is reached in the two people, the special fun of controlled folly is released into the world, inching the outer world into balance. This world balance is the ultimate purpose of these healing rituals of magical play. This ultimate purpose is usually hidden from awareness by focusing on healing the person.
To understand the nature of balancing, we must understand the true qualities of Yin and Yang. The popular notion about Yin and Yang is they are feminine and masculine with tints of negative and positive. Yin and Yang really are parts of a continuum, called the Tao. Everything has a Tao. When we were talking about the chero breath, inhaling is Yin and the exhaling is Yang. Contractions are Yin; expansions, Yang. The backbrain is Yin with its deep, intuitive, long‑range vision; the frontbrain is Yang with its practical knowledge of how to live day by day. Within each person there is the Tao of Yin and Yang. There is a certain point in each personal Tao where there is a balance between Yin and Yang. This point is different in each person. It is rarely at the middle of the Tao. When a person can find and maintain this balance, he has erour, the vulnerable strength. The vulnerability in erour is Yin; the strength is Yang. As a rule of thumb, in our modern western culture, imbalance is usually caused by too much Yang.
This means “health” is not a fixed point of perfection or normalcy that you reach and maintain. Health is the ever-changing dance of balance among the dynamic taos of the body. This dance of balance is the state the body tends to be. Healing is putting the body back into this dance. Within this picture, “illness” is often one of the paths back to health. Also death may be the natural outcome of health. This flies against the western misconception that holds that health is a static state, something you get to, maintain, or lose…that health is being unsick, untired, balanced, grounded, normal, undying. But the truth is health is a dynamic state of interaction of the seven centers, each operating as close within its Tao as possible. Sickness, contractions, mistakes, death are as equally parts of the state of health as wellness, expansions, doing the right things, and life are. There will be no state of perfection, only the process of living, the art of living.
Through bodyplay, erour is slowly reached by calling forth chero in all parts of the body by eroplaying. This is true not only in the “receiver”, but also in the “healer”. Moreover, through the energy released through these magical sessions, a collective social erour is gradually created for the general world. This is the ultimate reason for this work. The chero released as focused fun “writes” upon the place in which this magical play is performed. It transforms the place into a magical site. The more play is done in a place, the more chero is stored in the physical site. The more chero that is contained in a physical site, the easier it is to perform more intense play.
Each touch and gesture and movement in bodyplay has its own Tao of Yin and Yang…its own qualities of calming and arousal. Each touch has both calming and arousal within it. One of the secrets of bodyplay is finely using these two qualities in the right balance within each firm touch of playing.
The hands are transmitters of chero. This is because your hands are the only parts of your body that can touch almost all of your body. They are healing wands of chero. Laying on of hands is powerful magic. But rubbing body centers together is much more powerful, therefore more taboo. This magic requires two or more people being physically intimate together.
Cherotic bodyplay releases, frees, creates new possibilities. This is true for the people who are actually directly playing together. But this is also true for the society, the people, the world, the outer reality surrounding the eroplaying people. This makes bodyplay not just an individual problem‑solving therapy. Instead, it is a playful but powerful ritual that has effects on many different levels. There is a danger in focusing too much on what it will do for the individual, how it will affect his life, what it means in terms of his life, how it will help him.
You who are reading this are aware to some degree that you create at least your own reality. But you look around at the reality that you find yourself in, and it does not match your ideal of how things should be. This has given rise to bad logical thinking which has sealed many people (especially in the growth movement of the ’70s) back into being victims. According to this bad logic, since a person creates his own reality, he must somehow want the reality he finds himself in. If the reality does not match what he thinks should be, then he must not really want what he thinks should be, what he wishes should be. So he does not really want what he thinks he should want, what he wishes he wants. Just writing down this bad logic is confusing!
