Man to Man

IA B U ox i A i e u

greatly. The phenomena is called "rotation of the testicle." You know it even changes when you bathe. For this reason, some people never remove their underwear all at once, but remove one leg, then put the other one on. They are very particular that this won't happen.

This is the only country where nobody cares. They think the scrotum is just something extra hanging there. But I think that in the realms of consciousness, the testicles are very important. They are always a couple of degrees lower than the body and that temperature should be maintained. Everything should be done to insure that.

Q: I couldn't understand your grave message about mental masturbation.

Yogi Bhajan: I am saying that your projections are mainly mental and what brings you to wet dreams is totally mental. You work through mind and body but the body is subjected to the mind.

Q: Should the testicles be held in place at all times?

Yogi Bhajan: Yes. This is required.

Q: Two questions: first, how do people become fixated on a scent; and secondly, what other exercises can one do for the other senses that will have the effect that Peacock Pose has on regulating the sense of smell?

Yogi Bhajan: Basically the sense of smell is related to the pituitary. This connection is enjoined in many books and many sutras where it is related to the Third Eye Point which is nothing but the pituitary gland. The sensitivity which the body has is to its own odor. Each body emits a certain odor and desires an odor in return. Some people are fixated on a certain flower, some on wood, some on hair, some on rain. Some people are very horny on hot days. Sometimes on that very hot day, it will rain and the earth smell will come out. There are some people who cannot control themselves at all under those circumstances.

If you do Breath of Fire regularly, everything will normalize. That is why Breath of Fire is called Breath of Fire. It burns all inadequacies.

Q: Should Long Deep Breathing or Breath of Fire be done with PeacockPose?And, how long should we hold the posture?

Yogi Bhajan: A long, slow breath would be best and hold the posture from 11 to 22 minutes. Try it.

Sex Is a Natural T h in g

Does the spermatozoa control the egg? Does the egg control the spermatozoa? No. They totally merge, they totally get lost in each other.

In the old civilizations, I am not talking about the barbarian .

between sex and stomach, is so essential to your life—you. ■J

Take what used to be a very simple Western system: go out and have dinner and dance. Come midnight, they would wind up the evening. They would wait a while and therv;- maybe indulge --in sex. These days, you take somebody ; 'V- out, give that girl a sandwich or something, pull her off somewhere and just do it, and that's it. If he's really trying

to impress her, he may take her to the falafel stand. I call it "sandwich sex," There is no system, there's no rhythm, tftere's no understanding that if you are putting something in and you are taking something out, the procedure cannot be that fast.

Ma To Man

Further, 1am worried about people who eat meat not becauseTm against it. If you want to sleep with a pig at night and eat him first thing in the morning, it won't bother me if that is your bacon. The real thing I am worried about is the food that doesn't come out of your body within 24 hours; it is very damaging to sex, to creativity and to maintaining what is called the "grit" of the man, the real man. The real man is the man that stands within your Self.

You will find that people who eat meat throughout their lives, become bulky after, the age of 54. They are bulky in their face and their body; they even become bulky in their behavior. They lose their sophistication, their delicacy. Their behavior will become very itchy, and sexually, they will have as many diseases as you can list.

'■I talked to a man #ho came, to me in tears, and-1 could understand why. The guy was 39 years old and totally impotent. Totally impotent at age 39! It was a shock even to me. I asked him if there was any time in his life that he ate too much of any particular food over a sustained period of time'. I found that while he was in college, which is known as a time for shoving food into our systems just for convenience, he would eat six raw eggs blended in milk with a shot of brandy every day. I couldn't believe it, I told him .-that the..only effective, treatment would be. a tablet of potassium cyanide!. There, is no treatment that is,, no allopathic or homeopathic treatment. Fortunately, thereis treatment and there is treatment: three foods from India can be made into a juice that will help. So I called a friend of mine who sent it over here, and by Guru's grace, he is all right now. But who wants to go through that?

Now I am going to tell you something that you don't

understand and don't want to understand. You are going to experience failure. Have you ever known a child to be born without a pregnancy? is there any way for you to have intercourse today and three hours later, push, a child emerges? No. What happens? You get hot, you get horny, you have intercourse, and out of a lot of intercourses—you miss so many shots you wouldn't believe it—there is one pregnancy.

