Spiritual Economics Now

I asked my son, the musician, “Who is Charlie Watts?” and he didn’t know. I even asked his band members and they also didn’t know. I was reminded of when I asked them all, a couple of years ago, “What was it that prompted you to get a driver’s licence?”  They didn’t know. I asked if it were their parents, for insurance purposes …. no; I asked if it were their teachers ….. no. Well, then, what made them go to beg (the meaning of ‘apply’), pay a fee, and take a test for a document which they could not prove was required. Yes, they gave me my anticipated, favourite response:  “Everyone knows you have to have a driver’s licence.”  I told them what I tell everyone who gives me that ludicrous answer, “When ‘everyone knows’ something, you can count on the fact that whoever is spreading that propaganda has a vested interest in ‘everyone’s knowing’ it.  Someone wins by our programmed belief that we are under some obligation to perform for them, when nothing could be further from the truth.”

Back to Charlie Watts. Then I asked my son, “Who is Keith Richards?” Well, Casey and his entire band knew that he is and always was (since 1962) a guitarist for the Rolling Stones …… but not the only guitarist for the Rolling Stones. Yet, Charlie Watts is and has always been (since 1962) not only a drummer for the Rolling Stones but also the only drummer for the Rolling Stones––ever.  So, why do so few recognize his name?

My asking Casey this question was an addendum to a chat that he and I had about his delightful girlfriend. I had asked him if he thought she were the girl for him. His only hesitation in answering me was his thinking that, if he became a well-known musician and was touring the world, think of all the time he would be away from her, not to mention (let’s face it) the girls, aka, “groupies”, who might be available to him. This is what prompted my question, “Who is Charlie Watts?”

The reason that so few of us know about Charlie Watts is that he kept a rather low profile. How was this possible, being the drummer for one of the best-known bands in the history of music?  Answer:  His wife was the most important one in his life and, at every opportunity, he flew home to her and their daughter.

Charlie married at the age of 23, in 1964––typical of that era, but not typical of a lifestyle such as his. He had known her before the band became famous and their marriage has survived 46 years.  This is not to say that he didn’t deal with his own demons, as we all do, claiming that his drug and alcohol problems were “a mid-life crisis. All I know is that I became  totally another person around 1983 and came out of it about 1986. I nearly lost my wife and everything over my behaviour.”

I have since ‘googled’ well-known men who appear to have kept out of extreme limelight and I am amazed by the number who married under the age of 25 and are still married.  These men usually found the loves of their lives before they took on much emotional freight (temporarily disregarding the horrors of childhood)  and so I contend that after age 30, or so, we BRING, into our relationships, emotional traumas which, although the mate will intellectually understand, does not have first-hand knowledge of it and, ergo, lacks a certain degree of empathy; whereas, before age 25, or so, our mates have agreed to SHARE our emotional trials with us and so the old line, “we have a history together”, stands strong. It’s one thing to have compassion for someone’s angst, grief, anger, fear, yet, quite another to have gone through it with him. This is not to suggest that there are not some spectacular marriages after age 25; I just think that marrying young, providing there is a degree of maturity, might be an essential factor in building a strong and lasting marriage. (I use the word ‘marriage’ only because I am so tired of the word, ‘relationship’.)

I mentioned this to Casey to let him know that,  as important as he thinks his band and music are to him, there is nothing more important to any man than a loving mate and life partner who is with him, now, before he makes it to the world tours and, then, after it is all over.  Charlie managed to have it all and he was wise enough to remain aware of his priority.  “Ever faithful to his wife Shirley, Watts consistently refused sexual favours from groupies on the road; in Robert Greenfield’s STP: A Journey through America with The Rolling Stones, a document of the 1972 American Tour, it is noted that when the group was invited to the Playboy Mansion during that tour, Watts took advantage of Hugh Hefner’s game room rather than frolic with the women.”

This is a man who had known what he wanted––and don’t we all wish we had––at such an early age. Whilst all the other band members were doing whatever they were doing, Charlie was, for the bulk of the time, either with his family or evidencing his devotion to them. THIS is why so few people know about Charlie Watts. What sort of headlines could he have captured?!  “Rolling Stone drummer flies home to his family!”  The sex-and-drug stories of the other band members are what made the headlines.

I might have inspired Casey’s song, Living in Apathy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM75bba4BBE   Casey is lead singer, in the striped shirt), the lyrics of which include: “you come to our shows, might as well take off all your clothes, we won’t even know you’re there, ‘cause some of us don’t care”,  ….. and I might not have inspired it.