This way of thinking is a padded cell. It comes from the premise that there should not be any “shoulds”. This premise originally applied to false “shoulds” coming from outside of the person. But over time, it bled into the personal inner shoulds, what is right inwardly. This leaves no base upon which the person can create. He is left with guilt for creating a reality that should not be…or worse, he proudly takes “responsibility” for doing what he knows he should not do…takes responsibility for continuing to do it until sometime in the future when he magically can start doing his ideal. This is absolutely false “taking responsibility”, the worst kind of double‑think.
It takes one magical fact, the fact that you can create your own reality, and uses this fact as the foundation for a prison of victimization. It simplifies freedom, power, and real responsibility out of life again. If you really do not want what you yourself think you should want, what you wish you want, your only option is to give up on yourself, to see yourself as inferior to your ideas, to settle for less, to be less, to wallow in self‑indulgence within guilt and fear and doubt. So you project guilt, fear, and doubt out into the dynamic interplay of ultimate reality. So you are personally responsible for guilt, doubt, and fear in all reality.
What this bad logic does not take into account is the influences of the dynamic interplay on the person. If a person gets cancer, it does not mean that he secretly wanted to get sick or that he did anything wrong to cause the illness, or that this sickness is a lesson that he has refused to learn in any other way. If he thinks these things, if he thinks in this cause‑effect linear logic, he takes on the illness as himself. This makes healing much harder to take place because there is no place within which to do battle. It is him…it is the cause of his doing, his fault, or God’s wrath.
In reality, there are many, many factors that create such a situation. Many of these factors are “invisible”, impersonal. For an example, in our cultural frame, there is an expectation that has the title of “statistical probability” that a certain number of people within a certain time frame will have cancer and die. Reality tends to fulfill strongly held expectations, so that number of people will die within that time frame. This is just one of the factors. The person does not need to understand these factors.
We have said a major secret in healing is acceptance. What the person with cancer first (as any healer) needs to do is to accept the situation (but not the surrounding expectations) he finds himself in, accept the cancer, accept death, but more importantly, accept living. This acceptance creates a level battleground. Next, he should find out what he envisions should happen (but not just should happen for him, but what should happen)…how should he live, how should he die, what should the cancer do, what should life be like, what should dying and death be like, what should things be like. Then he has to act and live in passion and in faith as if things are as they should be. There is always a risk of failure, of losing the battle. But by doing this healing battle, even if the person “loses”, he is still within power.
I explore these ideas more fully in my book Cherotic Magic. And I’d love to hear from you.
Here is an excerpt from The Combine Plot that seems particularly relevant today:
I took the word “combine” from the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. In the book, the combine is a fear machine network which secretly installed pacemakers of fear, doubt, and mistrust in almost everyone in childhood. This made people much easier to control. It isolates people into cells padded with fear and doubt, making the people part of the combine. There are some misfits whom the combine missed with its fear pacemakers. In others, the fear pacemakers blow their fuses. These people without the fear pacemakers are very dangerous to the combine because if they are not checked, destroyed, discredited, isolated, or enfolded into the combine, they can show others how to blow out their own fear pacemakers, can show others how to be free humans linked to other free humans. The combine rarely has to directly destroy the misfits itself. Just direct eliminations would reveal the existence of the combine. So such direct eliminations are kept to the minimum. The real tool of the combine is a vague sense of uncomfortableness, of inferiority, and of mistrust within the victims of the combine. The setting of the novel is a mental ward in which most of the patients are self‑committed. They believe themselves weak, unable to cope with the outside world. They believe the fear comes from themselves, not from the pacemakers. They just have to start believing in themselves, and they could pull out the pacemakers and walk out of the hospital. But every time they reach this threshold of freedom, the combine, by clever remote manipulation, turns up the vague uncomfortableness and mistrust. The victims themselves do the destroying of the misfit either in themselves or that con man pied piper who laughs at their fears and limits, who shows them the way to freedom. It is the victims who do most of the censoring.
