Matthew Bernstein woke up at 5:35 A.M. He didn’t need an alarm. No matter what time he went to bed, he still got up within three minutes of the same time every day he was in the White House.

President Bernstein was the first Jew to be elected president of the United States. The election of 2028 had been a contentious one. A woman, Margaret Sandor, was the favorite, but she did much worse in the mini-debates than anyone had predicted, and one time, when she was sure she was out of range, she said, “That’s a Jew for you.” Even though more people agreed with that sentiment than not, the remark revealed a dual personality and that turned off voters, who still would rather have someone they thought they knew, even if it meant that person was a Jew.

Bernstein had always played down his Jewishness. His mother was Catholic, and he was never bar mitzvahed. He didn’t look, act, or seem Jewish in any obvious way. His friends called him Matt, and there was even a time in college where he was going to change Bernstein to Barnes, but he didn’t. In the Jewish religion, if your father is Jewish but your mother isn’t, theoretically you are not a Jew. But if you’re running for president of the United States, even living on the same street as a Jew makes you one, so having a Jewish father was more than enough to get into the history books as the first Jew to hold the highest office in the land.

Before he entered politics, Bernstein had made and lost a lot of money in the private sector. He founded a solar panel company that built new generation panels for home use and did very well for about five years. But he turned down an offer to sell and then watched an Indonesian company come up with a newer technology that overnight made what he did almost obsolete. He eventually sold his business for half of what he had turned down and took what money he did make, then ran for Congress in 2022. He won, rose quickly to chairman of the Finance Committee, and then became the first Jewish Speaker of the House. The first “Jewish” was something he was hearing a lot in politics, so why not try for the presidency?

He met his wife, Betsy, in college. She was an economics major and both of her parents were Jews. Matthew loved going to her house; he loved her mother; she was the mother he always wished he had. “She’s so supportive of you,” he would say. “Are you sure she’s Jewish?”

They married young and both of them went to work. They seemed like the perfect couple, lookswise. Neither was especially attractive. Betsy stood five foot four and had brown hair and brown eyes, which were closer together than she liked. She thought it made her look more ethnic than her friends, but Betsy had a very good instinct about what she could change and what she couldn’t, and spacing her eyes out was not an option.

Her husband had no ethnic features. A very average-looking man, five foot eleven, a hundred and eighty pounds. Before he was president, people always guessed he was an accountant. His hair thinned out early, but he never lost it, and unless someone saw his bald spot first, they would think of him as a man with hair. Bernstein wore glasses, not because he had to—there were all kinds of options to see clearly without them—but because he thought they made him look smarter. And they did. He wasn’t handsome, but he did look smart.

A year after they married they had a child. The baby was born with a rare genetic defect. The little boy’s heart was not fully developed and quit working before he reached the age of one. Betsy got pregnant again two years later but lost the pregnancy, and that was it for kids. They chose not to try again.

Betsy never loved the idea of her husband running for president, but she turned out to be his strongest asset. She was whip smart and probably gave better stump speeches than he did. And when Margaret Sandor let out her “Jew” comment, it was Betsy who would not let it die. Her husband played it down, always taking the fake high road, but Betsy made it her mantra. “Have we learned nothing as a country?” she would say. “Do we really want a president who has hate in her heart for any American? How would you know that she didn’t hate you?” The people loved that line.

On election night they both watched in silence as Matthew Bernstein became the forty-seventh president of the United States. Polling had become so precise that it took all the fun out of elections, but there was always a chance, remote as it was, that something unexpected would happen. In this case it was exactly as the polls had predicted, and at 11:30 P.M., Eastern Standard Time, Ohio put Bernstein over the top. Obviously he was very happy, but he also felt somewhat powerless.

By the quarter-century mark, almost three trillion dollars was going just to pay the interest on the national debt. There was no longer room for any meaningful programs; it seemed that the president’s job was just to keep the ship afloat. Initiating any great changes had become impossible. It was just too expensive. And Bernstein, still in his early fifties, also sensed that the younger generations were losing interest in their country. It had always been warned that the giant debt would fall to them, but until it actually did, young people still held out hope for the American dream. Once they were being taxed higher, earning less, and receiving less government assistance than their parents, the resentment level soared. Bernstein tried to address this in his campaign, promising to ease the burden on the young, but if you pissed off the seniors, you didn’t get elected to anything, so it was difficult to take too strong a stand. He wound up where all presidential candidates did, somewhere in the mushy middle.

