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Sex and Spirituality
Sex and Spirituality
A story written in the early
80's
Date: 6/26/2006 12:30:09 PM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 2041 times June 26, 06
10:23 AM
Letters from the Latter Day Harpo:
http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=782&i=33
I asked Mary Rose to type this up.
Harpo lived through many decades and he was
not the same in each.
I would say that his heyday for me was during
the ten years or so in Mission Beach
where he was definitely on a Mission.
He helped ground what we call today the New Age.
He helped a lot of people; then his Mission
turned more and more to Jesus.
When he lost the restaurant it was for many reasons.
He was already turning to Jesus is an extreme way
before he left the restaurant.
He had some deep wounds,
some deep avoidances.
As Mary says, Harpo was a fanatic to his beliefs
in many ways This article was sent to me 50 days after
his passing, a time of Resurrection in his
belief system. Harpo loved a lot. I know
the love he shared is more than most people fathom.
He was an extremist.
A character,
a Spirit,
not to be held down
Harpo was more than a man.
He was a figment of his own
belief system.
He is Free now, and the opportunity
for all of us is to Love him
because as he believed, "Love is the Way!"
The good he did wins out.
It is clear he neglected some of his
most basic human opportunities to love.
He hurt some of those who wanted to be close
to him.
Some of the comments show where he missed
lots of opportunities to love his own birth family and daughter.
This article was writing after he lost the restaurant
and before he left to Alemeda where he lived on the remainder
of his life.
Thanks to Mary Rose for typing this.
Your EG
__
SEX AND SPIRITUALITY a personal story
By Leslie Goldman
published in Holistic Life Magazine
in the early 80's
© 2006, Leslie Goldman, Your Enchanted Gardener
In the eighth year of my commitment to heal my body of crippling
arthritis through the natural healing arts, I reached a crisis point
that totally stopped me from worldly activities, and forced me deep
inside to resolve issues that were eating me alive. I had no choice but
to pay attention. It was either move into another consciousness or give
up my body.
I always got myself in trouble when I was not saying what I was feeling,
but ate it instead. I was doing this now. While new life was pouring
through me, I refused to move through it, but held on to my old until it
exploded from my bowels, I couldn't digest my food. I looked back on six
months of diarrhea that went on hour after hour, and week after week;
and rectal bleeding.
Food stood at the essence of my conflicts with sensuality, sexuality,
and spirituality; with morality and freedom. I turned to food everytime
I couldn't handle a problem, and now food was my problem. I suffered
every time I ate.
My deepest resentment as a child came when I was shamed into giving up
the artificial tit of my milk bottle because I was "too big a boy" to be
drinking out of it. I had explored, poked, and fondled glazed doughnut
holes and the delights of sticking my fingers into them long before I
ever discovered the sacred secrets and hidden mysteries of the little
girl next door. I lived in a world of banana cream pies, strawberry ice
cream sundaes, and chocolate-covered candy bars. Tony the Tiger and his
Frosty Flakes cereal were my regular associates at the breakfast table.
My mother graduated from the school of food psychology that believed all
the problems of life could be handled through the mouth. My father spent
more time praying over food than he did eating it, and he could pray at
60 miles per hour. He was always on the run; someone always needed him.
I was so far down the list I was robbed of any humane contact by his
God, his synagogue next door, and the cemetery where he prayed for the
dead every Sunday.
I was born a Scorpio, the sign that deals intensely with
sexuality-spirituality. I could never satisfy my sex cravings in light
of spiritual principles. I either felt I was raping, or being raped. My
solution to my sexua| dilemma was to lock my hips in place, calcify my
lower back, and so totally make myself unattractive that it would take
the rarest woman to discover the frog-prince who could be liberated with
a holy kiss. I eventually had my hip joints artificially replaced in
1975, after years limping and crippled.
It was in 1974 that I met Harpo, a magical food guru who ran a Mission
Beach family-style restaurant. I came in searching out his yum-yum
natural candy, rumored to be the best around. Harpo became my dearest
friend in years that followed, following me through my health crisis,
and filling me with the gaps of both mother and father's pure love. We
were a perfect symbiosis for each other. He often joked that I was his
mind; and I, his body. Even at 72 (53?) he had agility, stamina, and
endurance; He was muscular and flexible. My mind seemed as if it was
muscle. In the world of the French fry, Harpo upheld the integrity of
the whole potato. I had a body built of French fries through childhood.
We were drawn together when we were both about to make our own spiritual
statements, yet in the choice of them, we went our own ways. It was
through his spiritual-sexual conflicts, and morality-freedom upheavals,
that I came to know my own. When Harpo turned off his sex life in 1978
and turned on his Christian radio programs, it was full blast. If the
20th century had a Casanova, it was he; and now, he would turn his life
over to Jesus witan equal passion. For the new Harpo, the Bible,
complete and finished, and open to one interpretation became his
guideline for living. It was such a simple formula; yet maintaining his
chosen celibacy, became the challenge of his life. As I saw it, here was
a man among men who would not compromise life, yet in the same breath,
denied the very life impulse that sourced his own existence. Harpo was
the perennial child; He never grew up. Harpo chose a God that would say
"no" to him. He needed a religion with teeth in it that could bit him if
he did wrong, and a devil that could send him straight to hell. Because
of my orthodox Jewish father, who raised me on a diet of "you dasn't do
that!", I needed a spiritual philosophy that would say "yes" to me.
