Beezone Interview Series
with Stephan Blas
Session 5
A Wild Flower in Love
A Wild Flower in Love
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Stephan: In 1987, I’m in a relationship with Isabelle. I’m not sure if we’re actually living together anymore. We may be more living like celibate roommates because that also occurred for long periods of time where all of us would just live as celibate renunciates. So then in that sense, you don’t have a significant other. I mean you do, but you don’t. You’re not animating it now. You’re animating a different style. Except for those who would like to sneak around and see their special friend now and then. But for the most part, we really adhered to whatever disciplines were happening, to the best we could but emotionally I was confused.
Stephan sharing some backgound to what this session covers
This was during the Indoor Yajna period (1987-8) where Beloved is recapitulating his entire teaching. He is meeting with us every evening for hours and hours and hours. And he’s having all of these discussions, many of them are about high dharma and the traditional ancient texts of different religions. Often the Hindus, the Buddhists, just all of it, you name it, they’re considering. He’s re-making, re-visiting, re-instructing us in his own dharma. It was a sublime and difficult time. So, literally every subject matter was covered.
During that time there was a lot about Vivekananda and Vivekananda’s history. I was actually into reading that and for some reason or another, I could not put down the Vivekananda stories. I literally was so attached and identified with these stories that I would literally be crying. I’d be reading these stories, I’d be crying as if it was something I was familiar with or intimate with or something.
During that period with all that going on he keeps on bringing up matters that have to do with my sexual identity.
One day during a darhsan occasion, while I’m helping him put on his slippers….
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“I think maybe the reason why you can’t speak is because you don’t actually know who you are”
We’re going outside the door to take a pee break. And he says to me, “I think maybe the reason why you can’t speak is because you don’t actually know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, then you don’t have a place in which to have a voice.” So, that was a kind and gentle way of at least giving me some sense of a reason for why it was being so contracted at the throat. And whole bodily too.
Ed: Tie that in now. You’re having sessions, you’re having high Dharma talks …
Stephan: I’m going to connect it for you right now. When I start having all of these spiritual phenomena occurring in my, not just in meditation, but in life altogether, everything is now seen through different eyes. Everything is more psychic. My brain is using different things that it’s never used before or whatever.
So, then what happens is I started noticing the feelings again, the emotional sexual feelings. Because I often turn into, when I sit, go to meditation, I turn into a woman and I turn into a very sexual, sensual feeling woman. Literally, it’s just happening. But there’s nothing vulgar about it. There’s nothing … It’s ecstatic. I mean, I’m literally burning with passion and sensual feelings. Like I just want to go and crawl on Beloved’s chair. I literally just get into becoming this … Because he did that. He had transformed me in the dance and made me into a dakini. And so that would happen sometimes in meditation. And when I’m sitting for meditation, I would turn into the dakini again, madly in love with him.
So, now what’s happening is the whole realm of sexuality is being felt again, but now in a spiritual way. And I’ve never experienced this before, and I’ve never studied it. So I’m literally just observing it. I’m observing it all unfolding right in me, inside my body, outside my body, and how I’m demonstrating it. But anyway, so then I remember I’m in a video store or a bookstore or something, and there’s a video and it’s called My Beautiful Laundrette. And it says something about this homosexual relationship between these two guys.
So, we rent the video and start and take it back to the apartment and start watching it. And I kind of noticed that what I was noticing, I mean, not only was I being turned on by seeing two good looking guys kind of digging on each other and whatnot, also was Daniel Day-Lewis, so the acting was incredible. I notice that I was feeling these old feelings of desire and sexual interest and whatnot. And that, it was okay. In other words, it was just natural. It was just kind of normal. And that there wasn’t anything negative tied to it. The fact that I’m even watching this video, that this video even appeared to me, I started just noticing that the universe and the divine was giving me things now to just observe about this whole area that I always had such a problem within the past.
So, not only am I having all these spiritual experiences in relationship to sexuality and emotional sexual stuff, but I’m also starting to notice it’s popping into my regular everyday life. So, I go to the bookstore, the Adidam Bookstore, and I’m just looking at this table of books.
The first thing I pick up, there’s a book on Edgar Cayce.
