I just did for the Russian magazine HOOLIGAN:
well, actually while reading the Art of Shaman I realized, that you have written it for the guys like me not to annoy you. I mean, it's concrete and literal, solving most of future questions. so, hope you don't mind if there could be some questions asked, that you consider to be answered back in 1990.
1. how do you manage writing those words right now? how you invented that typing machine?
I type on a computer with a head pointer. Recently I added a word prediction software which has cut my keystrokes by seventy percent.
But I thought of the head pointer when I was seventeen. But it took me a year to get THEM to try it. They wanted me to type with my fingers, the NORMAL ACCEPTABLE WAY! I never care about being “normal.” I am practical, going for what works. So when they finally tried my idea, I was typing within five minutes! They wished they didn’t try it because I started writing radical political stuff like a political column for the high school newspaper in which I blasted the Vietnam War… About a year before it became fashionable to do so. This didn’t fit their role for me as a poster child for the disabled! When they sat me down to tell me that, I said I thought the goal was to get equal rights for the disabled [and for everybody], and one of those rights was being political! So!
2. tell me about God - did Reed tell you, why we suffer? shell we all suffer? I mean, you case is not the ultimate in the deplorable list - you know it, at least you donot suffer pain all the time. and you can see, and you areabsolutely sane... why God made us suffer?
Funny in the mid- seventies, we set up a church. In this country, the tax agency decides what gets given the church status. They denied us because they said we didn’t believe in God [= a supreme being]. So we got free civil liberties lawyers and fought, using Reed as evidence. We said we saw the relationship among everybody and everything as the ultimate being, parts of which are within each one of us. We won!
Most suffering is man-made. It doesn’t have to exist. Suffering is different than struggling. Struggling is a part of life. It makes you strong and healthy. It changes things. Suffering doesn’t do these things. Risk, failure, getting “hurt” are all parts of growth. Suffering is added on to us to keep us down, in control.
Since you asked, this is from my book, CHEROTIC MAGIC:
Matter is symbol, is metaphor containing possibilities. These packets shape matter. These packets, in turn, are reshaped by each body or object they pass through. This is why we are affected by the stars, for example, (and the stars are affected by us)...and why we affect the Tarot cards or the I‑Ching coins we cast...why the physicists affect the subatomic particles they observe. This is the alchemical secret: by reshaping these inner packets, the material reality is reshaped.
These inner rivers of possibilities are two‑way on the linear level. This means the magical effects are always two‑way. The light of the sun warms us; but we affect the sun through the same channel. Again, we have entered the level of the dynamic web of relationships in which the individual does not exist. In place of the individual, there appear points of personal responsibility in a dance. It is not the sun that warms, nor is it us who are warmed. It is the dance of no dancers, the dance of relationships that warms, and that is warmed. Individualism hides this fundamental truth from most people.
These rivers of inner possibilities do not run only in a two‑way linear manner. They also travel nonlinearly. This creates a deep ocean under time‑space. In this ocean, there are nonlinear waves of possibility which pass through the points of personal responsibility which most people mistakenly see as individuality. When a wave passes through this, it is possible to personally amplify, mute, or change the wave. This makes the point of personal responsibility the moment of the universal creation. To accept this responsibility of the universal creation, we cannot step back from the ocean to claim the responsibility or judge.
We are then just water drops ... individual water drops, not the ocean. To be in the moment of universal creation, in being the point of personal responsibility, we need to melt into being the ocean for all time, letting the dance happen through us, not thinking we are the dancers. In this point of personal responsibility, everything we do, think, and say is universally important, and not in the individually important sense.
Each center of the body is connected to many of the rivers of possibility. The nonlinear flow of the packets of possibilities within these rivers is chero. By transforming, transmuting, the packets of possibilities, it is actually possible to change matter, to change the material world. This alchemical fact is just the opening for the more important fact that reality is created, recreated every second by and within us.
We have said reality creation is a dance and that we are the dancers. But in truth, it is a dance without dancers. If we really take on personal responsibility for the dance, we surrender to the dance, give up individual "control," give up individual linking with the results. By taking on the personal responsibility for the dance, we are the dance. We melt with the dance. We are only the dance. We admit these facts. It is not a question of becoming, but of remembering and admitting. It is a question of being, living, dancing lustfully, without controls or limits in responsibility. In the apprenticeship, this quality is called "extensic". The extensic life dance is beyond morals or limits. It joyfully digs into the dance to the juicy black core.