It dawned upon me that, along with the global elitist’s propaganda that women wanted to be out working, away from their children, and ‘equal’ to men, equally suiting their purposes is the propaganda that people ought to wait until they are older to marry, as this also destroyed the family by not only putting off until later our having children but also by reducing the number of children we can have, due to our having less time to do so. This heralded the end of big families and, along with the infliction of inflation, the most insidious tax of them all, it added to the plan of busting up our prime source of emotional and spiritual support….. the family.

Over the years, just as I have asked everyone I ever knew who had cancer––friend, family, or patient––and discovered that the cause was always emotional trauma about 6 months to 2 years prior, so I have asked many, many men my age how it is that they are still married. The most common answer I get is, “I married my high-school sweetheart.” This does not mean that they got married right after high school; it means that they married their first love. For some wild and crazy reason, recognizing the love of their life seems to be the sole area in which men’s intuition outranks women’s.  These same many, many men who take the proverbial bull by the horns and marry that woman seem to be happier and have longer marriages than those who do not. Many, many men regret not having done so. I hear story after story of men who, after divorce, go and find their first loves and, yes, end up with them. None of this is true of women.

When I was doing Rapid Eye Technology, I had many clients who were having “relationship problems”. Inevitably, the women were distraught over not being able to have the man they wanted and the men were puzzled about why the woman they loved couldn’t recognize that they were, indeed, loved. I am suspicious that men might know their hearts better than women do. I finally came to suggest to the women, “I don’t care whether you think he is the man you’re supposed to marry or even how you feel about him; I care about what HE feels.”  Men seem better equipped to access information about their future mates.

So, I began to suggest to the men, “All women care about is whether they are loved and cherished and, ergo, whether their children will be taken care of.” A good marriage seems not to be based upon whether women love their man as much as whether they feel loved by their man. Correspondingly, a good marriage seems not to be based upon whether men feel loved by their woman as much as whether they feel as if they can trust their woman to respect, support, and honour them. Once a man makes up his mind about a woman, he almost blindly trusts her to run the relationship, the family, the home, etc. until he has evidence to the contrary. I don’t think it matters much what a woman opts to think about the man who loves her, just as long as he does love her.

My friend told me that even before their marriage ceremony was over, her husband turned to the guests and raved, “I got myself an angel!”  What a demonstration of love and trust!  Imagine the sense of security she felt, in hearing that!  Well, only we women can imagine that because that is all we care about….. “Does he love me enough to take care of me and my children?  Will he brave the world to keep us safe?”

I felt that sense of insecurity about life that most women feel, in my 30s when I was dating an FBI agent who said to me, “Mary, I think you are looking for someone to live your life for you.”  I realized I had blown my cover and did everything I could to pretend that, although this couldn’t possibly be true, it was an interesting concept for me to consider but, well, he was an FBI agent and there wasn’t much I could get past him. So ended one aspect of my relationship with the feds.

What a man needs to hear is a woman boasting about how well he is handling the world and how safe and happy she feels with him as her partner.

There is a case of a woman who wants to divorce her husband so she consults an attorney. He hands her the papers and tells her what to do. She said, “Oh, no; I don’t want just to divorce him; I want to make him miserable.”  With a sigh, the attorney says, “I see. Then, follow my instructions closely: go home and be happy.” “What?!?! But, I’m NOT happy and I want to make him as miserable as he has made me!” “I know; I’m telling you how to do that.  Be happy. Happily make his favourite meals; have sex with him whenever he wants it; wear the clothes he loves; at the end of his work day, look lovely, have a drink ready for him and, with a smile, ask him about his day; socialize only with those friends whom he enjoys; do not bore him with your idle chatter; talk about only subjects which he finds interesting ….. you get my drift.”  “Are you crazy?”  “No; I promise you that, if you are willing to do this for six months, when you do divorce him, you will make him completely miserable!  He will be lost without you. I’ll contact you in six months.”  When the attorney rang her to remind her about proceeding with the divorce, the woman exclaimed, “Divorce!  Are you crazy?!  I’ve never been so happy in my life!”

What is the number one thing a man wants from his woman?  No.  He wants to see her happy….. because of him.

When I was 20, I was dating a musician and we had talked about getting married in a few years and, once this was decided, I told him that, now that we knew this, I intended to go and live my life for the next 4 years––travel, meet people, have adventures, etc. and I’d meet him then so we can get married and start our life together. What kind of insanity was I running, eh?  He looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language and, after he recovered,  he said, “I don’t think you are clear on the concept. When two people love each other, they want to spend time together, not apart.”

This was an enigma to me because, clearly, all I was looking for was someone to take care of me, not someone with whom I could share my life. It must have been difficult for me to believe that anyone could feel that way about me and this is probably because I was incapable of feeling that way about someone. Based upon my theory, I now know that I would have been wise to have married him, because he loved and cherished me, but he would not have been wise to have married me, because I could not be trusted to respect, support, and honour him.

