Turned On

Copyright, 2007, Bill Lamond.
No part of the material contained herein may be reproduced without the written consent of the author.

Introduction

In The Beginning
I am lying on a massage table in my living room. My friend and masseur, Ed, has come over to give me my weekly massage to iron out the tensions that seem to be mounting after entering my forties, the dreaded mid-life crisis decade. In the past two years, I have divorced, left my psychotherapy practice of ten years and established myself as a business consultant. Everything is actually going fairly smoothly, and yet I am not completely satisfied, even anxious at times. Being a typical man, I think more income will solve my feeling of vague dissatisfaction, so I tell Ed that today I want to be quiet during the massage and think through a next level of income.

About forty-five minutes into the massage, while I am mostly daydreaming, frankly not thinking too hard about anything, I ask God, "What do I really need to do to have more income and the next level of my career?" In a flash, I hear a voice that is as loud inside me as if you and I were having a conversation on the phone. The voice says, "Get more sexually turned on." A bolt of pure energy surges through me, the core of my body heats up dramatically, I sit up on the table, sweating, look at Ed, and say, "You’ll never guess what God told me to do!" Thus begins a thirteen-year journey into eros* that continues and deepens even as I write.

There is something you need to know about me to understand just how unexpected God’s advice to me was. I was raised the third of five sons in a blue-collar, Irish-catholic family in Philadelphia in the fifties. Put yourself in my place and you will realize that getting more sexually turned on was probably the very last thing that you would expect God to say to you.

So that Ed wouldn’t think otherwise –- you know how fragile the male ego can be in that department -– I made it abundantly clear to him that absolutely nothing was wrong with me sexually. All the equipment was in good working order and though I didn’t consider myself a sexual athlete, I certainly enjoyed myself in that area. However…since God had advised me to get more sexually turned on, did he, I asked Ed, know of any way to do that, short of going to the red light district or any number of unsavory things that immediately popped into my head. These days, it makes me laugh to know that most people go to the red light district not to get more turned on but to dump their turn on because they have more than they can tolerate; therefore, probably not the place to look anyway.

As people say, timing is everything. Ed just happened to know of a man named Joseph Kramer, the founder of The Body Electric School of Massage. Joe had taught thousands of people the art of Taoist-Erotic massage, which uses the sexual energy, breathing and full body massage to charge up the central nervous system. Ed explained that he thought Joe traveled extensively teaching and didn’t maintain a massage practice, but suggested I call him and ask for his advice. By a stroke of good fortune, Joe also happened to live about five miles from my home.

After Ed left, I looked in my telephone directory and found him listed. I called and he picked up on the second ring. He said he was getting ready to travel, but just happened to be walking by the phone, and on impulse, picked it up. Joe told me that while he sometimes gave five treatments to men who had been severely traumatized sexually, he had never had anyone ask for his expertise just to get more turned on. He said he was willing to work with me as an experiment.

For two hours, twice a week, Joe worked on my body. Having body built for two years with a trainer, I can safely say that this massage regimen was as powerful and intensive as any physical or athletic training I had ever had. He told me the secret is to build a bigger and bigger energetic charge in the body and continue to hold it, so you can use it for more than sexual pleasure alone. In other words, to focus on the pure sensation and not try to get anywhere, especially ejaculation, where the body essential shuts down and turns off for a while.

The sensation in my body opened. Sometimes I felt that my skin was on fire or that I was having something akin to uncontrolled epileptic seizures while Joe massaged me. He called them full body orgasms. He taught me a breath of fire technique to increase the energetic charge in my body. I remembered old, distressing events from my past and cried like a baby or felt the heat of rage. Sometimes I felt so much energy going through me I felt as if I might explode. Parts of my body were having orgasmic contractions separately from my genitals. Waves of orgasm were washing through me without dissipating. Colors, sounds, and smells became more intense. My very pattern of thinking about who I am and what I am capable of was changing. In the same way that I had gone through sexual puberty years before, I felt as if I were going through an energetic – or what I now call erotic –- puberty.

By the end of six months, my central nervous system had blown open. If you’ve seen The Wizard of Oz, you might remember that before Dorothy went over the rainbow, everything was black and white. Then, when she landed in Munchkinland, everything was a riot of color. That gives you an idea of the differences I was experiencing. I was in a new universe, with new rules, a new cast of characters, new powers and opportunities, and yes, even new challenges.

Not just the quality of the information I could receive changed, but also the number of "channels" I had to receive information of every kind multiplied. I started seeing the relationship between things more powerfully. I could synthesize huge amounts of physical, intellectual, and emotional information easily. I stopped thinking in a linear, cause-and-effect, intellectual style and started living in a spherical or global, more intuitive, body-based style. I was finally out of my head and in my body. Ironically, at the same time, it was as if my I.Q. had suddenly increased by fifty points. Definitely Oz.-

The Core Problem
On a more somber note, I had a startling and very unpleasant realization. When I woke up erotically, I could finally experience the profound amount of starvation I had been living in. I am not talking about how much sex I was having or not having with other people. I am talking about whole areas of my body, my emotion, my intelligence and my spirit that were not in full working order, not available to me.

