Back
in the long-gone days when I wrote such things, I did a book called HOW TO MAKE
LOVE WHILE CONSCIOUS, about sex & sobriety. I remember a sunny al fresco
lunch at a restaurant situated along some sort of - canal maybe? (is there a
canal in San Francisco?) - some sort of body of water like that - with my sunny
smart Harper San Francisco editor and PR woman and sales rep, and the PR lady
said, um, the title made her free-associate to necrophilia, did anyone else
think that? - and we all laughed a touch nervously - and my editor backed
me up about its shake-you-up audacity, and anyway -- although I don't think I
quite knew it then - I meant "conscious" not only as a near-synonym
of sober, but as the closest as any one word I knew came to, well,
"God." By which I mean what I take (from Alan Watts) to be the
largely Hindu concept of "God" - the Ātman, the Spirit which is
Everything, but/and which Hindus say can only manifest in incarnations which pretend
they're not, or have forgotten that they are, "God". The whole nature
of the Hindu universe is hide-and-seek: God pretending he/she/it isn't - until
he/she/it wakes up & remembers. This creates all the infinite diversity we
know. The one artery we've got to 'remembering' is -
Consciousness.
Most
people (I see, hear today) still think of consciousness in purely biological
terms: those capacities which enable speech and thought and memory and
planning and 'free will' and figuring out what our senses are telling
us, etc. But to me the word so far outstrips that. Especially as I trundle on
toward Ancientness. Gets deeper and stranger and to some degree 'sharper'
every moment I use it. When I claimed yesterday or the day before not to
believe in belief - that all I saw was certainty - this describes the
'certainty' I meant and mean. That Consciousness is everything. Consciousness
CREATES everything. I could attempt to explain this more, but I'd get it
all wrong. It defeats any understanding besides (and even this is imperfect)
the 'understanding' derived through experience of it. It's not a 'concept'
- it's - well - 'it'.' Felt. Experienced. Known by everything in you down
to your mitochondria. And beyond.
So
anyway, HOW TO MAKE LOVE WHILE CONSCIOUS has had a long life not as a book
(it's out of print, although used copies seem to be widely available) but as a
title. To my delight, it regularly crops up on "The Ten Weirdest"
(Strangest, Most Improbably, Funniest, etc "Book Titles Ever
Published." As well it should. I mean it is funny.
But
I realize now that what I really wanted to title it was HOW TO MAKE CONSCIOUS
WHILE GOD.
You
can do that, you know. (I just did it a couple hours ago.) (But -- never mind.)
================
abebooks
- weird book room - 19 down, 4th one in.
I
make #9 in this list
Guy, this book was helpful for me to read in preparing my new book, SEX IN RECOVERY, due out in October. Thank you for your compassionate reporting and your meditation above about the nature of consciousness, god, love, etc.. /Jen (aka Guinevere, of Guinevere Gets Sober)
ReplyDeleteThank you Guinevere! Good luck with your book!
Delete