………
There is a martial arts principle that when you are attacked, that is the point that you have most force potential. This is because you can combine the opposing force with your own, and reshape this new, more powerful force into your advantage. Helms has given us an opening to create a greater freedom. I refuse to defend my work from charges of obscenity. There is no such thing as sexual obscenity. It is an undefinable concept invented to limit freedom and to promote the established moral order. If I protest that my work is not obscene, I would be admitting the valid existence of sexual obscenity. There is nothing wrong with using sex, nudity, and all the bodily functions as art. It is time to do away with the legal concept of sexual obscenity once and for all…and for good. Dana and Jesse are just giving us artists an opening to accomplish this.
But sex is just the top layer of this attack. Sex is what Communism was in the McCarthy Era. In the ’50s, people thought those who were blacklisted for being Communists or fellow travelers somehow deserved to be blacklisted, were asking to be blacklisted by going too far. People thought it was O.K. to sign the loyalty oath, O.K. to not hire the blacklisted, O.K. to play along with the corrupt system…O.K. because they were not and never had been Reds.
But what they did not understand was that the real focus was not Communism, but controlling power. The same is true today.
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An introduction written for Lee Gerstmann’s book Campus Quest, February 24, 2001.
Here I am writing the introduction to this book…and maybe an introduction of you to Lee…and maybe of Lee to you…especially if you are a woman who lives outside of the NORMAL yourself…or at least are not fulfilled by THE NORMAL. Lee is shy.
I don’t usually do this. The reason I am doing this is because Lee is one of my favorite poets. He writes, reads, exists in a “strange” state of purity, innocence, and an indirect directness which is fueled by a child-like passion. This state is not normal. It is very close to madness, to out-of-control homeless raging which threatens to destroy everything. But Lee’s reality isn’t madness. It is what a lot of artists and poets try to fake. Lee is real. I hope you bought this book from Lee after you heard him read/perform. Then you know what I mean. You probably also feel the warmth, the softness/gentleness, and the vulnerability that is the core of the planet Lee lives on. So get on stage and hold his hand…hold him like you would hold a scared puppy struggling to get away. This is why Lee writes poetry. This is the quest, hoping a woman out of uniform will hold him like this.
If you haven’t been around Lee physically, if you just came across this book…well, before reading the rest of the book…take off all your clothes, lie down on your bathroom floor, kick your legs and flap your arms for five minutes at least…then read Lee’s poems aloud, very loud, in the voice you would read Poe or Lovecraft with. Then you will have most…but not all…of Lee’s intensity.
You don’t need to do this to “get” these poems…especially if you are an outsider, a watcher looking in…not really wanting to be absorbed into THE REAL WORLD…just wishing to meet somebody to touch. I spent many years watching, on campus, on the sidewalk…unseen…desiring. If you have ever been an outsider, you are always an outsider, no matter what your outside “reality” presently is. Lee is the voice of us outsiders!
You and your group take yourselves much too seriously and don’t take your lives seriously enough.
You must do what most people want to do — to do in their dreams, but they dare not bring down into reality. A few men have done what you are about to do, but they are exhibitionists and egoists, little men trying to project illusions to show their contempt for their fellow men. One of their motives is pride. But what is really driving them is fear — fear that behind all of their illusions there is nothing. So while daring to stand out in an extreme way, they don’t dare to drop their illusions and stand naked as themselves, in their selves. They live out of fear and doubt as much as the masses of which they are so contemptuous.
You must not live out of any kind of fear. If you do, you are not who you say you are and will not do what you said you would do. These people whom we have been talking about take their illusions very seriously, believing their illusions are their only selves. They have lost their real spirit, or life, in the reflections of reflections, the thought forms of their egos, their brains. Now you see what I mean by “don’t take yourselves so seriously, but take your lives more seriously.”
Now it is time for most of you to create an illusion to walk about in the world. It is the same process that you used in spirit after you chose the thought form of your present body. After all, your body is an illusion that you created yourself after you and the thought form were matched up. Now you are creating another illusion using thought forms. But your spirit must do the creating, and not your ego or brain. This is what is hard for most of you to grasp. You are told you are the only one who can create you, who knows what you require, and that you owe nothing to anyone else save love. You take this as a command to do what you want, what makes you “feel good”. It does not mean this. Your wants can make illusions without, if you please, a “zipper”. You get trapped in it, having to tear your way out finally, bruising yourself in the process. The illusion that you are creating must come out of you and not out of your wants or from what you think you should do.