We have talked about the principle of inter‑penetration, the spiritual fact that the universal existence is enclosed in everyone and in everything.
To start to grasp this, we have to remember that the cherotic rivers flowing within matter run in a great many directions, both linearly and nonlinearly, both inward and outward. This the web dance. The cherotic packets of possibilities, effectively changed within the person, are taken by these rivers throughout the entire web, affecting the entire web.
So you are never hopeless or without effect. You can always shift reality away from doubts, fears, and other mistaken creations. You can always transform, transmute yourself, situations and the universal currents into joyful dancing by extensic melting, which is the heart secret of using erour.
Kinds of transmuting and transforming of situations and of self is the real purpose of alchemical art. You are not the source of effect, the dance of the web is. You melt forever with the dance within personal responsibility. The effect is caused by the everlasting interplay, inner dance, of the whole web of all possibilities with one another, creating seven dimension waves. You must enjoy the dance for its own sake, not some goal as an end. There is not end to the dance. Since the dance is everlasting, the holding‑on to any guilt, any doubt, any fear is just creating these things in the whole web, for which you are personally responsible. If you let go of these limited frames, your personal responsibility for them will vanish; moreover, their reality force will fade to a certain degree in the web.
When you admit you are melted into the dance, that you are the dance, and that every act and nonact, no matter how "small," is profound, then reality shifts. The focus shifts from what you do, what you appear to be like, what effect you are having...shifts to enjoying extensically life, claiming any and all responsible act or thought as your own no matter who does it.
Matter is a symbol containing within it packets of possibilities. Chero is the possibilities. The human body‑personality is a symbolic system containing possibilities. It is a symbol containing chero flowing nonlinearly through it, breathing through it. The human body‑personality is a point of creative multi‑universal responsibility because it contains self‑awareness. The "self" in this self‑awareness is not the individual ego, but the self of the web of ultimate reality of all possibilities. This self‑awareness is only beginning to evolve out from the web. This means the on‑going act of multi‑universal creation has just started. This creation depends on the self‑awareness which is flowing through each one of us.
Modern physics tells us that our universe is sitting on the razor's edge between existence and non‑existence, leaning slightly on the side of existence. The self‑awareness is the slight edge of existence. It is creating existence. This creating is radiating both linearly and nonlinearly from the point of responsibility which is contained within each of us.
Our point of entry into this on‑going dance of magical creation is our body‑personality in everyday living, everyday relating.
We think our body is contained, enclosed, limited within our skin. In reality, the skin is not the borderline marking the difference between inside and outside, marking off what the individual (or any other object) is. As we have seen, there is an energy field of thoughts, emotions, and other psychic material. This field usually comes out a quarter of an inch from the skin. This field is as much a part of the body as anything within the skin. The skin is the eighth center of the body, the center of relating, of touch, of melting. It is the center which connects the first and the seventh centers together, creating a circle out of the horizontal linear order.
The skin is not a fence of individualistic ego. Instead, it is the connecting organ of the body, our body. This body does not end at the skin. This body, our body, extends both outward and inward throughout the multi‑dimensional, multi‑universal existence which is being created by self‑awareness. What we normally think of as our body is in reality only a small part of our body. It is only a symbol of personal responsibility which lives within us creating. We are now entering the secret of inter‑penetration.
When we look at our body within the physical world, we can easily become aware of physical trails. At least they at first appear to be trails we leave just as the snail leaves a shining trail as it travels along the sidewalk. After we begin to recognize the existence of such trails, we begin to quickly see more and more of these trails. Body smells, dead skin falling or rubbing off the body, fingerprints, sweat, shit and piss are just some of the most obvious of these trails. There are many hundreds of these trails, mostly unknown to modern man. Each of these trails has volumes of information and possibilities about us and about our connection to the web of existence. In fact, each of our trails contains us. The scientist can clone a body copy from a single cell. A cat can read the emotional state of another animal by the smell of the piss left hours before. Everything leaves these traces of its existence in the reality. Our homes are filled with these traces of ours, which is why our homes have feelings of us, smells of us.
These trails are really meltings between our body and rest of the web of ultimate reality. These meltings are the breathing of chero, the blood veins of chero running both linearly and nonlinearly throughout the entire reality web. This implies that the whole web of ultimate reality is one living organism which extends beyond time and space. What is usually thought of as the individual's ego/personality/being is a connection in relationships of responsibility, of creation, and of change.