*   *   *

Brad Miller woke up at three in the morning with a pain in his chest. It must be indigestion, he thought. His last tests had all been fine, and although he didn’t have perfect arteries, he was on so much advanced medication that the thought of a heart attack was far from his mind.

He got up, had some water, sat down, and waited for the pain to subside. After ten minutes he pressed the emergency button on the fridge and a man appeared on the screen.

“What is the nature of your emergency?”

“How do you know if you’re having a heart attack?”

“I can tell you. Place your right hand in the sending device and sit comfortably.” Brad placed his hand in the silicone sleeve and sat down, his chest feeling very tight. After two minutes the man was back. “You’re not having a heart attack.”

“It sure feels that way.”

“Where’s the pain?”

“Where do you think? In my foot.”

“I mean where exactly is the pain? In your chest, in your arm?”

“Right in the center of my chest.”

“Sir, I want you to jump up and down ten times.”

“Are you crazy? I’ll die!”

“You’re not having a heart attack. Please jump up and down ten times.”

Brad did as he was told. He felt like an idiot jumping up and down in his kitchen, but after the eighth time he let out the biggest belch of his entire life. It was so loud he thought his neighbors would hear it. The man on the screen smiled. “Do we feel better?”

“I don’t know about you, but yeah, the pain seems to be subsiding.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No. Is this paid by insurance?”

“Yes, sir. There is a five-hundred-dollar deductible but everything else is covered.”

“I’m curious, how much is the whole bill?”

“Two thousand, sir.”

“Wow. Well, I guess it’s worth five hundred to know I shouldn’t have pastrami with orange juice.”

“I would concur. Do we need anything else?”

“I’m okay, how about you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. Let’s hang up before it costs me another five hundred.”

The screen went blank and Brad returned to bed. He lay there not quite understanding how the government could afford fifteen hundred dollars because he ate like a pig. No one else could understand it, either. It was a magic trick whose magic had faded decades ago. But as long as they paid, so be it. That was the mantra for the older folks.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was one o’clock in the morning when the frat party broke up. Brian and Kathy went to an after-party, mostly consisting of college seniors, and Kathy drank a little and tried smokeable steroids, which made her feel all-powerful and quite angry for about ten minutes before she got dizzy and came down. The boys liked to orgasm on it; the girls just got irritated.

Kathy listened as everyone there just bitched about what was coming next. All generations were disillusioned, but for different reasons. Kathy’s grandparents had rebelled because they didn’t want money, they wanted free love and a free life. Her parents never had time to rebel, mainly because her grandparents got their wish. Her generation had different issues. They did want money, they wanted it all, but knew they could never get it. They were growing up in the flat world, and it was obvious that America had to move down to meet everyone else halfway. They were the first ones riding the pendulum back, and they hated it.

Even after college, kids were living with their folks or grandparents, longer than ever before. America was becoming like Italy, where if parents didn’t throw their children out, chances are they would never leave. Some parents liked that, but most wanted their life back and couldn’t stand the sound of the retro subwoofers rumbling through their house.

Brian was too drunk to drive Kathy home. It wasn’t a decision; the car simply wouldn’t start. All cars now came with a Breathalyzer. You could defeat it by getting someone else to blow into the steering wheel, but the penalties were so great that people refused. A man in Buffalo blew for a kid and the kid killed someone, and they arrested the man and put him in prison for life. No one tried to fake out a Breathalyzer after that.

Kathy breathed into the device and the car started, but even though the car thought she was fine, she didn’t want to drive. The steroids were screwing with her vision, so Brian took the wheel. “I’m really okay,” he said, “I’ll take you home.” And then he backed into a garbage can.

“I’ll call my dad.”

“No, he already hates me. Telling him I’m too fucked up is not a way to make him feel better about us.”

“I won’t tell him that.” Kathy pressed the dash and her father answered, sounding like he was fast asleep.

“Hello?”

“Daddy?”

“‘Daddy’? What kind of trouble are you in?”

“I’m not in trouble.”

“The last time you called me ‘Daddy,’ I had to go to the police station.”