Sometimes you say, "A~ha, I'm a great man!" Other times, it's "Aye aye aye." I mean, that is life, isn't it? You fail every day. Are you crazy? It is a part of life. You must understand—it's the price we pay for pregnancy. But when you fail, you say, "I'm inadequate. I can't do anything." Once someone came to see me who was very crazy; he had failed at something and his rage was such that he had scratched his cheeks until they bled. He came to me and 1said, "Can you believe what you are doing to yourself?" And I sent him to get first aid, They treated him, gave him a tetanus shot, and charged him $39. It is ridiculous. A part of the natural, sexual indulgence, which is given by God, is that out of many intercourses, many chances, there is one pregnancy. This is the fundamental creative law of success, It must be accepted. All of you who want to get in and then out and be done, that's it. You're crazy. That's not the natural path. The natural path is indulgence, intercourse, penetrate, indulgence, intercourse, penetrate, and so on. Remember it. It is a natural law. Nobody else will teach it to you and then I'll be gone.

You Americans think you are very sexy, but.) find you very dumb. You don't know anything about sex. It's ridiculous. Sex is penetrate, indulge, and intercourse. Keep on doing that until you feel the situation, the object, ispregnant. From the pregnancy starts the attitude of success. In pregnancy,

Man To Wlan

If through overindulgence or masturbation or some other circumstance, your organ becomes bent

— this normally happens to most people— or if you find that your erection doesn't catch up from the base, which is a problem shared by 80% of all men then you are going to have trouble. Immediately after intercourse, your organ should begin to shrink back, but due to these problems, you will find it

isjust slumped down like a broken tree branch. You do not understand how damaging this is. it irritates the entire system m the brain.

Not only is it very irritating but it is a slow irritation. It takes 17 hows for the reaction to occur, then when you get up, you will feel very

heavy headed and your body will feel sluggish. It gives you a feeling of having sinned. That is the physical origin of the idea of sex as a sin. The Catholics didn't dream it up. they just propagated it. it is called the

'reaction of the male organ."

This pistachio chapati. which is very costly and very good, can put you back into gear. Do you understand what I am saying?I am a holy man and I must stay within the boundary of the law so that what I say does not appear sexual, but I have to teach you Qod's laws. If you break manmo.de laws, you go to jail and get out on parole, if you break natural laws, there's no parole. I am concerned about this and believe that no man should break a natural law.

the attitude of success is nursing. Be it a marriage, a business, a relationship, a church, God, whatever it is, the most sophisticated thing you can do as a human being on this Earth is called nursing. Nurse friendship, nurse relationship, nurse everything!

The greatest phenomenon of sex and success is totally qualified in one word, one dimension, one thing: the art of nursing. You can learn it from the woman. She turns her blood into milk. You turn your anger into seva, service. Do you understand what I am saying? Just as a woman turns her blood into milk to nurse a child, you can turn your anger into service. No matter how dumb a man may be, if he serves, he'll be successful, because this simple law— seva—is the secret of success.

Why do we want to do our thing? Why don't we just do what God does? Don't you want to be successful? Is there anybody on Earth who doesn't want to be successful? Success comes from nursing. That is how God laid the law of success. Nursing means tenderness, handling it right, letting it suck on you. YouAmericans abuse that word, "Ah, he's a sucker.'' I don't like it when you abuse it that way. It's not right. If you can afford it, let it suck. People will want to lean on you, to leech off you, to get things out of you. But remember, it is the law of nursing. When somebody comes and uses my telephone to make

a drunken call, I know it is a drunken call. It is not going to be a local call and I'm going to pay the bill. I know that. There's nothing to be mad about Why? I know that he is sucking. It is the law of nursing. I say, " Hail, hail to Guru Ram Das that I am competent enough to tolerate this." You've got to hail.

I had a very beautiful friend. After many

years, he came to me with a request. He said, "I want to do something."

I said, "What?"

He said, "You know, I want somebody to take me around, drive me around, and I want you to give me the car."

I said, "All right, I'll give you the car. What else?" "Get it gassed up for me."

"What else?"

"I want that plastic card so that if I need more gas, I can get it filled."

"All right, what,else?"

He said, "Then give me $500 also." "What else?"

"Well, if you can afford to give $500 to the person who is going with me."

I said, "Wait a minute."

