Enlightening Nonsense

“When it comes to spiritual teachers, there are those who are safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are. And may I suggest?: choose your teachers carefully. If you want encouragement, soft smiles, ego stroking, gentle caresses of your self-contracting ways, pats on the back and sweet words of solace, find yourself a Nice Guy or Good Girl, and hold their hand on the sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort. But if you want Enlightenment, if you want to wake up, if you want to get fried in the fire of passionate Infinity, then, I promise you: find yourself a Rude Boy or Nasty Girl, the ones who make you uncomfortable in their presence, who scare you witless, who will turn on you in a second and hold you up for ridicule, who will make you wish you were never born, who will offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror, not saccharin solace but scorching angst, for then, just then, you might very will be on the path to your own Original Face.”

—Ken Wilbur from Forward to living enlightenment by Andrew Cohen (p. xiii)

Herbert went to some “Wizards Workshop,” which I think involves a bunch of men dancing naked in the woods, and had me train his clients while he was away. While he pays me about half of what I extort out of my own clients, it was a decent amount of work and I made about $600 from the week. With the addition of about $200 he already owed me, that was good bank. That is, if I ever got paid it.

Herbert never pays me on the day of work. It is always, “I’ll have the money for you next Wednesday” or “…in two weeks.” I never really pushed him on this because I was pretty much fine as long as the money eventually came in. And it always did. That was until the Week of Wizardry where he got his nightly circle-jerk and I got jerked around.

I think when money gets past what you would normally carry in your wallet, it becomes Monopoly money of sorts—seems like a lot when you discuss the amount but worth the same as the orange paper $500 bills in this Hasbro game. Herbert would give me a few bucks this week, then in two weeks, but with him having me train some of his clients here and there, the pot seemed like a credit card debt where you end up just paying the interest and the main wad remains as gooey as a freshly shot load of semen. Three months have passed and he still owes me around $600—which is essentially saying he didn’t pay off anything for the week away.

I try my best not to bust balls but it gets to the point where, “Sorry, I had to pay rent” doesn’t cut the mustard, which raises the question why anyone is “cutting mustard” in the first place. It’s a spreadable. Seriously, if your mustard is that solid, it’s probably gone way bad. But my money going towards Herbert’s bills doesn’t make me or my landlord any happier. My anger came to a head when he left me $100 at our mutual personal training gym and it disappeared. Let me back up.

Herbert used to leave money for me with one of the receptionists at the gym out of which we both freelance. This was arranged in part because it was a mutual ground that each of us frequented and also because I didn’t want to have to meet him every week and listen to some New Age crisis he was going through and how he had come to grips with it all and “I really learned a lot.” Nigga, please!

And then it happened. He left me $60 at the gym and when I went into the office to pick up my dough, no one knew where it was. Herbert and I both showed up another time and the owner said he’d take our word for it and gave us the money but that he didn’t want to be the middleman anymore. Herbert and I agreed that we would have to make other arrangements.

So it came as a surprise to me when at a time in the future, there was a voicemail from Herbert left on my cell phone that said that he had left the money at the gym with one of the receptionists. When I went in for the green, guess what—no one could find it. I was a bit frustrated but channeled it in a productive way by kicking an old lady in the colostomy bag. I emailed Herbert about this and told him, “That sucks but look at it as an expensive lesson for you.” He wrote me back and basically said, “I left the money there. It’s your problem now. Talk to the receptionist.”

This made me just a tad furious. I told him it was as if I said, “I’m leaving you $100 in the middle of the sidewalk on 42^nd Street and Broadway” and when you get there an hour later you call me and tell me it’s not there and I say, “Sucks to be you. I left the money—my hands are clean”—total bullshit, fuck you very much.

It wasn’t until later that he suggested that maybe we both should take the hit, as it was a mutual place where we agreed to do the drop-offs. I was like, “No dice,” to which he got confused why I would bring up a has-been comedian. “We agreed NOT to leave the money there. You made a unilateral decision to do so. The money disappeared. Your problem. Fix it.” Unilateral is a cool word. Bilateral is not bad. Collateral is totally gay.

The combination of my viperous words and his being a flake led us to a head, and not the good kind where one person is sucking the other person’s dick. He said that he’d do his best to pay me $100 a week and then he was done with me, that he couldn’t work with me anymore.

I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry made a car reservation at an airport and when he got there they didn’t have a car for him. Jerry said, “But I made a reservation.” The girl behind the counter said, “Yes, we have the reservation but we don’t have a car for you.” Jerry went off on how she seemed to have missed the point of a reservation. “Anyone can take a reservation. That’s easy. It’s keeping the reservation that’s the important part.”

