What follows are some short essays on Mr. Jensen's Gnostic Religion
website, discussing the dubiousness of getting married, followed by my
letter about the ideas. The parts inside of [brackets] are my additions.
WHY I DON'T BELIEVE IN MARRIAGE
by John Jensen
Reason #2
From having been a long-time student of the occult, I have
come to see the wedding ceremony as a rite of black magic, a social
control device that works by hynosis and intimidation, ignoring the
basics of understanding what each partner needs from the other. These
ceremonies were instigated by ancient priest-kings and god-kings who
realized that by controlling the sexual behavior of their subjects,
they could make them more obediant. Contracts are a much better
vehicle for making a commitment. No, marriage is not a valid contract.
To be valid, a contract must have spelled out exactly what each party
wants from the other, with compensation (consideration is the legal
term. It has to be a two-way street), and recompense (who gets what if
it doesn't work out). Instead, I find myself repeatedly disappointed
to meet women who insist they want the traditional vaguries,
supposedly permanentized with a superstitious ceremony.
[Mr. Jensen indicates a crass disregard for a sincere personal feeling
expressed by some women he has known. I think he intuitively recognizes the
feeling as badhearted bitterness about other women and a real belief in the
usefulness of black magic.]
Reason #4
Marriage institutionalizes jealousy and raises it from a
neurotic response to a moral imperative. Let's face it; what is
jealousy really, anyway? When a man gets jealous, isn't he really
saying: "I'm not willing to put into this relationship what it takes
to make it happy for you so you will want to stay. Instead, I want you
to confine yourself to me. or else!"
[Mr. Jensen has no patience with someone who is slow to engage
intimacy and who thus gets left behind by their more courageous spouse,
and inevitably feels abandoned.]
When a spouse is unfaithful, we have at least three different
rational responses to choose from:
1. Talk it over and come to some kind of understanding.[of motivation(?)]
2. Get competitive. [or coercive]
3. Leave. [create formal distance in the melodrama]
[4. Seek a genuinely meaningful place in the new relationship structure.]
Jealousy is not a rational response. People aren't rational?
Then consider that if an inappropriate behavior is repeatedly indulged
in, is it not going to diminish that creature's ability to survive?
Isn't that counter-evolutionary?
Jealousy exists, not as a normal behavior, but as the
desperate action of a creature not unable, but UNWILLING to recognise
the nature or the cause of its loss. It is the result of bad
conditioning, a carry-over from times when women were regarded as
property, not as individuals. [Thus men can now be property also]
Traditional marriage, instead of helping people to accept the
responsibility to work at the relationship, leads couples to begin
after the ceremony to take each other for granted, more and more
expecting things from each other, rather than making the effort to
earn it. When they don't get what they expect, they start getting
concerned the spouse is giving their energy to someone else. Each
spouse, particularly the wife, must then cut themselves off from
former friends, especially of the opposite sex. If they don't, the
other spouse starts changing colors, making fnnny noises, and threats.
My efforts to build friendships with women have been
repeatedly undermined by their sexual or marriage involvements. Patch
differences or move in with a lover and friends get sacrificed. Love
may arise more easily out of friendship than friendship out of love,
but if the friendship has not yet gotten sexual, it will likely get
cut off if the woman gets sexual with someone else first. If you want
to keep a woman as a long-term friend it is almost imperative that you
get sexual with her first. However, this has the additional drawback
that if she then confines herself to you, her input is reduced,
causing her company to become less and less stimulating, eventually
bringing you to the point of becoming bored with her, undermining the
relationship.
Further, by getting sexual before building a solid
friendship, we may get hesitant about expressing things that might
jeopardize the sexual relationship, making it harder to build it into
a solid friendship.
Reason #5
The most radient women in my experience have typically (in
one way or another) had two or more lovers. In three instances, it was
not sexual relationships, but having had the experience of sharing an
intense loving experience with six to forty people at one time, that
was responsible for the changes. I have seen several women utterly
transformed from plain-Jane waif into radient, sometimes ravishing
beauty from one or the other method.
[Mr. Jensen appears to assume that a woman always knows when she's
beautiful and spiritually healthy. He has no idea that he's looking at the
health of a whole context, merely shown through an individual, not of that
individual.]
Is a jealous husband going to be able to handle seeing his
wife go through such an experience? I think not.
Love is something we all need, but that need can turn Love
into a pit that you fall into.
Love should be something that we DO!
Just DO IT!
Pour your heart into everything you do everyone close to you.
Love is a great power; let's USE it.
Reason #6
The excuse I hear most often, for putting up with a bad
marriage, is "for the children". Unfortunately, the children suffer
more to put up with dysfunctional bickering and fighting.
Children need role models. They need to see adults
interacting in productive and meaningful ways. Ideally, biological
parents are supposed to be best suited for that. In reality, two
people foisted together, in often cramped quarters, with little
opportunity to let their spirits breathe, will rub on each other and
tire of each other's company. In reality, children are capable of
learning a variety of roles, and learn to choose what works best for
them.