I got the whole idea. I made a call. I said, "Rent him a car and go with him if he wants you to. If he wants to go by himself, it is all right. Let him have his fun."

He did that for one day and then he came to me and said,

"I didn't enjoy a thing."

I said, "You must understand a simple law, if you overeat, you vomit—even when it's milk from the mother."

That's called the law of vomiting. You vomit sexually when you overindulge, especially when you are young, the simple years. But the most dangerous vomiting is done by those between the ages of 36 and 54; because when you overindulge in sexual activity at this age, it means you're not preparing for your creative activity, your creative years. At that time, one wrong intercourse will not let you think right for seven days. I repeat: one wrong sexual intercourse will not let you think for one week—four of them and you are out for a month.

What is more, sexual intercourse, from the point of penetration, indulgence and ejaculation, must be done tenderly, completely. If not, it will give you indirect anger. Indirect anger results in a hot temperament, and a hot tem­ perament comes from unsatisfied sexual relationships. This means the sexual relationship is done without RamLila. We call it Ram-Lila love, Krishna-Lila love. Lila means play, playfulness. Many games must be played in love making. Watch what happens, watch animals or a healthy child, when it is taking milk from its mother, it will use its hands and you will see the play there. There must be a play

from the beginning to the end, just to be normali

'This indirect anger—hot temperament— is called "shadow anger." It is a sexual diseasethat hasnotyet beendiscovered by medical science. Shadbw anger is

the disease of people who are sexually dissatisfied or unsatisfied. Their sexual relationship is not normal, it is not complete, it is not properly nursed.

It can result from sexual intercourse with a full stomach, an upset stomach; it can also result from not having cozy environments, or a rhythmical system, or a playful woman; it's quite a tragedy.

A woman who is not playful, who says, "Touch me not, touch me not," is not even as good as a pillow! You are better off to go to a good department store, buy a big pillow and marry that. It is soft, it is cozy, it won't answer back, it won't tell you, "Go away,'' and it won't cost much. A big, long pillow will cost you about $20 and you can put it between your legs and sleep nicely. A woman who is not playful is not worthwhile. The beauty of the woman is not her eyes, or her lips, or her nose, or whether she is young or old, and all that, her beauty is her playfulness. A woman who is not playful is dreadful. -

Understand the system. Sex is a natural phenomenon— sex as it is, is atotally natural phenomenon. Don't associate sex with guilt. Thanks to Catholicism, sex is a guilt, sex is

Mara To Man

Yogi Bhajan: Michael is our family friend. He is able to read faces. Michael, what are the facial characteristics of an impotent man? Imagine the picture and features of an impotent man,

Michael Ebner: I get two types. One is an individual who feels powerless and shows it. His eyebrows droop, the face muscles droop and there is a sort of softness and downward turn about the mouth. He feels that he can't impact the world. All this comes from a message in his earlier experience, especially from his mother, that he's a wimp and he buys the message.

The second type has a lantern jaw—very square jaw^ He's super-macho, the powerhouse trip. He received the same original message, but when this person was confronted with "You're a wimp," he bent over backwards to express, "I am not." However, when he gets involved in a close relationship with women....

Yogi Bhajan: Close contact ....

Michael Ebner: Yes. When he gets into close contact with a woman, his jaw goes up and his pemh goes down.

Yogi Bhajan: Can you tell us about the moderate man? Someone who is neither impotent nor the most potent?

Michael Ebner: This is an individual who is at home with the world and with people. He is able to be tender, expressive and vulnerable in close relationships; but at the same time, he is able to be assertive and protective if need be, and to be potent and powerful.

He has a muscular firmness about the face, not tautness or gauntness or a jutting type of face. There is a flexibility in the face. The eyes are rather open, the mouth is full but not the super-full mouth and the face tends to be rather oval in form. The body musculature is broad shouldered, relaxed and-supple.

Yogi Bhajan: What do you see about the tendency of people who are sexually like rabbits?

Michael Ebner: Do you mean wimps?

Yogi Bhajan: No, rabbits.

Michael Ebner: Studs.

Yogi Bhajan: No, not studs. The stud takes time. These people don't take any time. They are in and out. "Touch me and I'm done."

Michael Ebner: The premature ejaculator.

Yogi Bhajan: Well, just at the gate, at any rate they cannot ■ge further than the gate.