When reality is seen in this way, what looked like trails of individuals left behind within space and time become channels of cherotic breath and cherotic blood of possibilities. These channels are physical, although not necessarily material. We have just listed some of the more obvious material trails. But thoughts are physical trails too. These thought trails, these melting webbings, are made of many, many different kinds of conducting materials, such as chemical, electrical, vibrational, and many materials that we have not yet either discovered or connected to thought. Thought is focused in the sixth body center, that of wisdom.
Most people think that the thoughts in their heads are their own, coming from their own being...exceptions being strange occurrences of visions, possessions, and other "psychic" events. But thoughts are not our own. They are nonlinear veins of cherotic possibilities running through us. Here I am just using thought as an example of how the webbings work. What is contained is a nonlinear wave of cherotic possibility which has been affected by every mind body it has passed through. When the thought first enters your mind body, it is not your thought. It is in the air. You will always and forever make so‑called mistakes. Will always and forever have contractions. These are a part of the magical process that is life. These could be seen as sufferings, hurts, pains. But as parts of the magical life process, the heavy negativity slips away from them, and they become a rugged mountain path to be lustfully, extensically traveled. Any guilt or pity detours us from the compassionate and passionate life.
The true trusting person trusts life and extensically acts from that trust. He does not ask for proofs of worthiness of trust, no trials or tests for earning of trust. He trusts because that opens the door to all possibilities. When you trust into life, you are fully trusting yourself. When you freely trust others, you open the total freedom for both yourself and others. When the student in apprenticeship lets his trust for the teacher slip, what he is really doing is not trusting himself, not trusting his ability, his courage, his humor. Understand, the teacher is a projection of the student's soul into the field of objectivity. The student and the teacher are melting halves of a whole which we will call "deep love" or "erour love". When the student thinks of himself as just a student, just a disciple ‑‑ as if there could be any greater calling ‑‑ he has lost sight of his trust in not only the teacher and himself, but also in life. This is a common detour into fragile fragmentation, fatal only if the student stays too long in this quicksand pool, or returns to it too often.
The function of the shamans is to take in life‑denials from the universe, transform them into life‑affirmations, then project these life‑affirmations into the web of ultimate reality by actively living these life‑affirmations. This is what being responsible really means. This is real magic, real alchemy, real creativity. It is the cherotic breath. It is the dance without dancers. We as shamans admit that we are not individualistic egos or sources. Instead, we admit we are points of responsibility. This admitting creates a zone around us. Within this zone, life‑affirmations are created out of the life‑denials which have entered the zone. These now life‑affirmations then either combine with older life‑affirmations, creating more richly complex life‑affirming realities, or are projected outward from the zone to be a part of the decaying, rubbing dance with life‑denials. This is very similar to the process of the green plants transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen.
This process is without end. This endless process is magical life. The person who is waiting, wishing, for the end of life‑denials does not understand what life and magic are. At best, she can only put up with life, making do with an unsatisfactory situation. She usually gets overwhelmed and becomes wrapped up in layers of life‑denials which create more life‑denials.
The basic secret of magic is to like life, to love life, to throw yourself into life so completely, so extensically that you lose yourself as a source in the individualistic sense. You become a point in a wave. In this deep love of life, life‑denials are seen as what they really are. They are the building‑blocks of life‑affirmations. The process of transformation of life‑denials into life‑affirmations cannot be done in the Maya of the isolation of individual self. This transformation can only occur within relationships outside of self, within the real whole body of the web. This is why the lusty giving up of self into deep love is so important in order for magic to happen. Awareness is tribal, not individual. To understand this, the student should see the web of reality as one body, one tribe, one organism that is creating itself always.
We will explore what deep love is very extensively in the following book because in deep love we have the very heart of magic. But it is useful to summarize the physical process of the dynamic interplay of reality in our body‑personality.
All chero, which is packets of possibilities, affects you and is affected by you as it passes through your body. These effects shape the waves of change. When light (photons) enters your eye, when sound vibrations hit your eardrum, when air enters your body, they are changed by your body. They are then reflected back both outward and inward into the web of reality. This is also true of thoughts and emotions which are different forms of packets of possibilities.
If you look for sources of these waves, either within yourself or in others, you will be missing the true reality...you will be spinning your wheels. But if you realize that you are a part of a nonlinear system of living change, of universal creation, you will begin to grasp how to be a shaman. By doing what is right in any and all situations, it releases a creative change, not within you, but rather in the relationship between you and a magical other.