One parent is not enough.
Why must we assume,
in today's complicated world,
that two is really enough?
It is important to remember that, for most of recorded human
history, most people lived with several relatives in the same house,
often spanning several generations. Children were exposed, daily, to
the examples of, not only parents, but also grandparents, aunts and
uncles. While I do not propose returning to that kind of imposed
familial closeness, I think we have gone too far to the other extreme.
While liberating young couples from authoritarian patriarchs, we have
isolated them, and their children, from what is also a valuable social
and developmental resource. I think it high time we started developing
our own extended families; close-nit family units based on mutual love
and respect, instead of blood ties.
To sum it all up
Marriage is very much a condition of ownership and it is
usually the woman who gets to be owned. In spite of that fact, most
women seem to want it. I don't know how much ignorance is to blame or
how much can be blamed on masochism or a need to be told what to do,
but most women keep trying. When a relationship doesn't work, they too
often blame themselves instead of questioning the nature of the
institution. Of course, if they keep getting abused by macho brutes,
certainly they should question themselves. Even then, we should not
neglect to question the part that institution might have played in
setting us up for such abuse.
Can we honestly deny that such abuse and setting up for abuse
has something to do with having been frustrated from either saving one
self for marriage, or from lack of opportunities?
[Mr.Jensen cannot conceive of a human being who has never had any
technical initiative to be frustrated. He has also never consciously used
a personal relationship to support a trance or illusory mood, so he cannot
comprehend that use of marriage.]
Are not those opportunities lacking because marriage confines
us and attempts to dictate to our hearts, not just as adults, but even
as children?
Have any of us never had childhood crushes that could not be
fulfilled?
Are not our hatreds born of our love too long frustrated?
Does not our discernment get impaired when we get too hungry?
Do we not grow up socially hampered if we lack opportunities
to relate?
If we then try to build relationships coming from such
frustration, hunger, and impairments, can we avoid making disasters
out of them?
In the past, people stayed together, because:
1. Women didn't work outside the home, so they were economically
dependent on their husbands.
2. Divorces were very hard to get.
3. Everyone else was as bad off as you anyway, so there was nothing
better to look forward to.
Today, there IS something better to look forward to. If
marriage doesn't work for you, you can try something else. Building
new role models from scratch is never easy, but the alternative is to
stay put in the same miserable trap.
[Here the author restates the appearance of misery, due to technical
paralysis, that clearly identifies married women, without any recognition
that the woman, like a drunk person, has no awareness of the condition.]
Decide what you want from your relationships and Whether what
you are doing is actually helping you to get it. Do you really find
the best security in putting your eggs in one basket? Or is that just
an illusion we get from putting up with emotional blackmail games? Do
you still find the greatest intensity in a one-on-one When you have
run out of new things to say or do? Does that relationship have the
greatest depth, which is locked-in?
A wise man I know once told me: "Just because you set
married. doesn't mean you're not going to fall in love again. You
will!" He went on to say that it is a wise spouse who can recognize
that when he or she has 75% (if we all expect 100%, few would ever
marry), his partner still needs the other 25% and will eventually fall
for someone who offers it. Be patient and it will run its course.
The same wise man predicted that in the Aquarian Age, every
man will be every woman's husband and every woman will be every man's
wife. No, he didn't mean that as an invitation to "love'em and
leave'em", but that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin and
every relationship has something to offer us and warrants some
responsibility from us.
Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that mutual
understanding, respect and effort can do far more for you than any
ceremony or social sanctions can. Ultimately, we have to build our own
solutions, not someone elses, and we have to build those solutions on
our own understanding, not someone elses. If that means daring to make
our own mistakes, so be it. That's how we learn.
***********************************************************************
Hello Mr. Jensen,
I am writing to comment on your essay against marriage. I am also
opposed to marriage for pretty much the same reasons but I am much more
reserved in my questioning of it for other people.
Though I share your grimness about black magic, I see a place for it in
the lives of people who, for whatever reason, are unable to engage
inventive technical reasoning. I spent two years of my life identified with
a persona derived entirely from my personal feelings and a self-developed
dreamworld. A side effect was the complete crippling of my otherwise quite
unusual technical cleverness.
During this period I was intimate with a great many people. I found that
all the women around me, without exception, would notice and react to my
slightest nuance of expression as if I intended a deliberate touch on their
dreamworld, and they related to my dreamworld likewise. While this resulted
in a powerful sense of intimacy and wonder, and gave the word love a brand
new meaning, it also left all of them and I quite overwhelmed by the
responsibility to each other. We all required a definite private place for
recuperative magic spells where this responsibility could be suspended.
I found that, with the feeling persona, being alone courted serious
mental illness. I could ease this considerably through sharing my private
place with people who required no emotional accountability, such as service
people and very young children. Men and animals likewise rarely gave
importance to any subtlty of expression. I could tell that the euphoric
feeling of majestic power with these "familiars" was a potentially
dangerous illusion, given their benevolence was unconscious or coerced, so
I focused instead on developing solitary artwork, cooking, and "stage"
making, and the casual facilitating of unplanned semi-religious (and thus
controlled) events with other people.