Michael Ebner: I call that the running-everything-through- the-penis trip. This is an emotional situation. In this culture men are not allowed to express emotion for the most part. They can express anger but certainly not tender emotions. Because of this, they sit on their emotions and eventually, they channel them through sex, which is the only emotional outlet allowed by their families. Whenever they begin to become sexually aroused, then the power of all those unexpressed emotions wells up within them and they go off. They can't control it because they've got all that other emotional stuff coming through the penis.

Yogi Bhajan: You know all these things I am discussing with you, I learned at the completion of my sixth year of life..-1 am just introducing you to my childhood. We were given this training. We were taught what personality is, what a man is, what his features are, what his motivation is, how he deals, and why he deals the way he deals.

So Michael, what about the sexual acrobats?

Michael Ebner: There are two aspects to this phenomenon. One I call the perennial child. That's the individual who is into having a good time and making a lifestyle out of living for the moment, in the moment, and doing nothing but that. If it doesn't feel good, he doesn't do it, and if it does feel good, he does it continuously.

The other aspect is the selection of sexual skills as the basis of personal identity. As far as this person is concerned, sexual competency is the only thing that matters. Some base this skill on physical strength, others on technical skills and still others create a sort of sexual service situation. The basis of this individual is his extreme finesse as a sexual organism.

When these aspects are merged, you get an individual who is just a walking ego trip, trying to prove he is the world's greatest lover. At the same time, he is a total pig, using his sexual acrobatics to give himself a good time. He is only concerned about his partner's experience to the extent that he can get some ego strokes from it.

1Michael Ebner was also known as Dr. Narayan Singh Khalsa.

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Michael Ebner: The•basic root of that personality is the perennial child that I just mentioned. This man's mother, who is programmed by her own experience as a child, primarily by her father; by his withholding and selfinvolvement, has a lot of anger toward men, At the same time, she is vulnerable to men who are like her dad, so she marries one like him. She becomes highly dissatisfied with him and then turns to the son as a substitute lover, so to speak. Of course, she programs the son to be just like the fat^er*

Yogi Bhajan: I want you to go into full detail about this "substitute lover" business. I can't go into it in detail because I am a holy man. Ninety-nine percent of all women do that, and in America, I have seen almost 90%, which means that 90% of all men are impotent because of their mother's trip. I call it the mother's day gift. I want you to give the details of it.

Michael Ebner: This is basically where the child has been told by the mother, "Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me... or I'll kill you." That message comes from programming in early infancy, when the mother can withdraw basic life support from the infant. The moment the child starts to show an interest in anything besides being the mother's basic support system, she engages in abandonment behavior, which builds a fundamental panic in the child. All she has to do to subsequently control behavior is purse her mouth or tighten up a little bit and the child/man responds with total panic.

She uses her polarity to tie him into her so that she becomes, virtually, the most important person in the world to him. Simultaneously, she shapes him, through this very subtle behavior, to become a specialized support system for her. As a result, he is unable to separate from her, afraid to do so, and terrified of her. Underlying all this is that shadow anger you spoke of. The more intense the pattern gets, the heavier the shadow anger gets; it can even reach homicidal proportions.

- Yogi Bhajan: •Unseen intercourse is responsible for bringing a lot of impotency to all men. The result is that the, man grows to an adult and either cannot get enough sex to satisfy that unseen sex, or he's undersexed and even rejects his legitimate mate. Could you explain the origins

of that? . Michael Ebner: There are three parts of it, One of them js fear of engulfment that comes with closeness, Another is the incest taboo reaction that comes when the man starts to become turned on sexually to his wife. That stimulus activates the memory of the mother's sexualizing of the son and an incest impotence results. The third part

is that rage—that shadow anger,

Those three aspects, the two anxieties and the anger, are effective anti-aphrodisiacs and they literally cut sex off at the pass. That man has a triad of very powerful negative emotions that are activated every time he starts to get

cfose t0 a woman-

Yogi Bhajan: Do you understand that parenting style in which the child is taught to "be a pimp, not a man" and "be a prostitute, not a woman"?

I want you to discuss the hierarchy of the man, the producer, Why do the producers subconsciously produce the prostitutes and pimps that we say have shadow sexuality? Freud never used that word because he was afraid the ■people .in his time would eat him alive, but., the ancient scriptures use the words, "shadow sexuality." Shadow sexuality is the result of the children being influenced by the deficiencies and efficiencies between the parents themselves.