[“Reservations” scene from Seinfeld at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S67oEll2Azs]

I wanted to say to Herbert, “I don’t think you fully understand the issue at hand. You see, you can ask me to train your clients and I will show up and train them—probably better than you do it yourself. It’s not the working that’s the problem—it’s the paying. So it is not our ‘working’ relationship that’s at issue here—it’s our ‘paying’ relationship that is the problem.”

But instead I met with him and voiced to him my frustration in a less “you’re a douche and dummy” way. I told him that I thought he was taking advantage of me as a friend constantly being like, “Sorry, I had to pay my Con Ed bill” and that this was not really fair or acceptable to me. I mentioned how when he took $65 that a client of his gave him to give to me because, “I had to pay my bills,” that he was essentially borrowing money that was not his—money from me without my permission. This is like his mother giving him money to buy her groceries and him spending it on crack.

One item he had taken offense by in one of my emails was me saying that I fully accepted human frailty but that I needed my fuckin’ money. He took “human frailty” to mean weakness and started off essentially saying, “Who the fuck are you to call me weak?” I explained to him that I first heard this phrase when I was in Hawaii from a man who was very near and dear to my heart, Kumu John Keola Lake, and that it was not personal to him but the human condition—that we all have insecurities that affect our dealings in life. This drained his anger like a happy ending at a Japanese massage parlor.

He told me that in my writing he took offense but that in person he could feel my energy. I told him that was nice and asked if he could please take his hand off of my crotch. He acknowledged my frustration and appreciated my straight shooting—as opposed to the morning urination after a night of sex where it is always a crapshoot where the stream will flow. And we came to an understanding. Or so I thought.

He said that he did want to keep working with me and that he would do his best to pay me $100 a week but that he couldn’t give me any more business until he paid off Tom Cruise’s Scientology lean on him for using the name of L. Ron Hubbard in vain. I said I never understood why he was sending me his clients if he couldn’t afford toilet paper on his own roll and that a dirty ass is the devil’s handy work, or something biblical like that.

I thought we were clear on the fact that he was a douche and that the $100 that went AWOL wasn’t being deducted from the pot of Monopoly money he owed me and that while I didn’t want him starving on the street, I considered having lights in his apartment a luxury he could do without. He agreed to do his best to give me $100 a week but I found out later that he still thought he was clear on his leave-the-money-where-we-had-agreed-not-to-anymore fuck-up after the next pile of shit hit the fan and I was tired of having stinky air being blown on me.

He told me he could have $100 for me on Saturday. I told him that I was going to be away that weekend and to hold onto it for me. The next week, when the total should have now been $200, he told me he had $50 for me. I was like, “WHAT THE FU—?” His response: “Bills.”

The other thing is it is totally annoying to have to spend my time and energy not only arranging, but also picking up the money from him. Usually the best-case scenario is I am working across town and will have to walk 15-minutes to him and then an extra 10-minutes to my subway station. That’s almost a half-hour of my time—each time. If we add this time into the equation, I’m basically earning illegal alien scrubbing the toilet at McDonald’s rates.

The next week, I told him that I had a client on Saturday at noon and asked if we could meet at the midtown gym where I would be. He told me that he had clients from 12-2 and then 3-4 on the upper West side and I could meet him there if I wanted. We got into a text-message battle of “You come here!” “No, you come here!” I asked him to meet me earlier, at 11:30 or so at the midtown gym. He said he was tired and so no. That pissed me the fuck off.

We had more back and forths and he finally wrote, “I have your money. Come and get it.” I pointed out to him that in the past he had specifically told me that if I was desperate for the money he would come up to me in my boonfuck area just to drop it off—and perhaps pick up a bag of weed from my block’s dealers in the process—and wrote, “Was this more empty New Age words from you?” I then went for the jugular: “If it were me, I would be embarrassed by this whole situation and I would inconvenience myself over the other to try and do my best to make things right.” He wrote me that he was not embarrassed, that he was doing the best he could. I came back with, “If that’s your best, perhaps you are setting the bar a little low.” I was giving him a lashing that would make a Roman guard whipping Jesus take notice; it was almost worth the $15 in text-messaging charges I had accrued.

[See “THE TEXT-MESSAGING DOUCHEBAG” at http://rebelyogi.com/the-text-messaging-douchebag.html]

I was already pissed that it had been three months and I was owed all this money and I was having trouble paying my own friggin’ bills! But to say that you’re “tired” and so I should subway uptown, pick up a small part of my long overdue money, then subway downtown again so that I can catch a different uptown train to take me home is bullshit. This was too much for me from a travel perspective as well as a “You’re a douchebag” one and I wasn’t going to do it. I told him to put my money in a fuckin’ envelope and not to fuckin’ touch it for a fuckin’ change.

His 1:00 ended up canceling and he said he would come down to me. So I waited about a half-hour, as wasting my time to get money due me was a common pastime of mine at this point. I was thinking of meditating but my mind told me, “Do what you want, bitch, but I’m not going to stop my chattering!” So I just sat outside on the sidewalk and panhandled for money. Funny enough, I made more in the thirty minutes I was waiting for Herbert than he had given me in three months.