Many of the women around me though had very serious political hysteria
going and the unavoidable feelings of anger, that in the absense of
inventive intellect greatly increase the risk of mental illness. For them,
familiars were essential, and if the relationship turned vicious they saw
no cause and effect relation to their own black magic.
I saw many of the women do their best to engage inventive intellect, in
spite of the terrible handicap of preserving a dreamworld, struggling to
answer their own hysteria. I saw some success but at a considerable cost in
friendly rapport with everyone else. Some were even convinced that the
sexism of other people was the source of their handicap, fueling even more
senseless rage.
I avoid initiating black magic out of self-interest, not out of guilt or
fear of censure and all the women I saw deliberately avoiding politically
incorrect black magic simply created or adopted subtler forms. I believe
black magic will only fade out if upstaged by a clearly more successful
alternative. Your essay expresses too little compassion for a person
defending their dreamworld or a desperately ill alley-cat seeking a way out
of the wild.
My alternative is an open-hearted gang of eight to twenty adults with an
visible, shared, noneconomic dreamworld. I see my own household and the
society around me creeping that direction, and the apparent easing of
neurosis and hysteria encourages me.
A friend gave me a book written by Marion Weinstein, called Positive
Magic, which has also been a great encouragement. She has a list of what
she calls "practices to avoid" in spell creation, and also another list of
what I call her logical social premises, which I found very usefully
insightful. The lists are a formidable challenge to both social capitalism
and marriage, though she makes no comment against either in her book. Here
is my somewhat editted version of her lists:
Negative Spell Creation Practices
- Ritual renunciation or overt mockery of one's religion of heritage,
such as reciting a traditional meaningful prayer backwards. (taking a break
from all forms of accountability on the weekend, analyzing religious ideas)
- Desecration of any traditional holy object or symbol through spitting
on it, trampling it or turning it upside down. (wolf whistle, cursing the
name of jesus when making a terrible error)
- Making deals; promising any entity, demon, angel, spirit, god, or
another person, anything, when invoking a request for something.
(marriage, making a contract, renting a tool)
- Threatening any person or other entity with harm or neglect if they
fail to obey in some way. (warning potential shoplifters)
- Dancing counterclockwise without maintaining a balance of clockwise
dancing (a traditional occult method of summoning up negative energies).
- Invoking revenge or punishment, even to a very minor degree; any
attempt to right a wrong by balancing with another wrong. (calling police)
- The attempt to create technical change in the life or mind of oneself or
another person or spirit in a specific way. (sales effort, quitting smoking)
- Invoking of a curse or wish of bad luck without some form of balancing
resolution at the same time. (verbally condemning a deadbeat customer)
- Use of the possessions, the image or a body product (such as
fingernails) of another person, or entity, within a spell. (cleaning
someone else's house, waitressing)
- Enlisting someone else to engage remedial magic that one poorly
comprehends or feels queasy about. (hiring a lawyer or mechanic)
- Use of an unfamiliar language or poorly understood magic in a spell.
(selling the latest technology, writing a check)
- Ignoring of one's Inner Bell. (going to church, appearing in court)
Some logical premises on which these concerns are based:
- Conflict of interest in Drama is always illusory; any effort that
clearly oppresses another emotionally is not, in the long run, in one's own
best interest, ever, so all one's magic must be overtly intended to be for
the good of everybody and the good of all creation.
- The melodramatic life force of the universe holds no favorites and
exists equally in everyone and in everything.
- One's access to melodramatic power is limited only by one's
comprehension of it.
- A spell always ricochets back to the magician, amplified, and in a form
similar to what the spell created.
- The melodramatic freewill of oneself and of others is essential to life
meaning, and so must be preserved at all cost.
- Melodramatic defeat is, by definition, always temporary and always
subject to infinite redefinition and infinite unknown new approaches.
- It is unlikely or often impossible for anyone to know for sure the best
possible form for a given objective essence to manifest in (thus definition
of form is best left out of a spell).
- By altering the origin of emotions, magic will often fundamentally
transform the magician and their context to the point of being
unrecognizable.
- An unconditional acceptance of the validity of getting what one wants,
or, said another way, a complete respect for one's own definition of
personal need and personal karmic responsibility (self-love), is basic to
sanity and the root of any genuine regard for the life of anyone else.
- All emotionally recognized time, whether past or future, is actually
now, so, to be rational, all words used in spells should be in the present
tense.
And one other, not listed: all human interaction, involving two or more
emotionally self-aware people, is melodrama, whether or not technical
initiative originated the contact, so all economic interaction must involve
only people who are either drugged, hypnotized by mechanical sound or busy
with something, to avoid unintended evil spells.
_________________________________________________________________________
I hope my letter is helpful feedback. Your website has many essays that
have been of great value to me. I have a website also, with a bunch of
essays about similiar matters at http://www.efn.org/~empal. Thanks a lot.
Eric Michener
Return to Homepage