“Brian and I had a glass of champagne and I just thought it was safer if you picked us up.”

“A glass of champagne? Will the car start?”

“Yes, but I thought it was safer.” Her father wasn’t buying this.

“Take a cab.”

“We don’t have the money. We weren’t expecting to pay for that.”

“Tell them I’ll pay when you get here.”

“They don’t do that anymore. It’s all in advance, remember?”

“Jesus, Kathy, it’s two o’clock. If the car will start, drive it.”

“Dad, don’t make me beg.”

Kathy and Brian just sat in the car until her father got there. Brian couldn’t help but stare at her, she looked so beautiful that night. “Troubled beautiful” is what his friends called her, but they were all jealous. Kathy was the most interesting girl at the party, by far.

Possibly because he was drunk, possibly because he couldn’t help himself, Brian leaned over, kissed her, and told her that he was in love with her. That was the first time he said it. She smiled, gave him a quick kiss back, but didn’t say the words. Now he felt terrible. Why did I say it? Did I ruin it forever? He was so angry at himself. At that moment her dad arrived. She got out of the car and asked Brian if he wanted to be taken home.

“No, thanks. I’ll go back inside until the champagne wears off.”

“Champagne, my ass,” Stewart said. “Go inside and sleep it off.”

Kathy and her father drove home without talking. He was too tired to make obligatory conversation and she was still feeling the effect of the drug, even though it was supposed to last only a few minutes. It made her feel extra angry. Not at her father—after all, there he was, unemployed, no future, and still getting out of bed at two in the morning to pick her up. She was angry at everything else.

Her grandfather used to tell her how he stopped the war by rioting and filling the streets and how it really meant something. But it was different then. You had options in a war. You could lose, win, declare victory even if you didn’t win; you could turn the fighting over to the country you invaded. Lots of options. But now, massive debt was something else. All you could do was pay it off or not. Or you could keep delaying the problem, hoping that the next generation would invent something to take care of it. But as advanced as science was becoming, no one had come up with a debt machine. Finally Stewart spoke. “I won’t be home until late tomorrow night.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a new job.”

“Really? That’s wonderful! What kind of job?” Kathy sounded so hopeful. Her father was dipping dangerously into his life savings and really needed a break.

“It’s not that great.”

“What is it?”

“They’re adding a person to the automated security staff at the city college.”

Kathy wanted to cry. A security guard? In her mind that was worse than a grease monkey, but she tried her best to sound positive. “Wow. That’s good news. It’ll give you something to do.”

And they drove the rest of the way home in silence.

*   *   *

When Brian Nelson woke the next morning he felt awful. Physically and mentally. Hungover, hating his crummy college, knowing it would only buy him a few more years before the shit hit the fan. He had a car his parents had given him and that was it. One possession.

College had become meaningless to so many kids. The few who had privilege went to the expensive ones and that was still fun, and it was good to have a degree if you were going to work in a white-collar job, but it guaranteed you nothing. If the parents couldn’t pay, most kids didn’t go. The student loans took so long to pay back that young people really had to examine if it was worth it. There were all kinds of calculations that would tell them exactly how much they had to earn and how many years it would take to pay it back, and many kids decided that a lower-paying job, in the long run, would earn them more than a college education and a huge debt.

Brian had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His father was a pharmacist, but he couldn’t do that; that job was being replaced by pharmaceutical assistants monitoring automated dispensing machines, and the pay was terrible. He didn’t want to drive a truck, the way his grandfather did. His grandfather was always going from company to company and bitched about never having any security. Besides, Brian had never liked his grandfather and certainly did not want to emulate him. And he resented that whatever he wound up doing, a portion of his earnings was always going to go to his grandfather and all the rest of them. “He never even sent me a birthday present,” Brian would say, “and now I have to pay for his wheelchair.”

CHAPTER SIX

Sam Mueller had received so many honors in his life, he had a separate bungalow just to house them. And he knew all the living presidents—in fact, two of them were alive because of him—but he had yet to meet Matthew Bernstein.