I want to say some things that may be hard to hear. They are not a personal indictment of you, though your reaction might be anger, defensiveness, or even personal guilt. I am saying them knowing that for most people there are one or more areas where they are "blindsided" by life. Areas that do not seem to work the way you would expect them to, no matter what you do. It is useful to stop for a moment and feel what I am saying – the way relationships keep turning out for you, your health or sense of well-being, your relationship to career, your connection with what I call your inner Guidance or inner knowing

There is nothing to feel guilty about. Most people have one or more of these areas that they continue to work on or finally give up working on altogether. As you will discover, starvation is a state of shock. When you wake up out of shock it is usually uncomfortable, because what drove you into shock was more than you could tolerate; however, waking up is the beginning of the power to be whole and have the life you want. So, to continue...

Everywhere I looked I could see men and women just like me who are going through life operating on less than what was originally wired into them at birth. It was heartbreaking. And because most people in our puritan-based culture are just like that – suppressed erotically and work-driven – it seems normal and just the way we human beings are.

The erotic starvation was especially obvious in men. There is a story that I heard many years ago about war. The story goes that when men were preparing for war, their drill sergeants would tell them to ‘keep a tight asshole.’ Most of the "men" who go to war are really youngsters who have just come out of puberty a few years ago. Though we glorify it in our media, war is evidently such a terrifying experience for the people who go through it that many soldiers lose control of their anal sphincter and go in their pants. These young men were also taught to ‘kill or be killed’ and to not take the suffering or death of their enemies –- also young men just like them -– emotionally.

When you hold the anal sphincter tightly, you cut off the energy of grounding, literally losing your sense of the earth under you. When you cut off emotion, you lose your sense of relationship and connection. Most of the damage that has been done to people, our environment, and the earth itself, has been done by men. Cut off from the root and the heart, men often have no relationship to the world around them except as an intellectual construct. In the words of the popular song a few years ago, "the earth is just a dead thing you can claim."

I am not embarrassed to say that I have shed many, many tears over the way we men live. It is unnecessary, a vast waste of life. In a recent talk I gave to several hundred people, I asked each man in the audience to turn to a woman, look in her eyes, and silently apologize on behalf of all men for the damage that we do to our world. I asked them not to take it personally. A few men turned immediately. Many men in the audience stiffened, but turned. Some refused to turn to anyone. A few glared at me. When relationship and connection are systematically cut off, there is nothing left to do but defend and attack. The art of apology is seen as unmanly.

When men are not at war, we continue to compete as if our very lives are at stake.

It is also no secret that women are without voice for the world they want. Estimates are that one hundred million women have had their clitorises removed in the name of religion or culture or simply outright domination. Through the centuries women have been suppressed, owned and killed with virtual impunity. These same women are our mothers, our sisters, our wives, and our daughters. We even have a term for relationship between men and women that mirrors the culture we live in, which is, the battle of the sexes. You get a true sense of how out of touch (starved and in shock) we are as a species. (A gentle reminder: you were born into a culture that shaped you. There is no need to feel wrong or guilty. There is simply an opportunity to reclaim yourself.)

On the other hand, women in general are not as erotically starved as men. They provide the heart and soul and joy in most cultures. They have emotion and relationship and they feel deeply. You might ask how they escape the starvation that men live in.

Women do not generally go to war, a singular advantage erotically over men. Women also open at the bottom to allow intercourse and birth, allowing the root to stay open. Also, because the job of women is to raise children and create family, most cultures allow women to have their hearts open; otherwise, our children would not develop physically or emotionally. More than half a century ago, studies of institutionalized babies showed that without touching or some sense of emotional connection, many babies stopped growing. Some even died.

In truth, women are also starved, but in completely different ways from men. What has been systematically starved out of women is a sense of self and a real feeling of power and control over their lives. And, while women are often seen as their bodies, historically it is men who have owned those bodies.

In rural China, it is said that when you knock on the door of a household where all the men are out and only women are at home, you will hear one of them say, "Go away. There is no one home." It is the sense of being someone and a voice to articulate their dreams and desires which is most starved in women.

In 1993, the United Nations, the official body that represents our world and its people, declared that women’s rights are human rights. It is hard to believe that such a statement would even be necessary, let alone newsworthy. The United Nations has also publicly declared that single key, missing ingredient for solving the problems that face our world is to have the voices of women unleashed and finally heard.

If you look at the way our cultures handle this erotic starvation, you will see the problem of relationship. Men are trained intellectually and often are out of touch with their bodies and emotion. Women are trained not to be too intelligent but to have the physical attractiveness and emotional warmth that will make a man desire them. In the culture’s view, men and women and naturally just that way. When you look more deeply, you see a systematic suppression of powers and gifts of each gender and the cultural recommendation to find someone who fills in what you are lacking. At the present time, we can only wonder what relationship would look like if each person were fully nourished and whole in every area. A different world.

Though it may sound overblown to say - until you have experienced what I have experienced in my own body and soul - to open our erotic nature and restore ourselves is a critical element in stopping the destruction we find spiraling all around us.

At the heart of the problems we face as a world is the deep, continuing suppression of eros, the natural life force that created us and sustains us. It’s as if we don’t trust ourselves to be too fully alive.


A New Relationship with Life

Within two years after my erotic awakening, I invented fulfillment-based thinking, cleared up a condition in my body that had hounded me for thirty years, released much of the dead material from my old life, and became spiritually, mentally, physically, and erotically, a new person. Because of the enormous amount of turn on I could hold and the ways I could use it, people started being drawn to me. I was suddenly a hot commodity in Northern California – no small feat in an area where human potential gurus are on every corner. I have never advertised. I have always been "passed around" (my term for it) from friend to organization to friend.

