Beezone Interview Series
with Stephan Blas
Session 4
Trials of Sexual Identity
(Part One)
“The key to the consideration of the Way that I Teach is the understanding of the aberrated Narcissistic disposition that superimposes a contraction onto every present moment”
The Addiction Affliction, 1982
The Dreaded Gom-Boo
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Beezone Note:
The following two excerpts are referenced in the interview below. Read and familarize yourself with them to better understand the context of the following interview.
Revised and expanded edition 1976
“Homosexuality, then, is essentially an aberrated activity generated because of traumas related to the fulfillment of natural and polarized sexual roles. It feeds on vital shock. There may be occasional rare cases in which an individual is not functionally polarized in the direction of the natural sexual role to which he or she seems bodily to be fitted. Such would be the case of one who is organically developed in such a way as to be inclined toward the fulfillment of the energy role of the apparently opposite sex.”
“Thus, there are rare cases of genuine homosexuality, in which the natural polarization of sexual play is engaged but by individuals of the same apparent sex, or of the opposite sex.“
“True Yogic Intimacy” Is Typically heterosexual, but It May Also (In Some Cases) Be Homosexual. Any Practitioner Of The Way Of The Heart who is “Considering” The Possibility Of homosexual ?True Yogic Intimacy? Must Have
Gone Through The Culturally Accountable Process Of Discovering Whether his or her emotional-sexual Patterning Is Truly homosexual?and That Resolution Must Be Formally Culturally Acknowledged As Such.”
Sutra 40, 2004.
Key Term in Interview
Aberration
First published 1590s, as: “a wandering, act of straying,” from Latin “a wandering,” “to wander out of the way, lose the way, go astray,” literally and figuratively, from ab “off, away from” + errare “to wander, stray, roam, rove”.
Common Interpretations
1. The act of departing from the right, normal, or usual course.
2. The act of deviating from the ordinary, usual, or normal type.
3. Deviation from truth or moral rectitude.
4. Mental irregularity or disorder, especially of a minor or temporary nature; lapse from a sound mental state.
Trials of Sexual Identity
(Part One)
Stephan serving his Beloved, Adi Da Samraj
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Stephan: I’m beyond grateful for the grace I’ve received in my life.
Ed: There are very few people who can even begin to approach what you’ve been gifted and had to go through. Not to mention the wisdom you’ve received in that trial.
Since we’ve been talking about the ‘Reality Considerations’ (also call ’emotional sexual considerations’) I want to ask you about your time with Adi Da and his community around these considerations. I sent you some published materials on homosexuality. One was from the 1976 edition of ‘No Remedy‘ and the other from the 2004 edition of ‘The Dawn Horse Testament’. Both pieces can be read in many different ways especially the one in ‘No Remedy’. The ‘No Remedy’ excerpt could easily be read in negative terms because of how the term aberrated is used in describing homosexuality.
Stephan: Well, thank you for sending me those two excerpts. I was not aware of them. As you indicated, while I read them I did have mixed feelings.
Funny also, while reading them I was also reminded of a time I was in front of Beloved. It was in 1983. Now remember when you are in front of Adi Da you are always in a ‘Reality Consideration’! We were in a small gathering and he called me out and addressed my ‘mood’ at the time. In that exchange and in my frustration I screamed out that I was “aberrated”, not really knowing that I was saying. So, when you sent me the ‘No Remedy’ excerpt I was amazed at the use of the term – but also bit concerned. He uses the word aberrated, quite often in that chapter and when I read it I started to get a little concerned because I was beginning to interpret it a negative way.
Ed: Yes, anyone reading it could interpret it in those terms, clearly.
Stephan: Fortunately for me, my involvement in the emotional sexual considerations with Beloved in the those early years clarified – as difficult as it was – so much about my identity as a gay man. There is so much to say about it. Let me start in early 1983.
“If you invest yourself in the substance and circumstance of your aberration, your aberration is going to bite you in the ass!
A Mastered Life, 1995
After leaving Da Love-Ananda Mahal in Hawaii in search for Hermitage in March of 1983 and settling on different islands in Fiji many things started to happen. There was the first devotee being acknowledged as being in the seventh stage of life along with the intensification of Reality Considerations. Through those considerations, some humorous and others not, I came back to The Mountain of Attention in California to address what had been revealed to me at that time.
When I got back I started talking to people about the time on the islands and what was going on. I remember….