President Bernstein liked to make calls himself. He got a great kick out of appearing on someone’s screen. No secretary, no Secret Service, just him. Many people thought it was a joke. There were pretty good devices that had come on the market around 2018 that could change your appearance when you made a call. You could even change your sex if you wished. So when Bernstein called Dr. Mueller the very first time, Mueller thought someone might be playing a prank. Like the call he got a year earlier from Marilyn Monroe. “How did you get my number?” Sam asked.

“I have everyone’s number,” President Bernstein replied.

“I don’t have time for this. But I must say, this is a very good program. It has the voice and face down pat.”

“That’s because I’m real.” At that moment Allen, one of Dr. Mueller’s assistants, came rushing into his office.

“It’s him!”

“Who?”

“The President!”

“How do you know?”

“There’s no digital manipulation. We just got confirmation. And I called a special number and the Secret Service verified he’s talking to you … now!” Dr. Mueller motioned for Allen to leave.

“Mr. President … I’m sorry, I thought it was a joke.”

“So does everyone,” the President laughed.

“Well, it’s an honor to talk to you. How may I be of assistance?”

“Are you going to be in Washington anytime soon?”

“I wasn’t planning on it, but I certainly could be.”

“How about Wednesday?”

“You would like me there on Wednesday?”

“Yes. I always ask people if they are going to be in Washington anytime soon. It’s more polite than saying, ‘Be here on Wednesday.’”

“What time, sir?”

“How’s noon?”

“Is that another question where the answer is meaningless?”

“Yes, please be here at noon. I’m going to have a lunch for a few people in the health industry. I would like to talk over some new ideas. I’d love you to be present.”

“I’ll be there.”

“We’ll cover all costs.”

“That’s fine, sir, I’m happy to cover it myself.”

“Well, good. You have more money than us anyway. By the way, I just decided, this is the last call I’m making myself. The thrill is gone.”

“Well, I hope I’m not the reason.”

“Of course not, you just happened to be there when the fun disappeared. See you at noon on Wednesday.” The President smiled and the screen went blank. No matter who you were, whether you liked the man or not, it was still a thrill to get a call from the president of the United States.

Maggie Mueller was very excited. “The White House? What do I wear to the White House?”

“He didn’t say anything about spouses, honey.”

“Oh, screw you,” Maggie half joked. “I’m going. I don’t have to sit in the meeting but I’m going to the White House.” At that moment Dr. Mueller’s watch buzzed. It was one of his assistants. Sam never could get over this. His father had given him old comic books when he was a young boy to encourage him to read. His favorites were Richie Rich and Dick Tracy. And now here he was, almost as rich as Richie and with a watch exactly like Dick’s. What would have happened if his father had given him Wonder Woman? In any case, there was his assistant’s face on his wrist, always starting out with the same question.

“Am I bothering you, sir?”

“What is it?” Mueller asked, making sure he had nothing in his hand when he turned it to look at the watch. As silly as it sounded, when the device first hit the mainstream, people would get so excited they would forget they had coffee in their hands and dump it into their laps like in a Three Stooges movie. On the very first watches, Apple T&T even had a video warning before the face would appear, just in case someone scalded himself, but people hated that. The company changed it to a warning on the box: “Make sure hands are free before answering.” That was sufficient to release them from liability.

“The White House called to confirm the fifteenth at noon,” Mueller’s assistant said. “The invitation is for both you and the missus.”

The one bad thing about the watches was that people could hear both sides of the conversation, unless the recipient wore an earpiece, which no one did. “See!” Maggie said.

“Thank you, Sarah, I’ll make sure my wife is informed.”

“Thank you, Dr. Mueller. Good-bye.” And his watch went back to displaying the time. Sam put his arm around Maggie.

“I wouldn’t go without you, you know that.”

“You’re so full of shit. But I’m still excited.”

*   *   *

Why anyone wanted to be president of the United States became more and more of a mystery. Campaigns were endless, and the bubble one lived in was more like an MRI machine. It seemed that the entire job was raising money and trying not to say anything that could be construed as remotely controversial. And most of all, the ability to change the world was no longer part of the job.

Money makes the world go ’round and debt makes it stop in its tracks. Sure, a president could still fire weapons and was still commander in chief and the official spokesperson for the nation, but that wasn’t the fun part. The fun part was making real changes that could affect generations to come. But that took money. A lot of it. Money that was no longer there.