Presidents of companies, entrepreneurs, people in sports and show business wanted what I had. They wanted to be more turned on and to turn up their powers. They wanted the pleasure of life, not just the success. Let’s face it. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be more turned on and have a better life?

Women really wanted it – their appetite for life is a lot larger than what we men have right now. Their husbands usually began to want it some months later when they could see what their wives were getting. As a matter of fact, when my central nervous system blew open, I could see the relationship of people and things to one another the way women do and began to realize the power of the way women think.

I call that way of thinking "feminine" or "relational." The thinking itself has nothing to do intrinsically with being a woman. It is a model or perspective that women hold because of their roles as makers and sustainers of family life. It is inclusive (each new child, the in-laws, the neighbors), global (providing for the family’s nutritional, educational, emotional, social needs), multi-tasked (keeping an eye on the children at play, while writing a check and speaking on the phone) and non-linear (using emotional input and physical sensation to get information not available to the intellect).

Feminine or relational thinking is a brilliant model that could allow us to think through the enormously complex problems we face globally. Fortunately, men can learn it the way you can learn a second language Unfortunately, because women are seen as second class, the way they think and perceive is also viewed that way and most men would say is that women are mysterious at best or irrational at worst.

Men see relationships as things they have; women see themselves as living in a field in which everything that exists is related. In other words, relationship is not what you get; it’s where you start from. You see the web of life and where you are in it. You are included, not separate from it. Heisenberg, the brilliant physicist, said there is really no such thing as objectivity. Even to observe or study a phenomenon changes it.

I wonder what would happen

if we gave the world’s toughest

problems to women to solve.

At the least, they wouldn’t solve them

by resorting to more force.

Reinventing Yourself

One final thing – maybe the most important: It wasn’t enough to simply get more and more turned on. It was essential to learn how to use the turn on without electrocuting myself continually. I had to learn to hold the energy and be graceful with it. I had to become someone new.

The popularly held notion is that we are using about 10-15% of our central nervous system. This is inaccurate, since the central nervous system is in operation every moment and doing many things of which we are simply unaware, like digestion, immune system functions and the like. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that if you were consciously using 30% of the system, you would have a whole new set of conditions, opportunities and decisions to make. How about at 50%? Or Even 100%. Is that what "enlightenment" is – full conscious use of the brain and central nervous system, the neural net of the body?

When you remember your own growing up, it is obvious that the person you are at eighteen was not you at ten, plus puberty. In the course of the extraordinary new growth and awakening power of your sexuality, you evolved. You may have gotten bigger physically so your clothing was too small, but more importantly, your whole world got bigger. Your old interests got too small, too. New appetites emerged. New powers, gifts, and interests activated. You embraced a new self and a new future different from any you could have predicted as a ten-year-old kid.

As a couple with no children, you make decisions one way. As a family of four or five, there is a completely different set of criteria to be factored in. Not rocket science. Obvious.

At any age, when you get yourself beyond the 10-15% per cent of the central nervous system that we use actively and consciously, you go through an energetic puberty of sorts, where your view of the world gets larger and more fully developed. Your intentions for your life change. The quality of your life intensifies and the kinds of experiences you desire diversify. You also begin to notice all the compromises to your "turn on" you have made. You begin to perceive, as the character, Auntie Mame proclaimed, "Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death."

When you get way more turned on, you will outgrow the current life you are in. You’ll need to think differently, see yourself in new ways, open to a future that is more than simply a projected calculation from the past. You’ll discover, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, that you’re not in Kansas anymore.

The wonderful thing to realize is that none of us is really very different from anyone else in our basic humanity. Genetically, we are all nearly identical with minor superficial variations, like height, color of hair, eyes, skin, etc. We all basically want the same things: love, safety, companionship, a sense of spirit or something larger than ourselves, belonging. We want our lives to mean something, and we want to help make a better future for those who come after us. All the basic equipment works the same way universally in human beings. The unique way you express your humanity and use your basic human equipment is what makes you powerful and special.

Don’t forget that the last thing an Irish-catholic, blue-collar boy from Philadelphia would have ever expected was that someday I would be an erotic master and mentor people to use their eros to have passionate lives. If anyone had told me that was in my future, I would have thought them crazy. It certainly wasn’t in my conscious plan for myself.

There is nothing special in my background that gives me an edge over you about living this way. It is important to say, "If I can live this way and have the time of my life, SO CAN YOU;" but you will almost certainly have to reinvent yourself.

The equipment of our central nervous systems is essentially the same. The only difference worth mentioning is that I have given myself thousands of hours of turn on; also, I have a strategy and a system for holding the eros so I can use it and not get "fried." You can have that, too, with training and practice. You can love and enjoy the process. It is meant to be a pleasure.

I may have had my prayer for God to answer (more income, in this case); but God also had a more divine answer for me – one beyond my wildest expectations. Being very turned on for more than a decade, I have a sense that what God wants to give us is far beyond our current, conscious capacity to receive. My perception of what God wants is for us to live lives of dynamic happiness.