Listen to Stephan – click triangle
Everybody in the higher ups and all, that they started saying, “Hmm, maybe homosexuality is just an aberration” You know, “It’s just a self contraction.” And “Maybe Stephan is now going to tell us the miracle of his transformation”. I actually was thinking that that was possibly the case. Also, Beloved told us sometimes he doesn’t show us things until there’s a need to know. In other words, until someone shows the availability for that, then he’ll speak on it.
“I’ve shown you what you need to know…sufficient for your practice”
Adi Da to devotee, 2004
So, here we get a 1975 interpretation, homosexuality, aberrated, the community as a whole more or less, because they’re just sheep. You know, I’m apologizing so I’m including myself in it. Just sheep following along. We’re not any smarter than anybody else, aside from the Guru of course!. We’re just a slice of humanity, just like everybody else. So, we’re thinking this and everybody’s thinking, “Okay, now it looks like our intuition was, right.” You know, it’s, “Heterosexuals are the way to go and the rest is all just self contraction.”
Now, I want to skip forward to 1992. Beloved is speaking to me personally. I’ve already gone through a difficult and terrible turmoil and ordeal of – in the fire, in the cold lake, in the fire, up at the glacier, back in the volcano – with trying to figure out and make sense of my sexual identity. It’s at this point he then just tells, as I’m embraced with my male lover, the whole other story of the sacredness of male to male love and the beauty of it and how his own lineage of the highest spiritual adepts had been representatives of the homosexual side of things. But he was saying it in the most beautiful and loving and heart felt ways.
Ed: What I’d like to do is to develop this period of time from even back to 1975, all the way through 1992, and on into present moment. This leela…
Stephan: Alright. Let me start in 1975, at this period of time, I am in a heterosexual relationship, so to speak.
Ed: Now, from my understanding of what you’ve told me is that you were just trying to adapt to the norms of the culture that you were trying to adapt to.
Stephan: Yes, that’s true on one hand, and on the other hand, I was also leaving a particular lifestyle that was extremely… I didn’t have good feelings about my participation…
Ed: Okay, but you were in the bath houses and you were doing that wild kind of…
Stephan: Yeah, promiscuity. No love, no relationships. So I said, okay, well, we’ll just leave all of that shit behind and we’ll go now to the divine spiritual side of things and whatever that expects of me, I will just… I didn’t say this mentally, but that’s what we did. We just went with whatever was given.
Ed: And so at some point in time, you start to then re-establish a homosexual relationship in the community. And at some point in time, right?
Stephan: Well, how that happened was Saturday Night Massacre. Now I want you to remember, the film, the Difficult Man barely showed a tip of the iceberg of what was going on. Also, the talk in the Garbage and the Goddess, ‘Saturday Night Massacre‘ was just one talk, one night of zillions of nights of all of this stuff. I think a lot of people, like everybody who has literally really listened to that talk and considered it and felt it, started questioning their own cult of pairs.
Some people were able to withstand it, truly consider it and felt they were in a good, true, happy, loving relationship that wasn’t just a cult of pairs. But many, many people – most people actually – thought about it and came to the conclusion that they were just doing a karmic cultic thing with their significant other. So, there was a lot of breakups and mine was one of them. My wife at the time didn’t want to, but you know, me with my homosexual tendencies, of course, I was like, “Oh yeah, free at last!.”
Now you need to understand. All of that spiritual energy circulating in and out of the body also stimulates and tickles the genitals. Sensuality and sexuality, and the freedom of that, all starts getting stimulated and exposed. You can’t separate the two. Energy is energy. What is happening for me is I’m getting all these arousals again. At first I was trying to be some semi- pretend heterosexual, and now there’s this more free moment of breaking the cultic bonds of the cult of pairs and all that. Then there’s this other energy that’s starting to rise again with its homosexual head. This was all happening in and around 1974.
Ed: At this point I want to move forward into another time, 1983 the ‘Wandering Period‘, at Namali Plantation in the town of Savusavu, a small town on Vanua Levu in Fiji. At that time we were moving from island to island. Lots of things are going on and all the while the Reality Considerations were intensifying. These are profound times in many ways and things are going on, retreats are going on and even people were going “into” Sahaj Samadhi entering the Seventh Stage of Life – temporarily! And these reality considerations were beginning to be intensified.
I want to go to a moment where you were standing behind Beloved, fanning him.