Bernstein longed for the days of FDR, or even Barack Obama, where it was still possible and Congress would go deep into debt to give a president trillions to try to make things happen. But now the rules were changed. After the national debt passed one hundred percent of the gross national product, stiff new regulations were imposed on the executive branch.

Congress had always had the last word. But in previous administrations, the president still had the power of persuasion. Now the majority of Congress was elected with the promise of taking that power back. Successfully blaming past administrations for continuing to run America into the red, people running for the House or Senate convinced their constituencies that the White House was too powerful. That that was the cause of the problem. It was all bullshit, of course, but it led to a new era in gridlock. It was as if every member of Congress ran for his or her own presidency. Candidates never aligned themselves with the White House anymore, or even with their own party. They ran as individuals, on the notion of returning America to the people. What it really did was introduce a new kind of motionless government. Nothing got done. Denying new spending provided the House and Senate with the illusion of expressing the people’s voice. But the people didn’t want their lives and the nation’s infrastructure to rust away. What they really wanted was somebody to make tough choices, really tough choices, which took a leader. And the one thing the legislative branch could never be was a leader. That was the president’s job, and that was why Matthew Bernstein ran. And even if it was getting impossible to change things, he still wanted to try.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The first time it happened, no one thought anything more about it than they did about the random acts of violence that always occurred. In January of 2026, someone boarded a bus on its way to an Indian casino near Palm Desert, California, and shot twelve people, killing nine and injuring three. The odd thing was that the bus had thirty people on board, and anyone who appeared to be under forty was left untouched.

The shooter was a young man, twenty-six years old, and he was killed by the driver, so no one could ever talk to him to find out what was in his mind. His family and friends were interviewed and they came out with the usual stuff: “He seemed so quiet.” “He was such a nice guy, a great neighbor.” The couple who owned the Korean bakery even said they thought of him like a son. But upon further questioning it became clear they meant he was the size of their son, they weren’t referring to how they felt about him.

Violence in 2026 was really the same as it had always been. There were gangs and murders and domestic disputes and robberies, all the stuff that never changes. The one group that did seem to grow in stature was the neo-Nazi gangs, the skinheads. These people hated everything America had become. And where blacks and Jews had always been number one and two on their list, the newly legalized Hispanics made them even more nuts. The “last of the true white people,” as they called themselves, they realized they were never going to get America back, and all they could hope for was to make it really unpleasant for everyone else to live there.

But the bus massacre had nothing to do with that group. The shooter was white, but not a skinhead. Educated, with at least two years of college, he’d never been in trouble before. Everything ever written on his mobile devices was analyzed immediately.

In the new world, actually going to someone’s home and seizing property was done last, since every single bit of communication lived forever, and all that was needed was a judge’s order and it was all downloaded and scrutinized in the blink of an eye. People knew this, of course, and if they really wanted to communicate and have it never be known, they would do what their great-grandparents had done and write a letter, or meet in person, or just not tell anyone anything. But even if they didn’t write down their intentions, the software used to analyze their communications was getting ultra-sophisticated. And where years ago someone who was going to murder his spouse might put the word “chloroform” into a search engine and have that as evidence in court, now programs were designed to come up with that same kind of incriminating evidence from everything you ever looked at.

If you committed a crime, every piece of reading material, every store you ever went to—either real or virtual—and everything you ever bought was analyzed at such lightning speed that law enforcement would have three really good theories before they ever went to your home. In the case of the bus murderer it was easier than most, as he wrote angry letters to his congressman complaining about the outrageous taxes he had to pay for health care even though he was never sick a day in his life. They also found old-fashioned letters to his mother saying that he could no longer give money to help with Grandma, as he had been demoted and his pay had been cut. That, along with his obsessive interest in everything Peter Pan, helped the computers come to a conclusion: This guy hated everything old.

*   *   *

Brad Miller hit the ball straight down the fairway. It went almost three hundred yards. Herb had just hit into the trees and was sixteen over par by the fifteenth hole. “I shouldn’t have bet,” Herb said.

“Don’t worry, there’s three holes to go. You want to press?”

“You’re seven strokes ahead. You would actually need a real stroke for me to win.” He took out fifty dollars. “Here, let’s stop. I lose.”

“Come on, finish the game,” Brad said, taking the money. Brad pressed the button and the sixteenth hole lay before them. This hole was always windy, with a dogleg on the right and a huge sand trap on the left of the green. Brad addressed the ball.