This is the root of the student‑teacher relationship. When we talk about doing the right thing, about being responsible, we are not talking about what is considered moral or comfortable in the normal social frame of reality. Such morals are a system of checks that keep most people inside this social frame. The function of the shaman takes us far outside the social frame. So the right thing in the normal social frame may look and/or feel immoral, may look/feel impossible or overwhelming. This can be overcome by admitting you are connected on every level to the web of ultimate reality, connected by personal relationships to the people around (in the apprenticeship, to the teacher and other students). In this way, you are not limited to ego‑power, but are linked to the unlimited force of the web. By projecting the creative change outside yourself within the context of the magical other, you will not be sidetracked by thinking you are the source, that you are doing something. This melts you into erour, into the dance of no dancers, into the magical realm of poetry.
Poetry is a metaphor that explodes normal reality by using things within that normal reality, using normal things, such as words, in non‑normal or super‑normal ways. The apprenticeship is living poetry. The key is the erour love/trust. Erour love/trust is extensic love/trust which has no subject. It is a love/trust of life, of yourself, of the teacher, or others, all in one. This is an act of will and faith. This is the deep love/trust that admits to joy and unity.
3. your posititon is really anti-human on my point of view. I mean, most of people involved in 60ies - they where absolutely anthropocentric in their view - like the cult of body, living in the wild - the position of human perfectness per se. Do you agree, if you do - do you think it could be the reason of decay of the "movement" of 60ies?
Mmmmmm, I don’t really understand what you are saying /asking here. I think I am very human! I think the sixties wasn’t anthropocentric at all. A lot of people were searching for something better, how to live together in a more humane and healthy and spiritual ways. And often we did just that. There is a myth being actively promoted that the sixties were an embarrassing failure. This myth [false myth, a big lie] is a part of the culture war, an attempt to drain the power out of the sixties so that people will not try it again. We stopped the war. We set the civil rights struggle in motion, which set up the women, gay, disabled movements. We started thinking about the environment. The general vibe of the sixties was taking care of one another, of experimental living. Failure is a part of experimenting. But we set up alternative schools, free stores, underground newspapers, free medical clinics, programs to feed people, etc. These were so successful that the government set out to destroy them by any means necessary, including murder [of course all undercover]. So the sixties didn’t “decay.” It was murdered. But most of my friends from back then and the “leaders” of the times who I have interviewed are still working on change!
4. well - now I have a unique chance to speak with the real father of a psychedelic Family from 70ies! I mean, that was the time of Families - Source family, Process family, even Manson family. what can you say about the phenomena? who are the people, that joined you back in 70ies and the ones, who join you now? what means - living in a Family? I'm almost touching the legendary time now!
Well, I have been living communally since 1969. I am still in contact, in relationship, with a lot of them going back to then. Humans are mammals, coming from packs through small tribes. Before two hundred years ago, people had strong extended families. The “nuclear” family is a very recent development, causing isolation, limited possibilities. So the tribal body just seems more practical to me, if the people are committed to one another. This is especially true with raising children. You have people you can depend on.
Here is a poem about it:
tribal performance
by
frank moore
copyrighted, september 30, 1992
i am not interested in
climbing up
onto the alter of the stage,
in hiding behind the invisible fourth wall.
i am not interested in
dividing myself
from the people,
from the magic,
from the tribal community.
i am not interested in
hiding
behind masks
or characters.
i am not interested in
doing monologs,
standing alone
and isolated
under the spotlight...
not interested in
being a cultural commentary.
not interested in
being a lone artist,
suffering,
alone,
traveling around the land,
chasing fame...
or at least recognition......
embittered
that art doesn't pay.
i am not interested in
fucking you
the audience.
i am not interested in
just putting my cock
into your body.
i want much more than sex.
i want to put my whole body
into your body...
i want to take
your whole body
into my body.
i want
our naked skin
to melt together
in touch...
our skin
melted
into an organ of tribal body...
an organ of connection........
an organ that brings everything within.
i want
to erase
the false role
of skin
as the dividing line
that separates
you from me,
the outside from within,
the above from the below.
i want us to be
in a tribal body,
in the state of community.
i want us to be
cozy,
wrapped up into one another's bodies
as parts of one body....
rocking together.
i am not talking
symbolically or abstractly.
i am not talking
flashes or peak experiences.
i am not talking
about fractions of a second,
or seconds,
or minutes.