A few months before Christmas, Harpo met Mary, a woman who grew quickly
to play an important role in our lives. She held his highest love at
heart, came to serve him, and listen to his ancient stories into the
night; story-telling to women he slept with had been his own form of
mental therapy. Without it, he suffered nightmares. Mary came to cuddle
him, she said, not to tempt him. She found in Harpo someone who would
treat her full. She too desired celibacy now, and found sanctity in this
man who gave her space to gather her feelings, and "not misuse her
spirit through the flesh."
Mary presented Harpo his ultimate spiritual crisis. "I'm allowed to talk
to women one hour a day", he told me, "I talked to God and he told me I
had to sleep alone! The kind of love she gives me, makes me tremble. I
feel young and alive. I can't %¤#&!§-! She arouses me. I'm enchanted by
her." He feared to the depths of his being. "All I put up, I don't want
to lose it now." Harpo had taken a stand, applying spiritual discipline
to his life for perhaps the first time. I had to support him. even
though I didn't agree with his position or philosophy.
At that time, I had gone many months feeling deprived of human contact
and all sensual expression; that was why I returned to old destructive
eating patterns, my shotgun approach to solving my dilemma. I had wanted
to write and article on "The Prostitute as Priestess." It was through a
friend of a friend of Harpo's that I went for this interview and found
myself confronting my own wayward sexuality. She was drugged when we
met, and hungover, and spent twenty minutes walking around in a towel
hunting for a second black hose, while smoking a cigarette. Her
apartment was in utter physical chaos. She called herself a
"whore-bitch" and said this was the highest complement she could give
herself. "Everyone's a prostitute, you have to be one to live," she
said. "At least I like my work, it pays me, and I'm doing a service for
people." She'd been a top college English major and corrected my grammar
when I spoke. There was a priceless human being inside her that was
seeking some meaning while pandering to the unfulfilled animal in all of
us. I was repulsed by the thought of touching her, and I didn't like
this in myself, because I knew she was more than I saw; yet she
confirmed my need to whisper the name of God and express sexuality in
the same breath.
It was three days before Christmas when Harpo called to confess had
slept with Mary, cuddling through the night. By Christmas Eve, he was in
a full-blown spiritual crisis. He wanted all Mary offered him; yet, he
felt he was losing his salvation to accept it. He resolved not to see
her again. I slept over that night and when I awoke in the morning, I
heard their two voices, playing as two children. I belted out, half
joking, half taunting him, "Sinner, Sinner! You were a sinner yesterday,
You'll be a sinner today, and tomorrow!" Her retorted, "Jesus handles my
sins," unsure of himself. I playfully yelled, "Then, you might as well
start living again!" Later he confessed, "How'd she get me to do that?"
He looked off balance when he spoke. I had rarely seen him so much so.
That night I was happy to be alone, outside the aura of conflict,
listening half-way to Handel's Messiah and watching TV. In the middle of
the night, my mind was filled with inspiration and insight and I began
writing.
"Each person is called, in each generation to grasp the meaning of
creation. We are obligated through our birth to dance through the
universe to the music we hear. This is our reason for being, to move to
our sound, our keynote, through our artform, our creation."
And what I learned from Harpo, watching his struggle to find his
balance, to come to terms with his own sexua| drives, was the big lie in
my own life, and how I was a thief and cheat. I knew now that all along
I had restricted the beauty of my mind and soul from shining through my
body as some kind of punishment for the world for not seeing me in my
totality and beauty of my dance. My theft and lie was that I know how
beautiful I was and we all were, yet I wasn't saying it enough for
everyone to see this through me. I was holding back my dance, my
creation, my gift. I learned from watching Harpo that if I based my
morality on pre-packaged codes that served me up a pre-processed God, I
would be hopelessly lost in do's and don'ts. I knew that the strings
that attached me to the source of my own inspiration had to be melded
from the materials of my own making, or I would be bound up forever,
stifled and suffocating. And I learned from watching Harpo that maybe
it's not truth so much we are after, but meaning, and more than meaning,
balance. To find meaning in human contact and in being touched, to touch
others more than with just our bodies, or even spirits, but with all of
us. And I knew I had to find a meeting place within myself because I
could feel a lust for life that was moving in me and wanted to move
outside me. I no longer wanted to be caught midair, as a mind alone
unattached to earth as well as heaven, but more so, I wanted to be me,
as all I could be, rising up, a Scorpio dancer.
___
The preceding was originally titled Rise of a Scorpio Dancer and was from
"Portrait of a Healing"
Harpo is a Spirit:
http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=92&i=1706
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