“Wait,” Herb said. “Let’s not play with the wind today.”

“Okay with me.” Brad went to the control wall and turned off the breeze.

The Golf Depots, as they were called, were springing up everywhere. Invented in Japan, where space was always at a premium, they were open-air golf centers that consisted of one 350-yard hole. Every time someone completed it, he turned around and started the next. The putting green on hole one would become the tee on hole two. Scenery would change, wind would increase or die down, sand traps would emerge in different places, and you would get the exercise walking back and forth on the same hole. The centers, which took up approximately three square acres, could let ten foursomes play at the same time, all playing from the center outward.

The cost was minuscule compared to real golf, and what was also great was that it was safe. There had been some incidents in the past few years on public courses. Younger people hassling the “olds” for taking too much time or, in some cases, for even showing up at all. The Golf Depots had great security, welcomed an older clientele, and were a bargain compared to actually joining a club, which not only had prohibitive costs but didn’t much like members over fifty.

When the game was finished they got into Brad’s car. Brad had always liked to buy American, although that had become impossible. Even with the Ford-GM merger that took place years earlier, so many parts in those cars were made overseas that they were American in name only. Still, Brad felt good about driving his electric vehicle with the familiar two logos from the car companies he grew up knowing.

As he slid into the seat, which was molded to his body, the belts retracted, and a pleasant female voice asked him where he wanted to go. “Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked Herb.

“Sure, I could go for a pastrami sandwich.”

Brad knew of one place somewhere toward downtown that had great pastrami, but he wasn’t sure of the name or where it was. That’s where Susie came in. That’s what he called the voice of his car. “Susie, what’s the name of the delicatessen somewhere off the Ten freeway near downtown?” Susie dutifully named off three delicatessens but none of them sounded familiar. “That’s not it.” Then Susie named another place that rang a bell. “That sounds familiar. Call them.”

A voice came on the line, Hispanic sounding, but then again, every voice on the phone sounded Hispanic to Brad. “Is this the place with the great pastrami?”

“I can’t hear you,” the man said.

“Forget it.” Brad hung up. “That’s the right place. I recognize the accent. Take me there, honey.” And Susie displayed the route, traffic conditions, alternate routes, time to destination, average speed, weather, and three rest stops along the way, something the dealer programmed in thinking Brad would need, which he really didn’t.

“That’s amazing,” Herb said. “How did she figure out the restaurant?”

“She’ll take all the restaurants in the area, look at their menus, check for reviews, and if pastrami comes up a lot, she’ll tell me.”

“Can you fuck her?”

“You actually can, but that was another four grand. And you have to stick your dick in the lighter.”

About fifteen minutes later Brad’s car pulled into a parking lot next to Amigos, a beat-up-looking diner, crowded to the gills, with a line snaking out the door. “This is the place?” Herb asked, a little reticent.

“This place has the best pastrami in town. Trust me, it’s gotten raves. That’s why there’s a line.”

“There’s a line at the doctor’s office, but no one’s raving about that.”

“Do you not want to go in?”

“No, I do. Come on.”

They got out of the car and stood in line. They seemed to be the only ones over fifty. Certainly no one in that diner was anywhere near eighty years old. People made no eye contact with them, and as the line moved slowly toward the counter, Herb wondered if they should go elsewhere, but he didn’t say anything. After thirty minutes they were facing the menu board, about to be served. “What are you gonna have?” Brad asked.

“Tuna fish.”

“What?”

“What the hell do you think I’m gonna have? You think I stood in line for an hour for peas?”

They both placed their orders, two large pastrami sandwiches with cole slaw, pickles, and a dipping bowl of beef juice that would make the sandwiches fall apart in their mouths. They were told to go to a table and the food would be brought to them. They found a small table near the window and sat down, and at that moment two Hispanic men in their early twenties walked over. One of them said to Brad, “Get the fuck out of here, old man, this is my seat.”

“No one was sitting here,” Brad said.

Herb stood up. He was not in the mood to argue. “Maybe it was their seat.”

“It wasn’t. The table was empty.”

“Get the fuck out of here, did you not hear me?”