Michael Ebner: We need to see the nuclear family as a backdrop to this situation. Originally the family evolved as an extended group in the midst of a community that was pretty much committed to the individual. For the most part, child-rearing practices were shared among the community, Now we have set up an industrial-technical society where

the male, by design anyway, is pulled away from the family anGj female is kept at home. All the major support

systems for the child-rearing procedure are gone and only one individual has to handle the whole damn thing. This js virtually impossible. The wif^ can't be all things to one person, the husband, much less be all things to one person and to the kids,

Those are the kinds of dire straits we find in the nuclear family. It is like an octopus with its tentacles cut off, who is then told, " Now go out there and survive." The result is that family sees itself as a sinking ship, and the kids are put jnto the position of bailing, right along with the parents, to keep the ship afloat. That becomes a bottom-line demand

on the nuclear family as we find it at this point.

Over several generations, the children are trained from y

early infancy to the job they must do to keep the ship afloat. Very frequently, even the choice of the child's name is indicative of the role they will be forced to play in the survival of the family. In this situation, the children are shoved into these roles to help the ship, which has the effect of literally cutting off parts of their personalities, parts of their potential, forcing them into lifelong patterns of surviving and functioning. When they grow up, what they get to do is choose a mate.

Now in a society where many adults are involved in the child-rearing process, the kid is able to turn on to virtually any kind of person. This is why arranged marriages work. But in this culture, the child was only turned on to one person, and possibly a shadow person, the father, during the early formative years. So this child ends up with nobody to select from except someone just like mom and dad, and the typical result is that they do just that.

There is a combination of the children's personal limitations, which have been created by the crisis in the family situation, and the selection of "nemesis" figures, somebody just like mom and dad, which draws the per-r son involved as a spouse to think, "Oh boy, this time it is going to be different. I'm going to be able to make mom (or dad) love me like they never did the first time." This is quickly followed by disillusionment, disengagement and an enragement process wherein the person, who is not the parent, turns to his kids as substitutes (and bailers) and the whole thing moves on, getting worse from generation to generation.

Yogi Bhajan: Michael, there is a situation that gives the ordinary man the feeling of being hollow inside. It is called "empty sexual erection." Could you give the basis of that?

Michael Ebner: This is the whole business of sex without love. As you know, in a lot of families, love means engulfment love means becoming a specialized machine, love means cutting your own balls off and becoming an impotent eunuch. At the same time, sexuality means disengagement and distance, the closest thing you can get to love without being involved. Love implies vulnerability, and with the family system we've been discussing, vulnerability is potentially lethal. Consequently, you don't get love; you don't get near it for that matter. Through our present cultural and parental set up, love has become attached to annihilation in one way or another, so we avoid love like the plague. Sexuality is what we use to stay alive, to keep those cards and letters coming in. Because of this situation, we engage in sexuality without love.

In some cases, the opposite exists: love without sexuality. This is an individual who has been shaped by the parents to be a parent, a substitute parent for the parent, and the individual becomes a constant caretaker. Love without sex. This individual enters the marriage relationship in a parental

role, unable to be sexual because he doesn't conceptualize it as part of the love relationship.

Yogi Bhajan: Isn't that how the button system developed? The man has an imaginary woman and the woman, an imaginary man, who have certain buttons, like those mechanical games we play for a quarter. When the man touches a certain place, presses the button, then the woman should respond with a long kiss; when he touches her thigh three inches down, then she should come up four feet. Please explain that.

Michael Ebner: Here we see the person shifting out of commitment, connection and contribution, which is the major function of our lives as human beings, into sensuous substitution as a lifestyle. This is the sexual acrobat you were speaking of, the person who has become highly specialized in his sexual performance.

Yogi Bhajan: The person doesn't care about gratifying his partner. They want mechanical sex, the push-button system.

MichaelEbner:The performance—"Howaml doing?"—is ego-based. The degree to which that person is concerned about the partner's reaction is the degree to which he himself is receiving strokes for his competency: "Was I good?" that sort of thing. The other part of his concern is "Are you coming through for me?" Is the partner performing to this person's specifications? The whole idea is sex as a stimulation, the empty stroke, as opposed to the tantrie idea of sex as the expression of universal, dyadic, and physical all in one, a connecting cycle, a circle of energy. What we've done is to disconnect sexuality from what is real.