Stephan: Yeah, yeah. Right.
Ed: So, for the audience, if you could just to start there. Of course, this is the next moment for you, where the term that we started this conversation with, called, “aberrated“, starts to resurface. While on the island your’re serving Beloved, you’re fanning Him, and for some reason the question of your relationship to men is coming up in your mind again. You’re standing behind the God-man and this arises.
Stephan: Yep, and I knew I was in trouble. I thought, “Oh, shit. When it comes to me, if this conversation turns to me, I am in deep shit.” I knew it. Not that I had a reason to know it, it’s just that everything that I represented was about to be exposed. And I just knew that I’m jumping over the cliff. How do you explain a jumping over the cliff, off the cliff moment? You know?
Ed: You’re fanning Beloved. There’s a gathering going to happen that night, you’re fanning Beloved, these thoughts are arising, you’re two feet from the God-Man – He’s aware of what you’re thinking.
“Once my attention goes on it, I knew that I was in deep, deep, doo-doo.“
Stephan: Well, I’m starting to get antsy in my feeling, thinking. While I’m standing there behind Beloved’s back… also trying to… you know, I have to check on the ceiling periodically to make sure there was no geckos overhead. Because you know you don’t want them pooping on the Guru. So, I had to keep my eye on that periodically but basically I’m looking at Beloved’s skin and hair, which is not a bad job. But what I’m actually thinking about is this matter of my relationship with men. And, I’m putting attention on, the mind wanders to it. Once my attention goes on it, I knew that I was in deep, deep, doo-doo. I started kind of a little bit freaking out inside, almost like having a panic attack or something. I started having those feelings and I guess Beloved was picking up on it, like how the Divine Antenna usually does. He says, “Oh, looks like we got something to work with here. Time to go to the gathering, kiddies!”
I knew without anyone saying anything to me that I was about to get put on the spit. You know, where you put the pig the spit. I knew that that was going happen, I just knew, I felt it and there was nothing I could do about it.
I had to go over to the gathering spot, and I had to even do what I do, which is setting up Beloved’s space and having everything just so for him, whatever the accoutrements were of the time. At that time it was probably cigarettes and beer and those accessories. And making the pillows right in his chair and so forth. I did all that. When setting up I thought to myself, well now what am I going to do? I got that all set up. Normally, I would sit up close just in case I needed to serve, but most of the time the ladies would then be there and they could handle that kind of stuff. So then I was thinking, “Okay, where do I sit? Where do I sit?” And I thought, “Okay, I think I want to sit kind of in the back, off to the side.” Kind of like almost like hiding a little bit.
I do that and everyone takes their seat. Beloved, sits down, the ladies sit around Beloved, and we’re all sitting down and I don’t know how or where it happens, but it seems like it happens almost right from the beginning and kind of Beloved, I think… and again, I’m paraphrasing cause I don’t actually remember exact words anymore. I don’t have that kind of memory system.
“Has anyone noticed Stephan lately,
What’s going on with Stephan?”
If I remember correctly Beloved asks, “Has anyone noticed Stephan lately?” “What’s going on with Stephan?” Or maybe he called me Evam. It could have been Evam, actually. I don’t know what we were called in those days. I don’t think it was Ruby (Ruby Dharma). He asked and so people were kind of like trying to respond and everybody kind of says, “No”, they didn’t notice anything different about me. The moment started off pretty benign, not too much trouble in the beginning. But, He just keeps on asking about it and digging in, trying to dig in deeper. You know, “Isn’t he being…” “Hasn’t he…” Someone might’ve said, “No, he just seems quiet, sitting over there quiet.” “But yeah, what’s with that quietness?” “What’s with that reservedness of energy?” “Withholding of energy?” He starts using all these words, which kind of sounds like a criticism. “Oh fuck, here it goes. Here it starts.”
“Isn’t it kind of like being bitchy?”
Then he says, “Isn’t it kind of like being bitchy?” And I thought, “Well, what the fuck? Why is he using that term?” That is a term that in the gay community or the gay lifestyle has been used a lot. So all of a sudden he’s saying something in particular that I’m familiar with and that resonates with who I have animated myself to be in the past. And he’s bringing it up in that present time. And it is literally, it’s like, I know it just probably didn’t mean shit to anybody else, but to me it’s like sticking an ice pick in me, physically.