It’s, and I kind of open it up. And then it shows me something that he said about homosexuality and how very often with someone like myself, describing someone similar to myself, he said, usually that’s a sign that that person was the opposite sex in the last lifetime. And then they’re making the transition to a new sex in the next lifetime, but it’s not, it doesn’t come out fully, like it’s kind of intertwined together or stuck together. So that was his way of expressing it. It wasn’t negative. It was just one of the things that happen when you’re going from lifetime to lifetime. And I thought that was very cool.
Again, I was psychically kind of blown away how these things are just appearing to me, that is just explaining things in a whole different manner that I had never known or investigated or even considered. So it’s making everything okay. And not only just okay, but even okay in the spiritual sense. In other words, it’s not, doesn’t conflict with spiritual practice or spiritual life in the truest sense. I’m not talking about just going to church on Sunday, but I’m talking about the whole process. And so this was a new thing that was happening and therefore it began the process of seeing that I was getting the answers that I needed to heal and to move on in my emotional sexual character that had always been so difficult for me. And it eventually turned out where Isabelle and I could love and bless each other and release each other to other prospective intimates.
The Emotional Sexual Consideration moves to 1992
Then in 1992, Beloved basically gave me or gave us each other, Paul and I.
Adi Da, Stephan and Paul
Ed: So, give me some pretext to this.
Stephan: Okay, Well, things had been kind of … what’s the word? Stagnant. Things were a little stagnant on the Island, Naitauba and we were all in a period of kind of more assuming the celibate renunciate lifestyle. So we were doing that. That was the discipline of the day. We were living that to whatever ease or difficulty for any individual.
“It was almost like something was stuck and not moving…
…and reality considerations were suggested.“
But I remember Beloved was kind of a little antsy, a little, it seemed like maybe a little annoyed. Now these are just my words, of course. And in relationship with the community of devotees that were living there around him, it was almost like something was stuck and not moving, or he was calling for something that wasn’t being rightly addressed or given or … I’m not sure exactly, but I know there was this tension and there was communications going back and forth about trying to see if we could figure a way to respond to him correctly. And it was a difficult period. I mean, not heavy, but just a little difficulty.
I don’t know where it came from, who had suggested it first, but as would happen over the many, many, many years with Beloved, somehow or another, some kind of reality consideration was suggested, which meant that it would be just a small, specific group of intimates that were ready to have that, or wanted to have that, or agreed to have that. It would become, like those reality considerations often did, where the conventional rules and disciplines and whatnot were all released and the consideration would go wherever the consideration would go and we would all just participate with it. Sometimes that meant very vulnerable areas and areas of sexuality and emotions and attachments and cultism, just all of that would be, not just being discussed, but also considered in the fullest manner. No taboos once again. And also releasing any hold of your own idea of what it’s supposed to look like.
“No Taboos…nobody has any ground to stand on…it’s a fire”
and
“We are the fuel for the FIRE!”
That’s a very, very intense period and very testing and every kind of … Nobody really has a ground to stand on. So you can’t know the answer, so to speak. It’s not that kind of, it’s not academic. It’s actually a whole bodily kind of … There’s a ceremony going on for sure in which it’s a fire and all of us are the fuel for that fire. That puja, the way we are the elements for that fire puja.
That was the scenario that we got involved in 1992. That was the spring, early summer of 1992. We had all been, like I said, celibate renunciate. So we already went through that side of things, the opposite side, of no relationships, just being single devotees. So we got involved in all of those considerations and there were many, they were every day. I mean, every day was like a lifetime, literally. Every night was like a lifetime, where the consideration might go and to what degree you participated or failed, or whatever, whatever came up for you.
The Beginning of the End
I remember for me, one specific thing that happened, this was before I got together with Paul. We were all gathered in Owl Sandwiches, which is a small bure. The group of us who were involved in this reality consideration with Beloved, we’re in the room there with him in this very small room. Sometimes sitting with the person or persons that we may have been involved with. But that night, again, I have no fucking memory of the actual content. That’s where I’m a failure in this leela, but I received it. I received a communication whole bodily. So I got it. I don’t even know if I’m explaining this right. But he put out some incredible words in communication, describing the truth of everything, the truth of who he is, the truth of who we are, the truth of our relationship. I can’t even remember what the content was, but whatever it was just opened me, split me open. And left me as such that I wasn’t the same person afterwards.