Now as mean as I am, I don’t really want anyone to suffer because of my obnoxious ass—suffer in the sense of feeling upset, not regarding being “inconvenienced” in order to pay me the money you fuckin’ owe me, bitch! So I had brought with me a book as a gift for him, one that I knew was up his alley. It was one of these How To Manifest A Million Dollars books that a girl who bought a book from me on Amazon.com had sent me and I had no intention to read. I told her, “If you’re a millionaire as a result of reading that book, I’ll read it. Otherwise what’s the point?” She was just another broke-ass New Age failed manifester and so I passed it on to Herbert who gobbles up all that “Millionaire Mind” bullshit like a pig at the trough or Oprah during a feeding binge. But that is redundant.

I also thought that when he got there we could share a few breaths together, as opposed to the wad of phlegm I had originally thought of “sharing” with him. In Hawaiian culture there is a thing called “Sharing a HA breath” where you greet another by putting your forehead and nose together and both take an inhale and exhale together. I learned this, too, from Kumu Lake on our first meeting after I outstretched my arm to shake hands and he grabbed me and pulled me into him and I was convinced I was about to become his bitch.

Now I wasn’t about to share a HA breath with Herbert, as he would have probably stuck a finger in my ass, which in any normal circumstance I usually like but after the all-you-can-eat Mexican Buffet the night before, my asshole was a bit sore from its morning exit. In Tantra synching your breath is also a way to connect with your partner, or reconnect after an argument, and I did want to take a few breaths together.

As I saw him approaching me, I stood up from sitting on the sidewalk like a vagabond and met him. He was visibly upset. He started to pull the money out of his pocket. I said, “Put the money away for a second and let’s share a breath or two.” He gave me a forced hug and handed me the money, saying that he didn’t have time now, that he didn’t want to be late for his next session. He left in a rush and soon his walking away turned into a fast jog away.

He sent me a text message about ten minutes later that repeated that he didn’t want to be late for his next client but that we should do lunch next week. Since it was 1:40 and his next session wasn’t until 3:00, I knew this was nonsense. For all his “facing his inner Self” bullshit, he was sharing with me nothing but an insecure mask.

He’s given me a lot of talk about him “diving into the Unknown” and “facing the challenges” and “We are all the same” and “you and I are equals” and his Men’s Group meetings and the Week of Wizardry—but in the face of the truly Unknown and Challenging, all his training and New Age platitudes went out the window and he resorted to the animal instinct of Fight or Flight. And because he has been following the teachings of the pussies who talk of non-violence and “turning the other cheek,” and never reacting to a situation Authentically—unless it means smiling and prancing around like Richard Simmons doing gay naked yoga at that “yoga” studio in Chelsea—he took flight.

Herbert told me that he grew up without siblings and never had that comradery that a brother or sister could provide. I had asked him, “Didn’t you have any friends growing up?” and he told me that he didn’t really have any. Being ever sensitive, I covered my mouth when I said, “Uh, loser?” He also had serious challenges with his parents, not in the manner that I did with mine getting mad at me for painting the walls with my feces and jerking-off in the milk, but more that their love was absent and the only thing they shared with him was abuse. That totally sucks.

[Check out the awesome old classic Lonesome Loser by Little River Band at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5KWI71s3DY]

It doesn’t take a Freud to figure out that this is a huge part of him seeking what the New Agers call “community” in a ton of groups with which he is involved. He has a Men’s Group he organizes and that he meets with once a week for two hours. He invited me to come to this sausage fest but I was like, “Look, I wouldn’t mind seeing you in your flow but to spend two hours with a bunch of dudes is just a touch gay for my taste.” He also organizes some exercise group that we had originally paired in, where he taught a boot camp class followed by me teaching a yoga class. When he told me excitedly, “We’ll do this every week!” I pulled out my extra large pin and popped his balloon immediately, telling him that, “I’m happy to do it once every couple of weeks or so but I’m not into this community shit like you. I just want their money.” [See “HERBIE’S HANDCOCK” at http://rebelyogi.com/herbie-handcock]

It was also clear—and voiced by Herbert himself—that he was intimidated by me, thinking himself not as worthy as yours truly. He told me that he is over this but it is clear to me that he is not and that every time his integrity goes to shit with one of his broken promises or flaky actions, he shrinks around me like Fred Flintstone when Wilma is yelling at him.

Herbert is a good guy. I like good guys as long as they’re either paying me on time or sucking my cock. Otherwise I have no use for them. And I am a big fan of the old saying: “To err is human, to err the same way more than once is just plain stupidity.” Herbert will constantly tell me how he’s “learned” this and that from our interaction and yet he keeps committing the same fuck-ups and, frankly, I’m a little tired of it.

