{by Shokti Lovestar, London, England}
AIDS was a collective wake up call to gay people and to all humanity. Calling us to wake up to the fact that Healing Is Vital - healing of the human condition of separation, fear, conflict and suffering. The alarm bells continue to ring out but humanity keeps pressing the snooze button and waking up is taking some time...
2014 - The rate of HIV infection among young gay men is increasing – 30 years after the start of the epidemic. Still we are treating HIV as an entirely physical disease - the gay community is ignoring the deeper story of hiv/aids: the role of the virus in waking us up as individuals and as a community to profound realities about life. HIV came to tell us that we need to nourish our spirits as well as bodies, to look inside and find out who we really are. HIV came to show us that death is a transition not an end. HIV came to tell us we have to care for and love each other as well as fuck. We have not heard the message yet, though there have been voices telling us this since the 80s, so the virus spreads and continues to try to do its real work.
Dear AIDS..... Never before has anyone given me such great opportunity. You don’t know how much you have given me. You have given me the push I needed to take a look at my life, see the problems and find the solutions. I now realize all the choices that I have in life.
Because of you I have learned to love myself, and as a result I love and am loved by others. I am now in touch with parts of my being that I never knew existed. I have grown spiritually and intellectually since your arrival. I have become a loving, honest, and caring person. So again I thank you for giving me this opportunity to have insight into my life. (Paul, 22/7/1987)
It has given me a chance to love myself, Now I know how loved I am, I am finding my spiritual pathway, I needed to change my life in every area, I had to learn that people cared. (attendee at mid 80s aids support group)
Coming Out is the start of a journey of self discovery and self actualisation that goes way beyond the sexual aspect of our inner nature. This is a missing fact in our modern gay mythology: Coming Out is more than the chance to take a lover and be part of society, it is a call to seek deeply for the true Self within and to bring the fullness of who we are into life.
There is no greater catalyst for inner transformation and awakening than facing our mortality. The general human condition is one akin to sleepwalking: with so many conflicting answers to the meaning of life offered from science, religion and every tom, dick and harry many people prefer to avoid the questions. For the majority of people life remains largely unexamined, existential angst medicated away with alcohol, drugs, tv, consumerism etc. Without an understanding of the underlying ground of being that supports all life we are left trying to plug the gaps in our soul energy field, on some level we are always running from fear. Perhaps HIV appeared in gay life so early into our liberation story because our journey of self discovery had become stuck, we were not pursuing the journey beyond the sexual into the political, social and crucially, spiritual spheres of life. Liberated to legally have sex with each other, we still carried an inheritance of shame that affected our behaviours (and still does today), we were not addressing our healing. We were, at long last, having fun! For a while in the late 1970s it seemed that unbridled hedonism was to be the gay future, but HIV sobered us up and made us face our woundings, and how society feels about us. HIV forced us to get organised, get political, and demand both legal rights and social acceptance.
Although amazing progress has been made, and gay people can lead respectable and open lives these days, in gay male life there exists a massive hunger. You can find it in the sex clubs and saunas, on cruising websites and apps. Men put on a veneer of attractiveness and try to mask the fear and loneliness behind our muscles. We see what we want to see in each other, we take what we want from each other.
Never look for a lover, be one..... was the sage advice of American faerie poet James Broughton. Cruising apps and websites tempt us to always be searching, always be on the look out, and never be satisfied, as there will always be something better to be found and had. HIV is perhaps a manifestation of our collective hunger.
Some of us use chemical substances to open the gateways to sexual connection. The ritual of a needle slam, a pipe or a powder takes us instantly to a place where we want the same thing – SEX, and that's all that matters. We open and offer ourselves with nothing held back, anxious and excited to have a moment of perfect connection, hot sex, bliss. The drugs take the place of LOVE. (Love may break our hearts but what effect will long term drug use have on our souls?)
Going beyond our need for companionship, comfort, love, sexual connection etc, at its deepest level the hunger in gay life is at root the need to know who we are: a slice of humanity whose loving expression has been repressed for centuries – although we certainly found our ways to shine forth anyway, eg through culture. Michaelangelo, Tchaikovsky, Whitman: we have made our presence felt. In recent times we gained sexual liberation in part of the world. This process began as early as the French Revolution and the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s, but it wasn't until the late 20th century that our liberation really started to come home. Over a few decades a massive shift in public opinion has brought us queers in the west social acceptance too, adoption rights, marriage rights. Finally we are able to be ourselves.
But we do not know who we are. I was in my 30s before I found out that as well as our role as creators of culture in human history that we had also been the shamans and priests of the planet since very ancient times. As I had dismissed religion and spirituality as a teenager I would not have been particularly interested. I saw all that as superstition, I accepted a scientific biological explanation of our existence – until HIV, and the first symptoms of AIDS, moved me to start asking some deep questions and led me to direct experience of the multidimensional nature of the soul. I saw that I had simply closed my mind to the spiritual realities of life: once I opened it, they manifested before me. When I opened my heart to them too they healed and transformed me.
