(Section 11)
Cherotic bodyplay releases, frees, creates new possibilities. This is true for the people who are actually directly playing together. But this is also true for the society, the people, the world, the outer reality surrounding the eroplaying people. This makes bodyplay not just an individual problem-solving therapy. Instead, it is a playful but powerful ritual that has effects on many different levels. There is a danger in focusing too much on what it will do for the individual, how it will affect his life, what does it mean in terms of his life, how it will help him. This kind of focus can turn bodyplay into encouraging individualism which keeps the person in the prison of fragmentation.
To be successful, bodyplay has to be intensely personal between the playing people, but should not be individualistic. It should not push the people inward onto their “selves”. Bodyplay should expand them outward into others.
The above paragraph, and maybe the rest of this book, might be hard to understand. After all, the words “individual” and “personal” may seem to be the same thing. To be an individual and to be a person may sound like the same. To see the difference, you have to have split vision. You have to “see” things with both your frontbrain and backbrain, and combine the two pictures together. Usually a person looks at the world through one half of the brain at a time. In apprenticeship, the two pictures are slowly combined. This combining may feel like going crazy, or like reality has gone nonsense. The student does not understand anything anymore. But if the student rides this out by trusting, he will gain the ability of seeing multi-levels at one time. Then he will not be fooled by what appears to be happening, or not happening, on one level. But to gain this split-vision, the student must give up how things work.
To understand what eroplay, chero, and bodyplay both are and do, it is necessary to have some idea what sex is and does. The sexual urge is the urge to merge with, to combine with, to become one with another. Sex is a physical symbol of this becoming one. This being one is a long-term process of bonding. Sex is a combination of eroplay as foreplay, sexual intercourse, orgasm, ejaculation, and erection. Each one of these may release different chemicals into the body with different results. Sex is the sum of these parts.
We have mentioned how sexual intercourse within the normal social context of the modern western frame starts and promotes the bonding patterning in the brain which creates the merging oneness with one of its functions being child-rearing. If the reality of the relationship does not match this being a living unit, then it will, sooner or later, cause very painful confusion which usually translates into jealousy and rejection. In this materialistic culture, the being one with another turns into owning one another. “I am you” becomes “you are mine”.
Because eroplay does not have any kind of physical intercourse, it is not about becoming one with another. It is to communicate, to share, to exchange on all levels by connecting the centers through physical contact. Because eroplay is not connected with producing children, there is not ejaculation or sexual orgasm. In sex, orgasm, combined with intercourse and ejaculation, shoots energy as well as the sexual material outward into another’s body. To ensure sexual mating, the sexual orgasm is felt in the “sexual” organs as violent peaks of intense releasing pleasure in the middle of the well-being of eroplay pleasure. These two kinds of pleasures create a physical trance. Although orgasm is felt in the “sexual” organs, the actual orgasm happens in the brain.
In eroplay, there is no peak of released chero outward. Instead, the level of chero is raised within the body, creating a physical trance which I call “ontonse”. Ontonse can be as intense as an orgasm, but ontonse is not a peak of chero; instead, it is a high plateau. When ontonse fades, the extra chero produced stays within the body, healing and calming. This extra chero slowly radiates out later as an attracting force. We call this force “erour”. Erour is usually called sexual power.
Within ontonse, creativity and magic can be done. Ontonse can be felt in different parts of the body or in the entire body. Since ontonse is not a peak of chero, it can be maintained and turned into a doorway to deeper dimensions. Since chero has been hidden within sex, it has been difficult, because of social-moral taboos, to use ontonse directly as a healing magic. This is what the student will learn to use.
The hands are transmitters of chero. This is because your hands are the only parts of your body that can touch almost all of your body. They are healing wands of chero. Laying on of hands is powerful magic. But rubbing body centers together is much more powerful, therefore more taboo. This magic requires two or more people being physically intimate together.
As we sit here writing this, reading this, we are swimming in a vast ocean of dynamic poetic associations of levels of symbols and meaning, which are always in a dance with one another. This dancing ocean is always roaring in the background, sending in waves upon waves of experiential communications. What we manage to get onto the page is always just a small bucketful of the ocean. Each bucketful interacts with every preceding bucket of symbols ... changing, adding new meanings to all the buckets, all the symbols.
The work that we are in is weaving a web. We are not the ones who are doing the weaving. We are experiencing the weaving. We are aware of the colored threads. But we are not aware of the ultimate pattern. To accept this not being aware frees us to enjoy the changing colors and depths, to be a part of the weaving. Those who think they know, see, understand what is before them are just activating the built-in misleading mirrors of any magical system, are just setting off hidden alarms that protect all magical systems.
The shamanistic reality came from a time before the linear frame, before language, before the division between what is inside and what is outside, before the division between above and below. It came from before time. It came from experiential playing. This experiential playing ... whether it is done by animals, babies and children, lovers, or within the rituals of the shaman ... is a nonlinear communication, exchanging cherotic packets of possibilities between all realities. This experiential playing uses all the centers of the body for this communication.
This is why, if you use just your mental, just your emotional, just your sexual, or just any one of your senses in experiential play, you will get and broadcast a distorted fragment of the magical play.
In the tribal reality, the shaman did not have to teach or describe the magical reality to the people using linear words. She was just the connector for the people to the magical reality where change could be found. Through doing rituals of experiential play, she became a channeling bridge over which the people could enter the magical reality within the everyday reality.
The direct experiencing of, and the direct interacting with, the magical reality was a complete physical, emotional, mental, instinctual, sexual, psychic, and spiritual dynamic for these tribal people. The magic was as real as the material world for each tribal person. The frontbrain was evolving from the backbrain. Self-awareness was coming into life, as life had come into the inorganic matter, as the visible matter had come into what modern science is now calling dark or invisible matter. The awareness traveled from the inorganic background of unity into life. This life awareness traveled through both the plant and the animal dynamics of instincts and sex, through the life/death dynamic which is a unity which is/was based on/within the inorganic background. The living unity awareness traveled through the personal being.
Keep in mind that, although this process has a linear historical aspect to it, each stage is always occurring. When we do “bodyplay” within cherotic magic, we are not just working with and within “the personal body” but also within the tribal body of life.
For more information about or to purchase the paperback visit the Cherotic Magic website.