What you have created may appear to be taking you into hardships. As soon as I say this, some of you think you have to have hardships and pain, and will start creating hardships and pain for yourselves. This is not what letting you create means; you are just creating another zipperless illusion out of which you will battle. You have to create an illusion that is like clothes that you can put on to deal with the world, and that you can take off to play naked with your friends. If you can’t take the illusion off, you had better start ripping it off because you are trapped, no matter how fine the illusion may be. As the body is still there when it is clothed, you are still there under the illusions; it is impossible to create an illusion as beautiful as you. Know this because it will save you time.
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Use your own judgment when you listen to what I say. Believe only what feels right to you.
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Your group will be concerned with the creativeness which is in every human, every spirit. This creativeness is truly the God who is the reason for all life. This is so obvious. But Man has rarely understood the process of creating. He starts, let’s say, a painting with a set idea of what he is going to paint. Sooner or later he makes a “mistake” — a color or a line which doesn’t fit in the original idea — which “ruins” the painting. When this happens most people give up, thinking that they are not cut out to be artists, and withdraw back into the common existence. Others try to pretend that they didn’t make the mistake, that the color or line isn’t there on the canvas. They go on painting as before. When they are done, they have painted the shadow of what they wanted. Moreover, this shadow is covered with a haze. Others keep starting over whenever they make mistakes, not accepting any mistakes. They are rewarded for their endurance with the perfect copy of the thought form which they had held for all this time. They are rewarded by what they think they want to create. Their thought form has been brought down into the material plane. The creation is perfect. But it is not a masterpiece. It is perfect within the limitations placed around it by the rigidness of the artist. The work is perfect, but not free.
A masterpiece is perfect and free. The master artist paints an adventure in color, words, or notes. What others see as mistakes, he sees as challenges, boxes out of which he has worked as the basis on which he creates a totally new, fresh pattern. These challenges, boxes, keystones, keep appearing as he works, demanding the artist’s flexibility. If the artist looks back, trying to hold on to what he thought the painting was or would be, he gets trapped in a box out of which he must battle or be turned into a rigid, bitter pillar of salt. The artist has to keep his whole attention on the swirling colors in front of him in order to be the creator.
To create a masterpiece, the artist has to use and risk every bit of himself. But he also has to create with God, for God is the one who creates what most people call mistakes, and that the master artist sees as his tools and materials. God does not create for the artist. God just provides the tools, the guiding bumps. It is up to the artist’s free will whether he creates or gets dragged down by the weight of the tools. When the artist is creating, he feels no weight.
The most important masterpiece is a lifetime. This is a statement of hard fact. Creating a masterpiece in every day living is governed by the same rules as creating a masterpiece in paint, but much harder because the artist is also the canvas. In every period of time, in every land, there are a few masterpieces of art and writing. But a masterpiece lifetime is much rarer. Moreover, there has never been a time on your world where there has been a society where masterpiece lifetimes abound.
breaking taboos releases a magical freedom if done in certain contexts. this is true and important, but only in the first stages of magical training. taboo can be defined as social or moral forbiddens which maintain a dogmatic power structure by fear of what is outside that structure.
the things that are taboo, and hence are magically charged, in the normal social reality, are not taboo in the reality of the magician. there are no taboos or morals within the reality of the magician. for example, when i eroplay with someone, the eroplay itself is not taboo or transformative for me. the being with the other person in the eroplay is transformative, but not in the taboo dynamic. for me, eroplay, ritual reality, etc. is just everyday living. magicians will not do a lot of things, but this is never from a taboo/moral consideration, but from a practical ethical knowledge of how things work.
in what i do, breaking taboos is important in the first stages. in the public and private performances, as well as in my short-term work with people, breaking taboos plants seeds and time bombs, cracks the normal frame to let in a glimpse of an alternate reality.