From this it is very easy to get into self-blame or into putting the responsibility onto the parents. The best approach is to simply be aware of the situation and to begin healing it. Accept that it just is, or was.

The second part is the parental guilt you mentioned. Again this is the situation where sexual arousal is a form

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of pleasure that is forbidden within the family context because of its erotic overtones and implications. In addition, the man carries the message, "You, kid, are here for me," not the other way around.

The third source is parents who are intensely self-involved. The child finds out very early in life, within the first few weeks, that when he looks for support and sustenance in the environment, the environment is out of synch. This may not be in the form of gross neglect or abuse; scheduled feeding is a better example. The message is, "Mama knows best what you really want," and she reinterprets your desires or needs to hers. The family is simply not dancing the life support dance with the kid.

This child has to seal over his emotional openness and shut down his vulnerability because to be vulnerable is to have to depend on these undependable systems. The individual concludes that he is alone in the world, taking care of himself and raising himself by his own bootstraps. The net effect is that the individual becomes hypersexual, using sex as the nearest thing to love that he can get and still be in control, without getting caught up in any issues of vulnerability.

Simultaneously, because the child is only about three months old when he reaches this conclusion, there is the issue of physical vulnerability. Consequently, you have a person who is at risk in the world and who must be in charge of his body, his environment and his circumstances constantly. He becomes veryvigilant about it and we see the emergence of the mottos, "I need my space," "Don't tread on me," "I need to run my show,'' "Your entrance into my life is on my terms."

This is not a paranoid stance. The paranoid is an individual who has been systematically attacked by his parents in a violent and negative way. The parents responded to the kid as though he was an undercover agent from an enemy government. The child concludes that the environment is out to get him and he had better get the environment first. It is a relatively rare disorder in this culture at this time. The bootstrap neurosis is much more common. It is the delusion of indifference in which the deluded person feels that the world is full of people who back out of driveways without looking. Not that the world is malevolent and out to get him, but that the world just doesn't care and "I've got to take care of myself because nobody else will."

Yogi Bhajan: Their basic motto is, "Nobody is nobody." So for them, everybody becomes nobody.

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Yogi Bhajan: Michael, give us an image of a person who is real, patient, continuous, flowing, merging, surging, being, to be.

Michael Ebner: Physical?

Yogi Bhajan: Physical as well as qualitative, and also the source of such a person.

Michael Ebner: The source for this kind of development is in the early period, especially during the first two and a half years. The parents demonstrate to the child that they are really there for him. Plus, the right environment is there for the parents. That is one of the key elements for the positive development of the child. It is damn near impossible to provide all the child's needs by yourself. The parents need support for themselves as adults, as well. It comes down to this: when the child has needs, the parent is there; when the parent has needs, their needs are met. This parent is able to communicate with the child that sometimes the parents' needs may take priority. All needs are taken care of in a balanced, dancing kind of way.

It's a combination of reality enforcement, that there are pragmatic things that exist in the real world. It is a reality that parallels the reality of the young infant whose needs are his world at this point and this must be respected. The basic process is to integrate and coordinate the personal and pragmatic needs in a lifelong synchronized dance.

The successful process results in a person who is highly competent and well-developed physically, mentally and spiritually. This person has capable responses to almost anything that comes his way. He wants to express his love both in the form of contribution and in the form of receptiveness and sensitivity to other people's needs. This is an individual who moves in response to the demands of the situation rather than to a bunch of principles. He can be concerned about his impact on another's environment without becoming entrapped with either, "What will they think of me," or, "I don't deserve anything nice."

Yogi Bhajan: Now, Michael, tell us about the person who f looks for sympathy out of disaster the person who takes the air out of his own tires and then waylays others to help him, asking for a jack or a spare, or what have you.