A waitress appeared with the sandwiches and put them down, oblivious to what was going on. One of the young men picked up a sandwich and took a bite. “What the hell are you doing?” Brad was getting angry. “That’s mine!”

“I don’t think so, man. This is our table and it’s our sandwich.”

“I’m calling the manager.”

“You fucking do that, Grandpa. Good idea. And when you’re through we’ll talk about it outside.”

“Brad, let them have the sandwiches. I’ve lost my appetite.”

“They’re not having my sandwich. I paid for it, it’s mine.”

Brad went to find someone. Herb just wanted to disappear. He stood there not saying a word as Brad brought back a heavyset man, also Hispanic. Brad showed him the receipt. “We paid for these; these are ours.”

The man looked at it and said something in Spanish to the young men. The three of them laughed and the two men decided to leave. “Eat your sandwiches, you old fuck,” one of them said. “We’ll see you later.” They walked out of the diner. Herb was panicking.

“They’re going to wait for us outside.”

“Just eat,” Brad said. “There’s a lot of people here, they can’t do anything.”

“What are you, crazy? There are a lot of Mexican people here. They can do anything they want. I knew we shouldn’t have come.”

“Bullshit. It was your idea.”

“It was my idea to get pastrami. Your goddamn car sent us to a prison.”

Brad bit into his sandwich. He was worried about his safety but didn’t show it. “Wow, this is good.”

“It better be. It’s our last meal.”

They ate in silence, staring at the car through the window. They couldn’t see the men; they were hoping they had left. This wasn’t the first time Brad had felt picked on because of his age, but it was becoming more frequent. Herb, meanwhile, made up his mind never to try a new restaurant again. Better to have the same old thing and not be stabbed.

*   *   *

At ten o’clock at night, Stewart Bernard saw an alarm light go off that told him someone was breaking into the school gymnasium. The cameras confirmed it. It looked as if six boys were forcing the door open; one of them had a basketball in his hand. Stewart thought how silly this was. It was dark in there; how did they think they could play without lights?

He got on the Shuffle, the three-wheeled cart he took on his patrols, and headed down to the gym. When he arrived the door was open, and he heard the sound of a basketball and saw some dim lights. The boys had brought electric lanterns with them. Stewart stood there and smiled. This was harmless. They weren’t stealing or disturbing the peace; they were just playing basketball. But he had a job to do, so he threw on the switch and the overheads lit up. The boys stopped and looked up to where Stewart was standing. “The gym is closed, boys. You’re not allowed in here.”

“We’re just playing basketball,” one of them yelled.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Stewart felt it before he heard it. A sharp pain in his collarbone. As he reached for his chest, he heard the explosion ricochet throughout the building. The kids were running up the stairs to the exit. Stewart dropped to the floor, feeling as though he was going to faint.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” he heard one of the boys say to another as they ran by him. Stewart really wanted to hear the answer but he blacked out. He lay there in a pool of blood until one of the robot vehicles sensed there was a door open and came to take a look. The next time he opened his eyes, he was in an operating room.

Kathy was home when her reading device blinked red. She knew what that was, but had never seen it before. All handheld devices had an emergency chip that could either send or receive an urgent message. The device displayed the words “Contact St. Peter’s Hospital. Your father is hurt.”

She was hoping against hope that maybe it was a prank, but hacking into an emergency chip had severe penalties and she didn’t know anyone who would do that, anyway. She was frantic. She called Brian. They were both at the hospital within fifteen minutes.

Kathy looked pale and scared. Brian didn’t know what to do other than support her. He hated hospitals—the smell literally made him sick. When Brian was five years old, he fell off a scooter and skinned his arm so badly he needed stitches. The doctor did it poorly and it became infected, and he had to spend a week in the hospital, sharing a room with a teenager who had broken his neck skiing. The infection wasn’t what spooked him; it was seeing a boy in the bed next to him wearing a full body cast. It left an impression that hospitals were to be avoided at all costs. Better to just die.

When they opened the door to the emergency room they could not believe the number of people waiting. It was more crowded than the Department of Motor Vehicles. Probably three hundred people at least. There was so much sneezing and coughing that if someone walked into the room healthy, by the time he got to the front of the line he would need medical attention. Those who could walk were lined up in one of those S-shaped rope lines. Kathy had always thought that was one of the great inventions in all of human history: a way to keep people lined up in a small space while giving them the illusion that they were getting closer. Who thought of that?