The Problem of Happily Ever After

Movies and television play in a modern way the role that the oral tradition of ancient cultures played. Dorothy and Auntie Mame are two icons of modern cultural themes – the search for home and the living life to the hilt. Though these characters first appeared in books, they became full cultural icons only after they made the leap from the printed page to the movie screen.

Movies and television express the conscious and unconscious aspirations, fears, desires, and hopes of our culture. They show us how we think and what we think. As you are probably well aware, they even shape the way we think.

A quick reflection on media in general will show you that we are riveted on conflict and the battle between good and evil almost continually. Even our modern romances are filled with conflict – until, at the end, evil (or conflict) is defeated. What comes next? "THE END" and the credits roll.

If you can say that the amount of time you consciously focus on anything is a strong indicator of the importance of that thing, then you see the value we place as a culture on conflict and struggle. In our modern films, about 95% is spent on the conflict, with good prevailing in the last 5% – often against all odds, and by using some the same methods that evil uses, namely varieties of force or cunning.

In other words, our cultural stories, though they tell us that good or love will triumph, also leave us with no real pictures or examples, let alone a methodology for "living happily ever after." Our cultural fables presume we will simply know how to do it. Stop now for a moment and actually consider living the next forty or fifty years "happily after ever" and you’ll see what I mean.

Nothing is devoted to what comes next. The reason for this is that, as a culture, we don’t have a clue about what happens next. Just look into your picture of heaven and you’ll see what I mean. We all "know" we die, then, if we have been good people we go to heaven. Now see how vividly you can capture what heaven is really like – how it feels, what you do, how you spend eternity, the activities you are involved in and so on. If you tell the truth, you don’t have a clue beyond the first few images. Certainly, no idea of how you’re spending eternity.

For the last few years, I have been inquiring deeply with hundreds of people who have taken The Pleasure of Business, the strategy course I teach about fulfillment-based living, into what would happen if we finally believed our own cultural stories and admitted that good has won. Maybe not everywhere permanently, but in a majority of us individually. I know it has won in me –- perhaps in you, too. Maybe not every single human being, but enough of us in enough countries to honestly say we are a majority.

This was a major epiphany for me. Everything began to come together. I can truthfully say that I am a good person. I know in my heart that the light is stronger than the darkness in me. Even when I make mistakes or wander away, I always come back to the light. As a strategist and a coach I think being evil is a very ineffective strategy, pure and simple. People who follow evil don’t wind up getting what human beings really desire nearly as often as people who follow the light and goodness in them. Evil is just a bad personal investment.

Are you a person who is rooting for evil to win? Of course not. You would be insulted if we were at a party and I even asked you. Do you want a great world with people treated well? Of course you do. Are you decent? Yes. Do you make mistakes? Sure. They are part of the way we learn.

Has good won in you?
Yes.
Now what?

A New World Awaits You
My mentor and friend, Joan Holmes, a remarkable world citizen, is the President of The Global Hunger Project, an organization that is dedicated to the end of hunger and starvation in our lifetime. She says that the world where hunger has ended is not this world minus hunger. We already could end hunger if we wanted to –- right now. One year’s global military budget would do it. As a species, we are simply not evolved or mature enough to demand that hunger end.

The world we will live in when hunger has ended is not this world, minus hunger.


We –- you and I and everyone else -- will need to become people who demand that everyone gets fed and has a chance for a great life. To do that, we will have to grow ourselves as people to a level of relationship and generosity that we don’t yet have. And if we really want everyone to get a chance at a great life, we will have to put our money behind it, change our priorities, our laws, and even our leaders. If you think real change comes from the top down, think again. The consciousness of the world opens person-by-person, one by one, or it doesn’t open at all. When enough of us demand the world we want in ourselves, we will get leaders who are demanding that, too.

A living example… When The Hunger Project was founded in 1977, Joan Holmes was a school psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the launch meeting of the project, Joan recalls, she tentatively raised her hand and said that she would manage the project for three months. What she did not say at the time was that she never thought of herself as a person who could captain a global enterprise, and, as women were trained to believe, she thought the right person for the job would be a man.

Twenty-four years later, Joan has grown herself to the stature of a global dignitary. Her colleagues are presidents of countries and people in villages. Not only did she grow herself intellectually into a person with extraordinary savvy and insight into what it will take to end hunger worldwide, but she also became one of the most beautiful, charismatic, and elegant women alive today.

Joan inspires me, by her own personal example, to stop handling the life I have had and become the person I have always wanted to be. When we see the almost pornographic pictures of hungry and starving people, we know in our hearts that if they were properly nourished and given a chance at a healthy, productive life, they would become completely different people. The potential gain that we are losing is heartbreaking and not essentially different from the gain that we are losing from our erotic mal-nourishment, which is equally heartbreaking.

When you develop yourself erotically and feed the body energetically to open the central nervous system, you become different – more beautifully expressed, more alive and vibrant – the person you always have wanted to be.

The world you will live in when you are fully erotically turned on is not what you have now, minus your problems.

A new set of questions

We will have a whole new set of questions to ask when the "war" has ended. Think about it. When you are at war, you act one way; when you are at peace, another.

We’ll have to develop a whole new way of operating. A new modus operandi. We won’t have the answers. By definition, something new doesn’t have recipes. We’ll experiment. We’ll open ourselves to a new reality. From opening to that reality, we’ll get new results, and get new questions, and develop new ways to operate and so on. We are doing that now with computer technology. We will also have to do it with our own "technology of human-ness," no small task, one that will require the full use of our brain and central nervous system.