i am talking about
hours and days
within this tribal body
within the magical reality of performance.
i'm talking about
physical reality that
makes us sweat,
makes us be turned-on...
a reality that
we can touch and rub...
a reality of
human laughter
and heavy sobs of true feeling...
a reality
which sticks onto our bodies,
our naked tribal body...
and gets carried out
of the ritual space
into "the real world,"
"real life,"
infecting
that outer world
with the virus of
new alternatives and new possibilities.
but this tribal performance...
this calling up of tribal body,
tribal experience,
tribal reality...
is much more possible
when the "performance"
comes out of a tribal life....
when the tribal reality
is not limited
to the performance reality.
life on the road
for an artist
is lonely,
isolating.
this tends to
infect
both the artist
and the art.
and the fact of the matter is,
performance is
a full time occupation
for a single body...
and in cold practical reality,
this occupation does not pay the artist...
the artist has to be willing
to pay the art
for the privilege of doing it.
this has always been true.
this will not change.
this places the artist
who lives in only one body
in an almost impossible situation...
a situation
that is only made liveable by either
magic or compromise
(and compromise
is death
to both the art
and the artists).
but the artist
who lives and creates
within a tribal body,
a tribal community,
can perform
many different tasks
at once both
in the art
and in the mundane world.
the tribal body
can go to work
to get money,
do the art's office work,
make the flier,
book tickets.....
all at the same time.
this is also true
for inside the ritual of art.
and besides,
the tribal body
has much more fun on the road...
and that fun
(joy)
infects
the art.
i have a dream for the 90's....
that we will see
artist bands,
clans,
carnivals,
circuses.....
all self-contained
tribal communities...
roaming the country
doing art rituals.
yes,
i have a dream...
the night of the tribal bodies!
_
5. so you have chosen sex as your life weapon, not drugs, music, or violence - like the others did. how it happened you came to this? what do you think of sex culture of 60-70ies? don't you think they all lost the war for sex? what was the evolution of your sex performance - coming to the eroplay.
Well, I think I lay out the evolution of Eroplay in ART OF A SHAMAN. And I use everything in changing things… Music, art, dance, and maybe even drugs [Somala]. I don’t do sex performance. I use sex, like everything else, in performance. As the times got more repressive, my performances have gotten more explicit in response. I have discovered different erotically magical states, each with different effects.
CHERO is the physical life energy. I created the word "chero" by combining "chi" and "eros".
EROUR is vulnerable strength.
EROPLAY is intense nonlinear physical touching, rubbing, licking, exploring for physical pleasure for its own sake. Eroplay is foreplay which is released from the linear goals of reaching genital orgasm.
TANSEX is another state of physical trance play. As in eroplay, there is no genital intercourse. However there maybe orgasms in tansex. But the orgasm in tansex has not the linear goal peak quality it has in sex.
PANTAN combines various kinds of orgasm [explosions of energy] with ontonse [a regular implosion of energy] within an intensely small/intimate nonlinear play. These explosions and implosions feed off one other, creating a sustainable state of enjoyable pleasure. The sustainable state of pantan can become the context of your whole life. Pantan is the state of turn-on, aroused enjoyment of life and of being together. Within pantan creativity, inspiration, a sense of awe and newness, etc. always are at work.
TANPAN may include intercourse, but for magical purposes.
I may use each of these states within a performance.
But I have to say that describing the sixties as a sex culture is again a part of the false myth that drains you of the possibility of getting to the roots of the sixties. True, I think “free love“ was a failed experiment. But this is too simplistic a statement, needing paragraphs of explanations. Also failed experiments are where successful experiments come from.
Moreover, calling the sixties a sex culture is like calling my performances sex performances. It keeps everybody from deep complexity!
6. you are one of the rare american artists, whose art was considered offensive by a government office. tell me more about that case. What are the ranks of offensiveness to the public, you can trace for your art? did you have more problems with law?
I answered most of this in THE COMBINE PLOT which I emailed you. I never try to be offensive. But I am willing to deal with any reaction.
The only time the cops raided my performance was a poetry reading… No nudity, no eroticism! In fact I hadn’t started to read! Go figure it!
7. tell me about your president campaign - some stories right from the horse mouth!
8. couple of words about your future projects and the ones ongoing. and the final project of selling tickets for your death show - that's a triumph of antihumanism.
Well, how about two words? STAY TUNED!
Frank Moore
* * * * *
(Erika wrote:)
Great interview! Really fun to read
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