but within the apprenticeship, there comes a time where, if the student relates to the magic life as breaking taboos, rather than as her everyday life, it becomes clear that she is taking a vacation from the normal social world, rather than truly living beyond taboos as her own personal reality. the first ring of the chero apprenticeship, introduction to cherotic magic, lasts for 10 weeks. i meet with the student once a week for 2-4 hours. (for someone who lives outside the bay area, this ring can be done as a 10-day intensive.**) this ring focuses on the cherotic basics of the magical work. this is done one on one, focusing on how the student can use these basics in her life even if she does not go on to the advanced rings.
the break between each ring has proven to be vital. the minimum break period after the first ring is a month. there is no commitment to return from the break.
the second ring, practice and performance of cherotic magic, is 6 months. this is an intensely physical training, which includes both public and private ritual. this training will affect every aspect of the student’s life profoundly.
the third ring, living magic, is 2 years and is focused on the student’s devoting his life for the 2 years to the aiding of the shaman in the magic work. because of this, during the break between the second and third rings, after the student hears the calling for this devotion, he should arrange his personal life to make this devotion possible.
beyond these first three rings of magical training lie four deeper rings into the realm of the responsibility of the shaman. but it is important to stress that each ring is complete in itself, reaching a different level of shamanism.
**the out-of-towner may stay at the ashram/salon of all possibilities during this intensive. subject to availability.
Ok, here it goes…fast forward through the 35 years since Debbie and I left the community. A bus ride to D.C. to her family…the Jewish mother-in-law from hell [years later she sicked a hit man on me!]. I quickly called my friend Moe…whose head shop was in that book I was writing and which is lying unfinished in a trunk….but I did turn the material I was “channeling” into a book art of living. [The metaphysical writing is in the same trunk.] Moe rescued us and put us on a plane to San Francisco. The first person we ran into as we stepped off the airport shuttle was another of my college friends who put us up for the night. The plan was for Debbie to go to the S.F. Art Institute [where I would go years later]…but she couldn’t get in. After a week getting kicked out of rooms [crips weren’t in fashion yet], we boarded a bus to Santa Fe before we ran out of money. Santa Fe is where I lived before I went to the community. We got into Santa Fe at 4am without any phone numbers of my friends. But a friend drove by and saw me…and woke my dear friend Louise up. She picked us up. We stayed with her for a while. But to get Vocational Rehab money, I had to get back into college. So we moved to Albuquerque, staying with my friend Steve in the mountains until we found a room in town. My channeling made a spiritual community interested in me…until my muckraking nature raked up muck! I got my B.A. much too soon in terms of our money. We met Jo who we became intimate with. We three moved back to Santa Fe, where I got into an intensive film course. We met Ray. We four got married. After the film course, not having money to make films, I did nonfilm performances. I also started a drop-in workshop combining theater, ritual, intimacy, eroticism, etc. A community began to develop out of this. I began doing all-night audience-interactive ritual performances. We moved, with some of the workshop people, to N.Y.C. to continue the work in a loft off of 5th Ave. Both Debbie and Jo were pregnant. Louise flew out to deliver the boys at home after the hospital wouldn’t let me even on the ward [again before crips were in fashion!]. The boys came three days apart. We raised them tribally…the sanest way! They are in their 30s now…one is becoming an acupuncturist; the other is a musician and an instrument maker. After they were born…and after I did 2 nights of ritual performance in a ballroom…the tribal we moved to Berkeley…after a short attempt in San Bernardino. There I got a motor wheelchair. Imagine me mobile, driving myself all over the bay area, driving into all kinds of adventures. I even drove into a travel agency and met a sexy travel agent Linda who quickly quit to be my partner in crime for the last 35+ years!