People now begin to join in and are saying… and then of course there’s the certain people, like my closest fucking friends, like William and Tom, who immediately pick up on what Beloved’s doing and where he’s going and they start feeding, and asserting information. “Oh, yeah, right, yeah.” “Stephan has been bitchy.” Something, or, “Yeah, that sounds like something he’s been up to.” I don’t know what they’re saying? But somehow or another, there is some consensus happening now which is making me even… not only is it shining the spotlight on me even more… but I’m also kind of curdling, like sour milk turned into cheese. It’s not good. It does not feel good at all.
I’m just starting to feel, I don’t know. I don’t even know how to explain it. But just exposed and kind of burning up at the same time. Right in front of everybody. And there’s nothing I could do or say, or make sense of. There’s nothing to defend. It’s just kind of, whatever that is.
Ed: I think you described it as, “The terror of being exposed.”
Stephan: Yeah. That sounds right, terror. Thank you. Terror. Pure unadulterated terror. And the term devastation works with that quite nicely too. So, that consideration and an experience that I was feeling kind of culminated in a moment when we all went for a bathroom break.
“I just feel so aberrated.”
We go for a break and I’m in the rest area alone and I’m looking in the mirror and I’m about to just start bawling my eyes out. I mean, it’s welling, the well of emotion is just boiling up and out. It’s about to take me over and I know I’m about to start wailing. I could feel it like it’s like a tsunami coming. In a fit of anxiety I just pick my hand up and slap myself over the face, and throw cold water on me. I say something like, “No, you have to go through this.“
I felt like it was a necessary thing. Normally I would just collapse and be overwhelmed such that I just couldn’t continue in this kind of consideration and exposure. So I did, I walked back into the room and I think Beloved immediately, he was already like connected with exactly what was occurring, he said something like, “So what is it?” “What is it Stephan?” And these words just came out of my mouth. I don’t even know why I hadn’t thought of it. I was just feeling it. And these words started coming out that were expressing what I was feeling. I just said, “I just feel so aberrated.”
It was not something that you want to tell people. It’s not something that you want to reveal as your best look or that will be accepted. It’s not what you want to confess. That’s what happened and the feeling was like, it meant that whatever I was holding on to as an idea of who I was and how okay that was, should be whatever. Any of that, that I tried to represent myself as, was based on a falsity. The truth of the matter is this was what I was actually really feeling about myself. And I didn’t want anybody else to know, even myself, even though I felt it. I was like a raw piece of steak sitting on the chef’s table.
I’m not sure how it evolved but the conversation started moving on to my relationship with sexuality. I had to examine my confession, my outburst. If that confession was true then I had to reconsider everything about my sexual identity all over again. . What my relationship to heterosexuality was? What was the reactivity I was animating? I had to find the truth of it. The truth of who I was in reality. And thus began this next era, this next phase in my life of actually going down that avenue, once again.
I’d say, my God, it was nine years… I actually went through that particular experiment and depthful consideration for nine years.
But, truth be told, I had to go through all of it, which ended up with the 1992 Reality Consideration which brought me to a culmination in the whole consideration. Without a doubt, it settled the whole matter. But the whole thing about exploring ones early childhood. I mean, there’s such a pattern there, for everyone. But even more remarkable is to see all of it as the play of Divinity, of a process of Awakening, What any individual has to go through may appear to be difficult and whatever, but it’s a necessary journey and that is Divinely driven and humanly resisted, without a doubt. This is so clear in the company of a Divine Mahasiddha.
So I’m grateful that I could be the guinea pig, but I would never put my hand up for that job again. I’ll tell you that right now. Devastation is not something that you choose.
Ed: No, but that clarity shows itself in your 30 year old relationship that you have.
Stephan: Well, yeah. Thank God. Thank God. I mean, yeah, so that’s why I can be so grateful and feel so fucking blessed right now. Truly, I’m just saying that… Here’s what I’m saying is “anybody who finds any of this useful, how lucky they are that they didn’t have to go through it the way I did”. Hopefully, they get to reap the benefits of Beloved’s leela in the world using this guinea pig for a little bait.
Ed: Well, that guinea pig you are referring to was actually a “coin” as I see it. That’s what a leela is suppose to be, a lesson not just for the individual but for the pattern that it represents in others, also. As it is said, “no one gets out alive.”
Stephan: Right, exactly.
Ed: The lessons are a universal process. This is a universal thing and you were the instrument of that lesson of which we will talk more of in further sessions.