Michael Ebner: I call that person the professional victim. There are three or four different causes for that. One of them is the overt hostility of the parent toward the child. The parent is an extremely angry individual who systematically and consistently acts sadistically toward the child, "If you don't like this, kid, just try objecting and you'll find out what pain is." These parents also engage in overt threats of physical annihilation, either by actual physical assault or the constant threat of it. The message the child gets is, "All right, kid, your job is to sit there and take it and not give me any lip." He also learns from the family that some targets are acceptable for the rage that ensues

from this treatment, while others are not. The result is an individual who will sit there and take it and then take it out on everybody else. This person sets himself up to be a victim of circumstance in certain situations. He will also ensnare another person into the process, through the rescue operation, and then tell that person that thejob isn't being done right. He becomes highly passive-aggressive and does a subtle, sneaky, sadistic persecution of the helping person.

Secondly, there is the professional victim that can be seen most clearly in the alcoholic script; but can originate from any situation where the parents systematically withhold support, affection, attention, etc., unless the individual is in dire straits* unless he is hurting himself in some way. Here the message is that the only way to get strokes, to get life support, is to hurt yourself and so a self-destructive lifestyle emerges.

Another isthe man-who-came-to-dinner. This isthe hedonist who uses the victim-of-circumstance ploy to get his foot in the door, and then never leaves. If you haven't heard of "The Man Who Came to Dinner," this was a fellow who came to dinner and fell down the stairs, breaking his leg. He ends up spending the rest of his life living upstairs, an absolute asshole.

There are a few others. There is the individual who is the chronic parent, whose own parents have become so dependent on him that they have trained him to what I call "Quasimoto" behavior. (Quasimoto was the hunchback of Notre Dame.) This guarantees that the child will be such a gross yuck that nobody in the world will be able to stand him. The child perpetuates his yuck reputation by setting up such awful situations that the other people involved are crying, "Oh my God, get out of my life," which forces the kid back into the family per the parents' original plan. This is an individual who appears to be a total monster on the surface, but who is actually a very nurturing, supporting person to everyone but himself.

Yogi Bhajan: What about the "Ma, ma, ma, I'm back"?

Michael Ebner: Oh, yes, the mom-addict. That one is created by the parent, the mother in particular, engaging in a Couple of behaviors. One is overindulgence. She is always there, giving him whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, spoiling him. Secondly, she makes sure that in the kid's life and experience, everything and everybody else is put down as a piece of shit so that the child becomes convinced that mama is the only thing in the world that offers him anything relevant. Plus, sonny has got to have his goodies and mom is the only one who can provide them. This is a hand-to-mouth addictive lifestyle combined with a total dependency on mom. If he tries to leave, he ends up coming back because nobody does it like mom.

Yogi Bhajan; Last of all, tell us about the person who says, "1 hope so, I cannot commit."

Michael Ebner: Oh yes, the will-of-the-wisp. A real will- of-the-wisp is the head of the dandelion that has gone to seed. It is grey and fluffy. When they float by, they look very attractive so you reach for them, but with the mere pressure of your hand, swoosh, they are gone. You go for it again and the same damn thing happens. There is no substance there.

The parent of this child developed avery special relationship with him in the form of a "dance away" parent. "One of these days, kids, I'm going to really connect with you, and really be there for you, but right now I've got these other things I've got to do. Oh, don't go away, I want you there, but I've got these other things to do." This is the carrot-dangle, carrot-yank phenomena. As a result, the child invests all his eggs in the basket of getting that mother or dad to come through, and he is unable to commit anywhere outside the family, or even to himself, because he is so hung up on the parent he sees dangling before his eyes. It produces a lifestyle of systematic commitment avoidance. He can't commit to anything. He'll start to commit and then he'll withdraw just like the parent. These folks do the same carrot-dangle, carrot-yank play that was done to them.

Yogi Bhajan: I am really very grateful that you are very committed and that I am very committed to the essence of life.

I am grateful today that when I was very young, very innocent, and very unknowing of myself, I had very heavy environments, pressures and circumstances. I am grateful that one fine day, through the grace of God and Guru, I touched the lotus feet of my spiritual teacher who kindly, gracefully, slowly and graciously, in spite of my rejections, my obstructions, my cries, my faith and my lack of faith, took me to the Word of the Guru, which took me to God. When I look back at that procedure, I feel, that without that touch, I would have been very neurotic, a human product of my environments and the pressures of circumstance. I might have been cooked or I might have been left raw, I might have been accepted or rejected. But my very inner Self, which came through my commitment, brought happiness, balance, integrity, dignity, service, giving and grace.

enlightening self. You can only live by the experience of your wisdom—and that comes from following a wise man.

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