A guy who saw a flyer for my workshop came to check me out. He didn’t want to do the workshop. But he did want to come to me for weekly individual sessions where I kicked his ass about his relationships and his life…and he paid well! He turned out to be a psychic teacher. All of his students and clients wanted to see me! For a couple of years I worked 8 hours a day and had two weekly workshops going. Although I always charged just what the person could afford, money was good, especially when they started moving in with one another and came as households! I even got a masters degree just by documenting this work. But problem solving was boring. I wanted a community of deep intimacy. So I demanded more. A community of 30 in several households emerged. Sound familiar? Also quite a few successful businesses came out of this sexy coming together…not to mention a few millionaires [never me!]. We won a legal battle with the I.R.S. over getting church status. They were saying we didn’t believe in a God. We had to go to D.C. with my channeled and metaphysical writings and the A.C.L.U.! But Inter-Relations was born, which has made doing the work much easier.
I started putting on events like free concerts and sexy parades, and directing plays at our storefront. I also started doing 48-hour improvised performances. Everything was small and underground. But then I directed what was supposed to be a one-night-only wacky tacky sexy take-off on beauty contests, the outrageous beauty revue, at the S.F. punk club the Mabuhay. The room held 500. It was packed. The first two rows were photographers and reporters [we were on the third page of the next day’s S.F. paper]. Scary! The club’s producer made me announce that it’ll be a weekly show. So it became the ever-evolving early show every Saturday night [and often Thursday too] for three and a half years. So we opened for EVERY punk/hardcore/whatever band! And we got international coverage of all kinds…magazines, t.v., films, etc. I had to work hard to not let it get big or lose its edge…to keep it underground where you have the most effect and freedom…just popping up everywhere to interject bits of subversive alternatives. At the beginning, I was not in the show. But I started worming myself in. I added a live band, the superheroes…of course I was one of the lead singers! The band started getting gigs at other clubs. And we opened our own club, the blind lemon, in Berkeley. But by the second year of the show, the community began to decay. It took years for that painful process to play out.
In the meantime, I started making small films [after walking out of a “real” film deal!] and mainly put them in the closet…waiting for the internet and public access t.v. to give them outlets! The first film, Fairytales Can Come True, even was distributed. In the meantime I went to the S.F. Art Institute graduate program for “performance/video”. I/the work freaked them out bad! But Linda and I stuck it out for two years…which landed me a cover story in the major performance art magazine… which made me the darling of “THE ART WORLD” for at the most two years, until they figured out I wasn’t a nice safe thankful crip artist, but an artist who pushed limits. But during these two years, before the art world blacklisted me, Linda and I started touring the U.S. and Canada, doing both the long ritual performances and singing gigs. I also started being invited to lecture at colleges. I was one of the featured performance artists in the film Mondo New York. I also kept making videos [directing, acting, editing, even creating musical scores and Linda doing the camera work]. I began a performance series at the University of California. This series, which lasted for three years, gave me a lab where I could improvise/jam with other artists/musicians. When I got on the art world’s blacklist, I moved into poetry readings and other underground worlds. But then Sen. Jesse Helms got me back into the art world’s graces, kind of, by including me on his list of six targeted performance artists whom he considered obscene. That opened more possibilities for touring. I rode that pony for all that it was worth!
My writings, as well as articles about my work by other writers, began to be published in a wide range of magazines and books. In the early 90’s, I began to offer shamanistic apprenticeships. My book, Cherotic Magic, came out of this. By this time, the community had shrunk to our household of five and the two boys. And even in our house, the original vision, principles, etc. had faded. Linda and I finally moved out…in with two of my apprentices, Mikee and Alexi. Debbie and the two others of the old household went into walking around town nude as The X-plicit Players.