“To commit mistakes is not wrong—commit as many mistakes as possible, because that is the way you will be learning more. But don’t commit the same mistake again and again, because that makes you stupid.”

—Osho, Your Answers Questioned (p. 17)

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In the book living enlightenment by Andrew Cohen, Ken Wilber wrote the Forward [SEE QUOTE AT THE TOP OF THIS PIECE] and while reading it, I couldn’t take the huge smile off of my face the whole time. Because it was so on. And so how I teach. In essence he says there are too types of spiritual teachers: there are the Nice Guy or Good Girl who will stroke your cock and tell you how big it is, and there’s the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls who will pull out their own cocks and slap you in the face with it. (For the record, I’ve only had two girls slap me in the face with their cocks and both came from personal adds I responded to from chickswithdicks.com so, technically, I should have known what I was getting into.)

While I think most spiritual teachers out there are Pussies, I’ve come to realize that some people are so broken and trapped in the stumbling-like-a-baby stage of growth that they actually need the handholding of a Pussy. You take one of these diaper-wearers and put them with a Dick-Slapper like me and all you get is a whining little crybaby curled in a ball and rocking in the corner with bruises on his or her face from my Louisville slugger. And that doesn’t serve them.

These babies will never awaken from hand-holding and cock-stroking and, what’s worse—as I’ve seen over and over again in the yoga poser circles—they will more than likely “think” that they have reached some place of “knowing” and often <gag> start to “teach” others from this place of egoic deception.

“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.”

—Osho, Your Answers Questioned (p. 1)

That is, until a Cock-Slapper like myself challenges their spiritual house of cards and then you see how quickly their compassion drains from their system, like the blood from an erection after it blows its load in a girl’s face and you realize she looks better that way than she did spunk-free. When they are pushed in the least and don’t have their Pussy teacher there to keep them on balance and wipe the snot from their noses, or the spittle on their lips for those who have devoted decades to pussy teachers, like Bark Mecker [SEE “OLD PHOGI” at http://rebelyogi.com/old-phogi], they react as they did before they ever met their Pussy—with Fight or Flight. For the most part, I wish they would choose flight because Pussies don’t teach anyone how to fight and so they just flail their arms wildly and end up slapping themselves silly. It’s embarrassing really.

“Whenever there are alternatives, beware: Don’t choose the convenient, the comfortable, the respectable, the socially acceptable, the honorable. Choose something that rings a bell in your heart. Choose something that you would like to do in spite of any consequences.”

—Osho, Your Answers Questioned (p. 16)

I’ve been criticized by some when they offer me unasked for advice about how I need to “market” myself and my teaching, telling me that I should open myself up to a wider venue of student by stopping all my talk about “nuns dry vaginas” and “pedophile priests” in my yoga classes—that is, if I want more people to show up. While it might be nice to have more than one or two of society’s defects attending my classes, I say, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke!” I don’t want these babies coming to my class with their stinky diapers crying every time I don’t say, “Ooky-booky, tiddly-two, you love me and I love you!” I’m a graduate level teacher, not a pre-school Pussy. And for those few—and they are few—who “get” me and what I am sharing, they leave not just with a good workout or a weekend escape from their miserable lives, but transformed, not always completely, but a process is started in them that is irreversible.

Some of them wish they had never come, that they had more time with the handholding Pussies before being shown what useless crap they have been studying. But now they have had the sand washed from their eyes and realize, like a baby after being birthed and having the vag juice cleaned from his eyes, that there is no going back to the pussy.

“Life is basically insecure. That’s its intrinsic quality; it cannot be changed. Death is secure, absolutely secure. The moment you choose security, unknowingly you have chosen death. The moment you have chosen life, unawares you have chosen insecurity.”

—Osho, Your Answers Questioned (p. 26)

Life is here now. And heaven and hell are here now as well. They are not some childish story to be enacted after you die. They don’t require four decades studying with masters who you don’t get (I’ve seen this in the yoga poser world as well. In Dick-Slapper talk it is called, “A waste of time.”)

I am all for nurturing. But do realize that you only need this kind of co-dependent “love” when you are not overflowing with love from your Self. When you are a bubbling well of love, then your nurturing is real love and then receiving this kind of nurture is no longer a Band-Aid used to cover up your wounds. Because this is completely unnecessary. You have already bathed in the Fountain of Youth and washed away all the wrinkles and scars given to you by those who taught “fear” and “hard work” and “you’re not good enough as you are now for enlightenment” crap—which includes your parents, teachers, priests, politicians…and the Pussy teachers.

“Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one would like to share. Happiness always wants to share. It is too much, it cannot be contained, like the flower cannot contain its fragrance—it has to be released.”

—Osho, Your Answers Questioned (p. 54)