An example. When I worked in a counseling agency for children in Philadelphia about twenty-five years ago, we counseled many families of police officers. Some of these officers worked in the toughest, crime-ridden neighborhoods and were in danger every working day of their lives. After working a shift where they were involved with tragic, horrendous, or brutal circumstances and people, they were expected to come home and be loving, kind and patient parents. Many found it impossible, causing problems for themselves and the people they loved.

These officers had to be taught to distinguish behaviors that were appropriate in their work from those that were appropriate at home. You might say, "Any human being could figure that out." Unfortunately, when you are the human being and you are caught in the cycle, you are often the last one to know.

You might imagine enough money, good health, a great relationship, a beautiful house, etc. Those are things. The question is can you actually imagine – day to day – how you would live? What you would do each day if everything were actually great? You say, "Well, I’d take a vacation." Even if that lasted two years, then what? What would you do each and every day to express yourself, to interest yourself, and to give yourself a greater sense of your life’s meaning something?

The material presented here is one answer to the questions, "Who will human beings become, what will they think, and how will they live after good has won in them?" and "How do we get there from here?"

In my childhood religion we were taught that this world could never really be a world of happiness. Only when you die and go to heaven can you finally be happy. Sometimes for hours at a time I would imagine and wonder what it would be like to be happy all the time, to have nothing to do except enjoy myself and contemplate God. As a kid, frankly, it felt like heaven would be the most boring place imaginable. Life that was that good seemed pretty dull to me. It certainly lacked spice or excitement.

The answer to the question, "What would a life of pleasure and fulfillment be like" is not a particular thing. It is a path to follow – a living investigation into a future that opens as you walk it. My own experience of more than a decade living with the question, "What happens after good has won" is nothing that I thought before my central nervous system opened. I had to invent a whole new way of looking at life through the lens of ongoing happiness, a state that is barely imaginable for us.

Centuries ago, when there were parts of the world that were unexplored by Westerners, Europeans would mark these parts on their maps as "terra incognita," literally, the unknown land. The most potentially valuable terra incognita of our lives is erotic turn on, the full use of the brain and central nervous system.

The opportunities I have had and the ways that I have allowed myself to respond to my own turn on and greatness are as different from Kansas as Oz. And that, I would say, is the very good news. I am healthier and more vibrant than I was ten years ago. People my age often look a lot older. My relationship with God is healed. I think of God as my creator, lover, and partner, not as someone who is out to get me. I have a great income doing what I love. I have many intimate relationships and a wide circle of friends. I am not afraid to make mistakes or try something new. I am a good father. My heart is open. My sexual vitality is turned up. The intuition switch is "on". I feel safe to pursue a large vision - having at least ten million people live this way to seed pleasure and goodness in the global consciousness.

We are led to believe that if people are too turned on, they would become a problem, a danger. The opposite is true. When you are turned on and know how to use it, you have more to give, and it is natural to give more. There is no sacrifice. Everyone and everything around you is nourished.

Still the changes keep coming. In the last six months, I have developed the ability to feel physically the exact amount of turn on another person has and where they have it, simply by putting my conscious attention on them. I can feel it in my own body and use it. It gives me a deeper relationship with the other person. If they are closed, I can feel where they are blocked and help them open. If I am making love, I can have the sexual connection be much more powerful. If I am tired, I can circulate the energy I feel in others and revitalize myself. I can even use it as an early warning system to steer away from people who would not be beneficial for me.

Envious? Don’t be. Just plan on getting very turned on and becoming a person who can have all this and a lot more. That would make us both happy.

The Banner of Happiness

There are many banners, so to speak, that are being held aloft these days as the answer to the problems human beings and our world face. Ecology, healing, women’s equality, racial harmony, even spiritual transcendence. No matter what banner you stand under, when you’re very turned on you see that what all these banners have in common is the desire for a world of happiness, whether in this physical one or the next.

One banner that is never held up is the banner of happiness itself. In the world of the politically correct, it is not even appropriate to be too happy with so many people suffering. Nonsense.

It is a well-known fact of behavioral science that the easiest and most powerful way to teach anything is to have someone do it in front of you and then show you how it’s done and let you practice. What this means is that unless some of us can achieve a state of sustainable, everyday happiness, and model lives lived in it, we will never achieve the real result we are longing for so desperately as a species.

Think of this book as a manual for living everyday happiness! In computer software language, think of the material and processes in this book as an architecture – a milieu in which to create whatever would make you happiest, in harmony with the world around you. It is the result of eight hundred people who have been following this path over ten years, discovering what it takes personally and practically to live lives of ongoing pleasure and fulfillment.

Also, think of this book as describing a pioneering effort – a demonstration project - to think through a way of living that is based on passion and joy, not work and suffering. As with any pioneering effort, not every question is fully answered; not every challenge solved.

As you read this book, you will have to figure out what to do – to cut your own path through it, so to speak. My advice is to read with your body and emotion, as well as your eyes and intellect. Feel the material. Don’t just try to understand it intellectually. Feel where you get more turned on as you read. Start where you feel most turned on. Try some experiments with what you are reading. Don’t just take my word. Have your own experiences and then you will be able to take your word for it.