I continued performing, directing, touring, etc. But we also started publishing an underground zine, The Cherotic [r]Evolutionary which became very popular…which ain’t saying it was a profit-making thing! The Work has always been a holy addiction that we pour money, etc. into to create community and to effect social change. We jumped into the web full force when it was born. FreespeechTV.org gave me free unlimited space to put up videos and audio content …that lasted for years! We put up the works of other artists as well as our own work. Our site, eroplay.com expanded and expanded. Over 7 years ago I started doing a radio show the Shaman’s Den, on a web station. But my muckraking their ambitions to make it big didn’t sit well. They suggested not politely that I start my own web station. So we did within a week. luver.com started with a live music show web casting from Japan, followed by my 2-hour show on Sunday nights. But LUVeR quickly evolved into a radical 24/7 station with all kinds of music, news, whatever shows. It became a black hole for our time and money, forcing us to stop publishing our zine. In about a year LUVeR started webcasting video as well. My show started to be a video show of me either talking to a very interesting person or of bands from all over the world playing live at our house. Then I started doing shows on Berkeley’s cable public access station. I use the shaman’s den shows as the base of these cable shows, but throw in videos of my live performances, films, concerts, erotic explorings, poetry readings, whatever. For a year the City Council tried unsuccessfully to get me off the air. But now I’m on the channel every night of the week, up to 6 hours a night!
Now we have two houses on the same street. I live in the “Purple House” with Linda [we have been together for over 35 years!], Mikee [who has been with us for over 15 years,] Erika [who has been working with me for 5 years and moved in over a year ago], and three cats. And in the “Blue House” Alexi lives with Corey and Cookie the Cat. The two houses are on the same block. We designed the Blue House, and Alexi and Corey basically built it. Alexi learned construction by working for a company that grew out the community of 30. We have set him up with a successful handyman business. Corey works at the natural food store around the corner. Through it we have started an international food testing project for GMOs. Erika has become the director of enrichment at a large retirement community, injecting our sexy subversion in there. Linda, Mikee and I work at home keeping everything going. Mikee does the tech and graphic stuff [which, btw, he is available for hire cheap!]. Linda does all the practical stuff that makes everything possible. And me?…a cult leader always with big ideas! We are a good team, a tribal body.
Hey, I just found out that we are putting on a LUVeR benefit at the illegal infamous historical hardcore dive burnt ramen with my jamming erotic band the cherotic all-stars in May. Not bad for a crip turning 60 in June! True, we have pretty much stopped flying to places touring. But there is no sign of slowing down!
“An update of the last 37 years of my life” written by Frank Moore, March 2, 2006. Read by Attaboy. Background music by Sander Roscoe Wolff. A segment from the web video series LET ME BE FRANK, Episode 6: https://frankadelic.com/episodes/episode-6.html Watch episodes of the series: http://frankadelic.com/
In the primitive world, reality shaping was the function of magic and of the shamans. The shamans used rituals and myths as dream boats to travel outside of the normal frame of reality into the web of all possibilities to communicate with the gods and to shape reality for their tribe. Sometimes through the myths and rituals, the shamans took the whole tribe into the web. But often the shamans went deeper into the web alone…alone because of the increasing dangers that exist in the web. This magical activity was seen by the tribe as vital to their survival. The shamanistic activity was not limited by the reality frame, by what was practical, although the practical reality was shaped by the shamanistic activity. As a result of these common mythical journeys, the frame was very flexible for all in the tribe.
But this began to change in the modern cultures, especially in the West. The shamanistic activity began to divide into philosophy, religion, art, science, and the occult. Each of these areas began to subdivide into sects, schools, disciplines, mediums, etc. They also divided into “pure” and “applied.” “Pure” activities are done for themselves to explore, shape, create reality, to travel outside the normal frame, to capture possibilities not enclosed within the frame, to bring these “new” possibilities into the frame to magically widen or shift the frame of reality.
The “applied” activities try to use, to control, harness these new possibilities into the service of the established frame. This is the washte brain activity. In the modern culture, the pure activity is seen as being of value only as it relates to the applied activity. This severely limits the magic change of reality shaping which is what the pure activity is meant to be. What also limits the shamanistic magic in the modern world is the fragmentation of the pure activity. There is a holistic myth developing in science, in philosophy, in art and theatre, in religion, in psychology, in the occult. But this myth cannot get into the frame because the modern myth travelers are talking, thinking, and seeing in different technical languages, depending on their fields. Because of this, they do not realize they are visualizing the same myth. So the new possibilities contained in this myth cannot get through except in fragments.