We have all been so propagandized, that we were forced to forget what we wanted and when we remembered, we were made to look foolish because of it.  Ask any female  ‘senior’ what she intends to do after high-school and she will tell you what course she wants to study at university or what job she hopes to find. There was a very tragic year, about a decade ago when some horrific percentage of girls answered, “Business Admin.” They intended to don suits and become men….. just what we need––more masculine women!  No one will admit to, “Get married and have a family” and if one will, she will be disrespected by her friends. We are made to feel guilty for wanting what we want. How absurd, when doing what we want is how we express ourselves.

I notice that one’s blood-type affects the dynamics of relationships. Blood-type ‘A’s tend to be frenetic, brilliant, difficult to live with, annoying but exciting, and the geniuses of the world. I suspect this is because they feel as if they do not belong on this planet and so they move into their intellect, in order to handle this sense of “stranger in a strange land”.  ‘O’s tend to be more stable, easier to live with, not as exciting, and feel as if they belong on this planet more than ‘A’s do.  ‘A’s and ‘O’s tend to attract one another because ‘O’s need fascinating, energetic  ‘A’s in their lives and ‘A’s need the ‘O’s to reel them in and settle them down.

So, an A/O marriage is potentially good, an O/O marriage is likely to last forever, but only because both are so bloody boring (I’m kidding), and an A/A marriage is likely to end in homicide (kidding, again…. sort of).  My older son, Colin, claims he can detect an A or an O because, “A is for ‘Annoying’ and O is for ‘Obviously nice’.”  Obviously, he is the O.

When I attempted to blood-type my younger son, the A with the O girlfriend, he said, “I know I’m an A!”  I asked him how he “knew”. He said, “I walk fast, I talk fast, I don’t like meat, I’m brilliant, fascinating, annoying ….”  I agreed but continued to pursue the matter, saying, “Casey, we won’t ever really know until we type your blood.” His protest and my cajoling seemed interminable, but he was adamant, “MOM!  I KNOW I’m an A!”  “Casey, how can you say that you KNOW you’re an A?”  “Because I’m an asshole.”  I had no further argument. That was the end of discussion and also of any subsequent attempt, on my part, to type him.

All that said, none of it addresses the true purpose of relationship with a life partner, though, which is:  for the spiritual evolution of all “one” of us.

Is it possible to find a life-partner who knows that the purpose of the relationship is to stand by the other when the going gets tough… when the childhood traumas surface, all the while remembering that the present partner had absolutely nothing to do with those traumas, yet, at the same time, it most certainly appears that this is the case.

YOUR ARE NEVER  UPSET FOR THE REASON YOU THINK

When I was 33 my beau and I separated. A couple of months later we were both fine and dating other people. One Saturday morning I was having my tea and muffin and watching a re-run of Ozzie and Harriet, as I did every Saturday morning back then. I had planned to ride my motorcycle to the beach as soon as the show was over. About ten minutes into the show I ‘heard’, ‘leave now’. I thought, ”that’s crazy; Ozzie and Harriet isn’t over yet.” I was very inclined to watch the rest of the show and yet, I felt I just had to leave right then. So I did.

I was riding up the hill, which curves right, near the beach to park my bike at my friends’ house when I saw, parked to my right in front of their house, my ex-beau’s blue car and there was a woman sitting in it. I became completely hysterical. It really is true that one goes completely unconscious and becomes automaton during one of these ’stack attacks’ and all my senses ceased to function. I was sobbing and out of control. I wonder how I managed to hold my bike.  I recall phoning a friend and I was so nuts she didn’t recognize my voice. I was such a wreck I didn’t go to the beach; I just went home.

About three hours later I wondered what in hell had happened. I felt fine. I couldn’t figure out why I had been so upset. I knew he was seeing someone else ––hell, so was I! ––so I hardly felt as if I were missing something. What WAS that?  Since I know that ‘I am never upset for the reason I think––it is always only a reminder of an earlier, similar trauma’–– I knew that what seemed to be the matter was not the matter. So, for six (6!) days I continued to ask myself, ”What was that?”  I searched my mind for why a woman in his car was so upsetting to me.