What is important is that the banner of happiness is waving in the air. There are people standing under it who are leading extraordinary lives. Welcome. Start living a life of happiness so others can see what it looks like. Don’t worry. It ALWAYS looks great!

Have your own personal happiness be the greatest, practical, and most effective contribution you can make to life around you. It is. It adds to the joy of the world.

The Hidden Costs of Winning
In the last two decades in business as a self-employed person, I have found that success-based thinking is really what I call winning at a discount. It is okay to ruin your health, have lousy relationships, harden your heart and other ridiculous things as long as you get "successful." It’s really a "success at any price model."

This model presumes you are living in a state of war or emergency. It is a way of operating to get a particular result at any cost. In times of war, it may be necessary. It is also a way of operating that will burn out your adrenals and never give you full enjoyment. It certainly is not a way to live everyday life. It burns out the body and deadens the soul.

Experientially, what is frightening about the model of success we live in today is that at the very moment of winning, you can already feel the discount. It makes most people bitter and crazy. Yes, they have won, but at what cost? You need only look at the latest disaster to befall the rich and famous in the tabloids – drugs addictions, marital scandals, mental illness, even murder – to see what the "success at any price" model produces. It’s not pretty.

When something is achieved at a ruinous cost, it is called a pyrrhic victory. It is empty. Success-based thinking is a pyrrhic victory. It forgets that at the heart of every human endeavor is the very human desire to be happy. Even if you want to be rich and famous, more powerful, better in bed or fully enlightened, you must somewhere in yourself think that these things will make you happy.

What seems wired in all life everywhere is evolution and flourishing. If you have not grown into more of the person you want to be while achieving your goals, if you are not flourishing inside as well as outside, you may have missed the whole point of being human.

For ten years I was a psychotherapist. I worked with people who were what psychotherapists call "normal neurotic." About two years into my practice, I discovered something that changed everything. I discovered that the basic problem most people have is that they are living lives that are too small for them. Either their visions and desires were too small to have a really great life or they have had compromised their visions and desires and were living at a discount. Sometimes they had the vision and desire and only needed to be trained and coached to have what they wanted.

I told my clients that I was unwilling to work on their problems anymore and that all I wanted to speak with them about was their aspirations and coach them to have their aspirations happen. They were relieved. Miraculously, many of the problems for which they had come to therapy disappeared.

I had a roommate many years ago named Sandra, a woman who had a very sophisticated style and loved to get a bargain. She especially loved getting a discount. Sandra often went shopping at an outlet for a famous women’s clothing store, I. Magnin, in San Francisco, and came home with stylish new clothes she had bought at a huge discount.

One day she came home and showed me a very expensive sweater she had bought for less than fifty dollars. When she showed me the sweater, she said, "This is a two hundred dollar sweater that I got for forty bucks." Though the sweater was, indeed, beautiful, I foolishly told her that what she got was a forty dollar sweater.

She was furious. She said, "Can’t you see the price marked on the tag from I. Magnin?" I replied that, yes, I could see the price, but that what made the sweater worth two hundred dollars was: having a day of shopping at I. Magnin; having the sales clerk spend time with you and give you undivided attention; having your purchase beautifully wrapped; and feeling like a million bucks when you left the store.

Thankfully, I have learned to be more tactful. You can see, though, what I mean. There is no intrinsic value to anything. Value is something we make up. If you don’t have the full experience, it is impossible to have the full value.

When it comes to your own life, don’t go to the discount store. Have the full experience.

For nearly ten years, I have taught a high-level strategy course called THE PLEASURE OF BUSINESS. Don’t be fooled by the title. Though I have taught it to hundreds of business professionals, the business I am speaking about is not commerce and industry. What I really mean by "business" is the entrepreneurial endeavor of your life.

If you could see your life as a conglomerate, you would see that you have many holdings, ventures, and departments that all work together and must be in harmony for your life to be "profitable." Your body is that way. There are myriad parts that operate together for you to stay alive and go about the business of your life. Any simple action requires the simultaneous coordination of brain, nerves, organs, and muscles, not to mention the underlying processes of the body that you take for granted all your life, like breathing, blood flow, and digestion.

Imagine a life where your spirit, intelligence, body, sexuality, emotion, and energy were engaged and operating harmoniously and with full profitability. There’s a life worth living.

I have hundreds of intimate conversations each year with successful people from all walks of life. One thing I have discovered almost universally is that we all have areas of our life’s "business" that are thriving. We also have areas that are just breaking even, so to speak. Sadly, we also have areas that are so unprofitable that we really don’t know what to do with them and often try to ignore them as if they’ll go away. Unfortunately, this is like ignoring a small cavity in your tooth and hoping it will also go away.

When I was a kid, I used to love the performers in the circus who would line up many sticks on a stand and spin plates on them. They would put three or four plates up and get them going good and fast. Then they would put four more plates up and spin them, while remembering to go back to plates one through four that would, by this time, have begun to wobble. By plate number twelve, the ante was raised dramatically and wobble was king. I still laugh when I think of these performers running back and forth along the line of plates, all the while smiling at the audience as if nothing in particular were out of the ordinary.

Sound familiar? It is the way most human beings conduct the business of their lives. Whichever plate has the biggest wobble gets our attention. Our strategy is to run back and forth spinning the plates as if they are all unrelated. It’s an exhausting way to live, as you probably know from your own personal experience. When you can’t run back and forth any longer, things wobble and crash, which only makes things worse. Maddening, and yet, like the performer spinning plates, you are expected to smile all the while and make it look easy.