Now I see that coming out is the start of the journey to Self discovery. We have to think for ourselves and trust our inner feelings in order to embrace our sexuality. We need to do the same with our spirituality. HIV was the catalyst for me to search for spiritual truth. 20 years since this search opened up for me, I see how urgently the confusion and ignorance in gay minds about god, sexuality and spirit need to be blown away. We are called GAY because our souls were born to be happy – to celebrate the miracle of life itself. Our earliest visionaries, Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, saw us as bearers of LOVE and HEALING for the planet. For millennia we were the shamans of the indigenous tribes on every continent on the planet. In the west we have lived and served in churches and monasteries for many centuries. Spirituality is at the very core of who we are. I did not know this, and I bet that the vast majority of men becoming HIV+ today do not know this. Gay culture ignores spirituality, ignores our history of service to humanity, and the continuing spread of the virus, and of drug addiction and other ailments, is the result.
Underlying our ecstatic journeys into sex and energy is the shamanic nature of our souls. The ancient indigenous part of who we are sits inside us waiting for our busy modern minds to shut up and surrender to the greater being within. I underwent a massive internal transformation because I faced and surrendered to death. The shaman connects the worlds and works with energies of nature, sex and love. We are the shamans of the modern world, born into a culture that is confused about, or denies, Spirit. To find out who we really are, and what we are really bringing to the world, we have to look inside: all the way from the sexual to the spiritual aspects of the self.
When we listen to the part inside us that says we are gay we are listening to our souls. But once out, we tend to stop listening so deeply, perhaps becoming enraptured by the lights, glamour, bodies, highs of gay life. Eventually some crisis will come along – heartbreak, addiction or HIV in all likelihood – to shake us out of our dreamstate and face some challenging realities - the simple, ultimate, and quite obvious one is that we have to live from the soul, not from the ego or the cock, if we want a happy and healthy life. Really simple but of course we do not talk about souls in modern life. Your soul might enjoy a lot of sex, might like to take drugs sometimes, but for sure it has other ambitions too, ones that are peculiar and particular to you. We could avoid this crisis stage if we put the soul at the centre of gay life. We could build a culture that celebrates the our ability to love, to create beauty and to bring peace and tolerance to the world, turning around the lies of religion and the huge inheritance of shame and guilt from the past that all of us carry somewhere in our psyche, and also overturning the 'consumerist' approach to meeting each other (as disposable objects) - that is perhaps a revelation of what capitalism is doing to the world on the human level, on top of the destruction it has brought on the environmental.
HIV = Healing Is Vital. Healing of the inheritance of suffering endured by our queer ancestors. Healing of the damage done to us growing up queer in a macho straight world. Healing of the illusion of separation that is the human condition. Healing of the confusion around spirit and soul. Healing of the hunger that stalks many gay lives.
AIDS = Accelerated Individual Discovery of Soul. As I faced death in the mid 1990s I met the multilayered magnificence of my soul. I experienced it as entirely supportive of my homosexuality and my love of pleasure (the things religions eastern and western had told me were 'bad'), and saw that LOVE really is what matters, it is in fact the divine force driving everything. I have chosen to serve the spiritual evolution of humanity ever since, because what I saw blew away all doubts, revealing to me we are part of a divinely perfect, intelligent creation designed to bring us, through life's experiences, to a state of grace and wholeness - all we have to do is cooperate with it instead of resist its call. Love is the Way.
Hunger is a powerful force in gay lives. It might seem to be a hunger for sex, love or friendship, but at its core is something bigger.. We might find some satisfaction on the never ending conveyor belt of gay life, but the hunger will never really leave us until we seek, accept and embrace the fullness of our true nature as spirits having a physical experience. HIV was a wake up call to us in the 1980s and it still is now. Putting it simply: know you are not matter, you are spirit, eternal and free. Death is not an end it is a transition. Drop all fear. Choose love. With this peace of mind in place, find out who you are and pursue your real dreams or life will simply kill you.
HIV IS A CALLING TO KNOW OUR SOULS
TO FACE MORTALITY
AND BREAK THROUGH THE ILLUSIONS, CONFUSION AND LIES OF OUR TIME
HIV IS A CALL TO TURN INWARDS
TO FACE THE SELF
FIND ITS MOTIVATIONS, BLISS, DEEPEST DESIRES AND BRING THEM FORTH
HIV IS A WAKE UP CALL
TO US TO SEE WE NEED NOURISHING IN SOUL
AS WELL AS BODY
OPEN TO THE POSSIBILITY THAT THERE IS NO DEATH
ONLY A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE
OVERCOME FEAR AND FACE THE SHADOW
EMBRACE THE LIGHT AND GROW
I am so happy I came across this post. It was beautifully written and thank you so much for sharing your personal experiences with your readers. It is astounding at how little people know about AIDS/HIV even now even though it is a disease that still effects many. It is even more surprising at the stigma still attached to the AIDS virus. I wanted to recommend a memoir about the subject that is educational, informative and inspiring. It is called “Don’t Stop Dreaming” by author Dr. Russell Tomar (http://russtomarmd.com/). This book offers a first hand account from someone who was right in the middle of the tragic start of the AIDS epidemic. The author shares his struggle with finding a cure as well as trying to understand the cause and treatment of the disease. I feel it is the duty of each individual to educate themselves on things like this that have had such a profound impact on such a large number of people and this book was the perfect way for me to do that. I hope you will give it a read too!
Posted by: Deborah Starling | December 08, 2014 at 09:40 AM