I remember going later in the evening, I went off to another bure and I was with Jonathan because him and I were kind of getting it, possibility of a relationship even whatever. And so he was with me and the bure we were in was called Do Me Some Good, that’s the name of the bure. And that’s where I used to live. That was one of my residences There was maybe another person or two there too, who was, we just happened to be in the same area and we’re all kind of talking. So we had just left Owl Sandwiches which is where Beloved was. And he went back to his house, and I don’t know who went with him at the time. But he was with some, few people at his house and we were up at Do Me Some Good.
“It was also like layers of protection from that, feeling that wound, the protection of trying to act a certain way, or be a certain way”
“It was also like layers of protection from feeling that wound, the protection of trying to act a certain way, or be a certain way, to not feel that, the fear that one also carries with them either consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously.”
All of that was just, I could just feel that, I could feel Beloved’s siddhi and grace just taking these layers off.
“The core or root of it was actually the heart itself, was love itself”
Then there was just this, leaving me with this wound that was almost unbearable, but at the same time, as he has described it, I was able to also feel that right on the other side of it, in fact, the core or root of it was actually the heart itself, was love itself.
You don’t get there without allowing that wound.
Most of us, I can only speak for myself, but I don’t know too many other people who allow that, who literally really, truly allow that. I certainly was not one of them, but in this moment it was given, his gift and it was doing its thing to this body mind. So, I was expressing that to the people who were there.
That went on for a long time. I mean, that was like hitting the depths of vulnerability. That’s very rare and unusual.
“I’m a wild flower in love!”
We went to sleep and we got a phone call the next morning and Beloved was asking for reports from everybody. In other words, what happened to them that evening? Did anything happen? Did they have anything to say, anything to report? The only thing I could say, which was like, because I’m not really putting it into context about, that the talk that Beloved gave, that communication that literally tore my heart out or did something. So, I didn’t describe any of that to him. All I said was “I’m a wildflower in love.” That’s all I could say. Because that’s what I felt like. I had been transformed.
That’s all I said and Beloved took it and he received what I said. And he said, “Yes, it is all about love, isn’t it? And the confession of love, that may be the sign of true hearing.”
That’s what he said to my little, quirky, silly, “I’m a wild … Beloved! I’m a wildflower in love!” That was another sign of how often Beloved and I, the way we had our type of conversation, very different than him and Julie, very different than him and Marsha. But with ours, it was almost nonverbal, other than a quick little statement like that, because I could never understand what he said verbally, but it would penetrate me in a different way.
Being able to just confess that happy ecstasy to Beloved in these little silly words, he took it and turned it into dharma and turned it into this a very significant thing. It just kind of blows my mind, just again, now I’m telling you this and reliving this and re-imagining this and revisioning this. Again, the miraculousness of his work it’s basically just a Guru-Devotee relationship and the gifts that come about through that process period.
“Guru-Devotee relationship…was everything.”
I just told you something about having difficulties with my emotional sexual and trying to figure that all out and then having this occasion and this one particular night where something of just his speech and his communication about the true depthfulness of the Guru-Devotee relationship and how that was everything. Everything else was just a play on it, an extension of it or a thread of it, but it was just really the core, the pure, simple aspect of that was everything, in which what Ronnie had told me years earlier, that that was it. You’re just in his Presence and whatever needs to occur occurs. I got it! I get glimpses of it. And that was one of them, for sure.
So, many times like that, of the most profound gifts, most profound spiritual gifts are given, but they’re given in these very human, very guttural, but yet magical burning in the fire and then turned into bright, light, happy, giddy, go-go dancing…dancing as a go-go boy or dancing as a diva, a deity. It’s kind of similar in some sense.
It’s all theater. And sometimes it’s high spiritual theater, but it’s all theater and it’s really just the enjoyment of the Divine and the Play. And like you said, it’s what you reap, I’m so grateful, way so beyond grateful that I got to be a participant in the way that I did, and so close up and personal.
More on the Indoor Yajna
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