What’s worse is you think there must be something wrong with you because it looks like everybody else is spinning their plates successfully. What you don’t know unless you talk with many people as intimately as I do, is that the very people you think are doing it successfully are normally covering up or ignoring what’s not profitable in their lives, all the while looking over at you and thinking you’re doing it successfully.

We can’t even get our legislative bodies to make a coherent plan for the next decade or two. Whatever emergency or struggle is "entertaining" us most gets put on the agenda up front. And, like ocean waves, there are always more. If it’s any consolation, most people in power are simply running faster and spinning more plates than you or I. You have only to look at presidents of The United States after four or eight years in office to see how exhausting the plate-spinning strategy is. Our presidents come into office full of energy and leave looking old and tired.

The Pleasure of Business is a course in what I call "fulfillment-based" living (also referred to as "erotically-based," "turn-on-based" living). The difference between this kind of thinking and success-based thinking is that in fulfillment-based thinking we are not playing just for the tangible result. The result by itself is not enough and never justifies the means we use to get it. We are playing for a style of life we want, as well as things in it. We want a style that is pleasurable, cooperative, and that actually requires us to open more in order to have results we’ve never had.

Think of a youngster learning to walk. Maybe your own child. They take their first step. You laugh and clap and pick them up and kiss them. In a very short period of time they are toddling, then walking, running, skipping and jumping. They got it all from your pleasure and their pleasure as you both opened to something new and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Now, take the same example with a different point of view. As your child takes its first step and then topples over, you rush over, pick it up and start hollering that it’s just not enough, they better get it right, and what’s wrong with them anyway that they can only take one step. Sounds familiar in your own life as an adult, doesn’t it? You take your first step in something new and, like a child learning to walk, you topple over. You criticize yourself so much that you decide taking more steps may just not be worth it. If you do continue, you grit your teeth and fight off the critic in you who is goading you at every turn. When the result is accomplished, you are called a "survivor." Yuck.

Fulfillment-based living is my own attempt to reach my goals and make my dreams come true in ways that do not discount them. I want the freedom to learn new things and make mistakes. I want to have as much fun and enjoyment and happiness while I am going through life. Also, I want to arrive in style, not feeling as if I been through the wringer.

Pleasure Rules<
FONT SIZE=4>Pain and Suffering

Many would argue that pain is necessary for growth, as in the example of bodybuilding where the muscle fibers burst under the pressure of weightlifting, and feel painful for a few days while they rebuild themselves at bigger levels. It is useful to make a crucial distinction between pain and suffering.

Pain is a neural response wired into your body that alerts you that something is happening to injure you. For example, cut your finger and you feel pain. The pain warns you that your body is in danger and you have choices that must be made. You can choose to ignore the pain, as in bodybuilding or dental work, or even feel good about it because you are building muscle or saving your teeth. You can also take immediate action to stop whatever is causing the pain, as in pulling your finger away from the knife that cut you, putting cold compresses on it to dull the pain or wrapping your finger to prevent further bleeding.

Suffering, on the other hand, is a mental state that often has nothing to do with the physical pain. Suffering is a psychological phenomenon, not a physical one. You are preoccupied and fall down the stairs. There is certainly pain, but you also tell yourself things like, "Oh, I’m so clumsy," "This is all my fault for not watching where I was going," "Now I’ve ruined everything." You speak to yourself and begin to experience strong emotions about your interpretation of the event, which makes you feel bad about yourself. As you do this, the physical pain often begins to intensify, causing you to speak more negatively to yourself and spiraling you down.

People are also said to suffer when pain is protracted and there is no escape, as in chronic conditions where the pain cannot adequately be managed. In cases of acute, severe physical injury, where the pain is overwhelming the central nervous system, the body "blows a fuse" and short-circuits the pain. We call this "shock." It is the body’s way of shutting down physical pain responses from which we cannot escape. It is a dangerous state. The body gets cold and begins to harden. Left in physical shock for more than a few hours, people die.

Left in emotional shock, people "harden." They feel "stuck," "cold" or "disconnected." Their eyes have flatness to them, rather than sheen. The areas of the body most associated with emotion, i.e. the jaw, the neck and throat, and the chest and belly tighten. After a time, the unrelieved tension causes the parts of the body affected to harden, get colder, and lose their feeling. When you ask them how their jaws feel, they will probably say, "Why, they’re fine. I don’t feel anything the matter with them." What they are really saying is that they don’t feel their jaws. If they did, they would feel the acute discomfort of the tension they are carrying.

Much of the suffering we do is not physically based. It is the result of the interpretation of painful life events in ways that keep us locked up emotionally and prevent escape – sometimes, long after the actual physical pain has ceased. And, because the body and the mind are interconnected, the body will shut down where the suffering is perceived.

You cannot eliminate physical

pain, nor would you want to.

It is life-protecting. You can,

however, stop suffering, by

releasing your negative beliefs.

Try this for a moment. Every one of us has experiences from our early years that were acutely embarrassing for us. You probably have several. Pick one and think about it for a moment. First, you will feel your body react. Parts of it tighten. Then you will have an uncomfortable emotional reaction. You will hear yourself saying things to yourself that keep your reaction in place and program you to avoid incidents like that in the future.