On the Friday evening I was pulling some baked muffins out of the oven when I suddenly saw what it was. The muffins went flying into the air as I so clearly saw exactly what my computer brain had found, after nearly a week of search. I was driving up a hill, which curves right, in my mum’s car. I was 17. I saw my father’s blue car parked to my right and there was a woman sitting in it. I was quite stunned and so I turned around and by then he had started his car and was driving away from me. I chased him. He appeared to be alone. I felt as if I sped through intersections and red lights even though he seemed not to be speeding (I wonder if everything were in slow motion which is what occurs when one is in shock.) Had it been earlier I would have gotten hit broadside by traffic. I was completely unconscious and on automatic survival mode (adolescents tend to over-dramatize situations like this). I lost track of him and the next day when I asked him why he didn’t stop he told me that he thought I was my mum in the car. I did know the woman who was in the car with him but by this time it was immaterial and irrelevant. I felt as if my father had caused me to endanger my life by not stopping.

This is the best example of the best evidence I have that, when we are upset, it has nothing - NOTHING -  to do with the one who seems to have upset us nor - NOR - the situation. We can use these circumstances as opportunities to discover which traumas we have yet to release.  (Remember, our life––the people in it and the circumstances of it––is only a mirror of what is going on in our minds. Our life is our reflexion, so trying to change people and situations is, as David Icke says, like combing the mirror to get our hair right….. it won’t work.)

Seeing the sole purpose of “upsets” as “opportunity”, we can thank the one who has upset us because now we know ourselves better. If it is our life partner who has upset us, it can often be very dramatic and people even bust up relationships over drama, rather than making use of these situations AND by making use of our mates to clear past horrors. We must not blame the one who has upset us; he is a kindred spirit who is quite possibly fulfilling an obligation he made to us at another level of consciousness and he is here to assist, and the reason the upset showed up as it did is because we likely refused to get the message when it was offered at a gentler level.

I do my best to feel blessed when I am upset, albeit, usually, that is difficult. First, I establish that what appears to be the upset is not real, so that, then, I can observe the illusion, in order to get a clue as to the truth of the matter, in order to get back in control. If we ever think we are beyond being upset, we ought to think again. If I had already perfected this process I wouldn’t be here. I still get upset and am wont to respond with very clever remarks––often not the best way to handle other people. I am conscious enough to realize this and I am always willing to make the required correction, which also is often difficult, but I know that if I don’t do it now, it will only be less facile, the next time I am reminded of the trauma.

When the ego mind is reminded of a past trauma, by a present event, it takes, from the past, the emotion it felt then and applies it to the present, thereby tricking us into believing that our feeling about the present event is accurate when, how could it be, when the ego mind does not live in the ‘present’, it cannot access the ‘present’, and it has no idea that the ‘present’ even exists. It lives in the past and the future––specifically, regret of the past and fear of the future. Once it latches on to a present event, attaching to it a past emotion, it strengthens the already-existing belief which was created by the original traumatic event and sets about, again and again, seeking evidence, in the alleged ‘present’, to support its belief.

Yet, this corroboration simply cannot be accurate and the sooner we grasp this concept, the happier we’ll be. Remember that the ego mind would rather be ‘right’ than ‘happy’, so it would rather be right about its evidence supporting a believe which we might have about our ‘marriage’ being miserable than happy about the true purpose of our ‘marriage’ which is to become aware of the tricks of the ego mind. The ego mind will pull every stunt in the book to trick us into thinking that it is the answer to all our problems, in order to keep us from noticing that it is, indeed, the cause of all our problems.

Marriage is a spiritual agreement for which I think there is only one vow which ought to go something like this:

Based upon how I have felt about you for (length of time) and how I feel about you today, for the spiritual well-being of all involved, I promise to stand by you when you react to whatever I say or do which reminds you of the traumas of your life before me. I promise to do my best to remember that whatever you say or do, during your emotional reaction, has nothing to do with me and I will do my best to allow you to remember this, too, without ego involvement. There are bound to be times when I fail, as my ego might be reacting as well, based upon my own past traumas, but I promise not to allow the sun to set before we talk out the episode and release the matter, to the best of our ability. If you’ll declare that you are, at least, willing to do the same for me, I’ll know that I can trust you to allow me to be myself, be vulnerable, be honest, and to feel loved, respected, and honoured (women can say, “and to feel loved, cherished, and honoured”). I expect this will keep us busy for a lifetime and, as my spiritual evolution is my prime concern, I look forward to spending the rest of my life with you.

Now, THAT is a “marriage vow”. Who is capable of honestly proclaiming it?  Charlie Watts might not have used those precise words, yet, he seems to have most certainly lived them. The most efficient way to advance spiritually is to do so within an intimate relationship. If you are already in that situation, then take advantage of it and use your mate as both your reminder of your past traumas and your opportunity to release them.  “When you clear your personal stuff, you can go cosmic.” –– Barbara Marciniak.  Charlie Watts is a man who clearly realized the opportunity of his intimate relationship and managed to hang onto it, in order to do the spiritual work which we all want completed.

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