When I was growing up, my brothers and I always kissed both our parents goodnight. We also kissed our aunts and uncles when they visited. Actually, looking back, a very nice tradition. One night, when I was eleven or twelve and my aunt and uncle were visiting, I finished bathing and came down to kiss everyone goodnight. When I kissed my uncle, he looked at me in a very embarrassed way and said, "Are you still doing that. You’re too old to kiss me goodnight."

I felt humiliated. All my family was around. My brothers smirked. Though I knew I had done something wrong, I couldn’t figure out why and more importantly, who had suddenly changed the rules that I had been following all my life, and why I didn’t know about it. For years after that, every time I remembered that night, my face burned. My belly contracted with fear. I can remember making a conscious decision not to express too much affection, lest I be seen as the fool again. I even went through a period where I did not express any physical affection to anyone for fear that I would violate yet another unknown rule and be humiliated. You can see how these things harden and then become rules that are reinforced by the emotional and physical sensations that accompany them. They are self-reinforcing patterns that harden and have a life of their own. These experiences, repeated over and over, are the basis for our suffering and the hardening in our body and soul.

Now, the Good News...

Here is some really good news. Pleasure is definitely stronger than pain. In research studies, it has been shown that when human beings are in highly sexually aroused states, their pain threshold elevates. To put it in plain language, you can do things to people who are very happy or very turned on that in an ordinary state of awareness would be painful.

You are standing in the grocery check out line. You are happy and radiating your joy. The person in front of you accidentally steps on your toe. They turn around and say, "I’m sorry." You laugh and say, "Don’t worry. It’s all right." It never crosses your mind again.

You are standing the in same line. You are upset and worried about something. The person in front or you accidentally steps on your toe. They turn around and say, "I’m sorry." You glare at the them and say, "Watch where you’re going." You are annoyed the whole time they are being checked out and walk out of the store mumbling to yourself at stupid, clumsy people. Your toe hurts.

When you increase your pleasure and have it at higher and higher levels, at lot of what you would ordinarily find painful disappears off the screen. You can not only tolerate more stimulation and pressure without pain, but the miracle is that things that used to feel painful are neutralized or can even feel good. In the last fifteen years I have had more than one thousand years of massage. When my body is tense, everything the masseur does hurts. When my body is relaxed and open, the same things feel good.

On the other hand, it is also a well-known fact that in emergencies where people are charged with adrenaline, their pain threshold also elevates and they feel less pain. Said graphically, in the heat of battle, you do not feel the wounds and do not complain much. In a kill-or-be-killed situation where the adrenaline levels are sky high, the pain receptors dull.

Why Pleasure Rules

Pleasure and adrenaline produce the same result around pain. The difference is that to produce adrenaline sufficient to dull the pain, you have to put yourself in high-stress situations. Adrenaline dries the mouth and produces a strong odor in the body. Not great side effects. Also, prolonged stress will cause adrenal failure, a dangerous medical condition that takes a long time to reverse.

The choice is clear. Pleasure rules. It is the best way to go through life with the minimum amount of pain and the very best side effects, like happiness, well-being, appetite for more, and a feeling of freedom and safety.

More importantly the act that creates most living things is an act of pleasure. If nature is to be trusted, then one of the hallmarks of creation is that it is a pleasure, sexual or not. If you align your life in microcosm with the way life works in macrocosm, it stands to reason that you have a better chance of winning. The Taoists call this being in the Tao. Get in the flow, so to speak, and you do not have to paddle so hard.

Pleasure is intrinsic to our very creation. It is also intrinsic to our growth and development in the earliest years of life. Children who are given little pleasure and are subjected to continual pain, often stop growing, physically and emotionally. Why in the world would we imagine that pleasure is intrinsic to growth in childhood and not intrinsic to growth throughout life? Why would we ever imagine that "no pain, no gain" makes better sense. It just doesn't make sense.

Plus, pleasure is attractive. Things that turn me on are things I want to do more and get good at. I stick to them longer. I have more tolerance for the challenges and for making mistakes when I am attracted to something and having a good time.

People in their pleasure are very attractive. They radiate and glow. We want to be around them and we want whatever they have to rub off on us.

When I discovered pleasure-based thinking, I also discovered that much of my sexual turn on was based on fear. You know, could I say the right thing, would they think I was a jerk, was I good enough looking, did I know the right moves, was my body OK, was a good enough in bed? Ironically, the danger felt like a real turn on. I made up my mind that I would re-wire my turn on so it was based on pleasure, rather than adrenaline.

I want to tell you something intimately. For the next three months, until I was able to change my thinking and perception about what turned me on, I had almost no sexual turn on. I could not find where to get my pleasure from that was not based on fear. At one point I even thought that maybe I would simply never be sexually turned on again. This re-wiring project was one of the most useful gifts I have ever given myself. (When you learn completions and installations and the erotic meditation in this book, you will be able to re-wire yourself, too.)

Think for a moment about high-fashion runway models. Men and women, these are people who are taught to project "attitude," a hard, in your face, brazenness that in our culture passes for sexual arousal. They portray turn on as aloof and combative. Nothing could be further from the truth.

These are not people that I would feel ever feel comfortable going up to at a party and saying, "Hi. My name’s Bill. You look like a nice person. Want to get to know each other?" Right! Just the opposite.

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