People were slowly moving toward two very haggard-looking nurses sitting behind a glass partition. There was also an S-shaped wheelchair line. Fifteen people who couldn’t even walk wheeling around their own ropes. Kathy kept looking at the crowd to see if she could find her father. “I don’t think we’re in the right place,” she said.

“Did they say he was here?”

“They said he was in the hospital.”

“I don’t think we have to wait in this line. Let’s go to admissions.”

They went into the main entrance and there was a line there, too, but a much smaller one. When they got up to the admissions desk, Kathy told a woman who she was and the woman repeated the information into her headset. She waited for the answer on the screen below her. After a moment she said, “Are you the next of kin?” Kathy was panicked. That sounded devastating.

“Yes.”

“He’s in surgery.”

“What?! Why?”

“I can’t give you that information. Please sit over there and someone will come and talk to you.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t have that information. Someone will come and talk to you.”

Brian lost it. “Jesus Christ, what are you good for? How much do they fucking pay you?”

Fortunately for Brian, the woman behind the desk did not respond. Someone newer might have had him arrested. Behavior that could get you thrown off planes decades earlier now got you thrown out of every public building in America. People just didn’t take outbursts. They would call security at the slightest hint of anger. There was so little human-to-human contact now that people were just not used to a display of actual emotions; it all came across as hostile.

“Come on,” Kathy said, taking his arm, “let’s sit down.”

She and Brian waited for what seemed to be thirty minutes before a woman in a business suit came out of the elevator and walked over to them. “Are you Miss Bernard?”

“Yes.” Kathy was scared.

“Is this your husband?”

“No, my friend. He drove me.”

“I’m Sue Norgen. I’m with the hospital administration. Normally I just talk to family members.”

“Why? Is he dead?”

“No, he is just out of surgery. He will be okay.”

“Thank God,” Kathy said. She reached for Brian’s hand and squeezed it so tight he thought she would break it.

“We need to discuss some issues,” Sue told her. “If you’ll follow me, we can go to my office.”

“Can I see him?”

“He can’t have any visitors now. He’s in intensive care.”

“Oh my God! That’s bad, right?”

“That’s where everyone goes after surgery.”

Kathy realized that she still had no idea what was going on. She couldn’t believe so much time had gone by and she still knew nothing.

“What happened to him?”

“He was shot.”

Kathy thought she was going to pass out, but instead tears poured from her eyes. Brian put his arm around her and Sue Norgen extended her cold hand, offering zero comfort. “He’s going to be all right, dear, that’s the important thing. Would you like a cold drink?” Kathy nodded. “Let’s go to my office and we can discuss everything.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

People always wonder about the transition period of the American presidency. What exactly happens during the two and a half months between winning and taking office? What does the new president find out that he or she hadn’t known before? For Matthew Bernstein, it was a bit overwhelming, to say the least. He was given security briefings when he was officially the candidate, and those by themselves gave him pause. They were certainly more detailed and authoritative than the available news of the day.

There were no trusted sources of newsgathering anymore, no voice of one news organization or one reporter that people believed over another. It was a combination of professionals, amateurs, citizens, gossip, pictures fed to a world from billions of handheld devices; a whole slew of information that people had to somehow slog through and decide for themselves what they thought was true. There was even a site that claimed to know what the CIA daily briefings were. Surely that wasn’t true—or was it? So many things on that site came to pass, and every time it was shut down it reopened somewhere else.

But when he became a candidate, Bernstein started to get the same briefings as the president. This was the information that had to be perceived as real. To paraphrase Nixon, “If the president hears it, it must be true.”

What he wasn’t told was what the president already knew. He was only privy to what was happening at the moment, but the real stuff, the stuff that a president had to take office to find out—that was still out of reach.

After the election, around November 20, Bernstein was told that he was to go on a week’s retreat to a beautiful spa on the Cayman Islands. His wife was allowed to come, and he was told this would be about “filling in” details. He knew of these retreats—they were given to all incoming presidents—but he had had no idea, no idea at all, what he was about to hear.

It started out slowly. The first day was basically rest and relaxation, along with the daily briefing, which now took on an air of more significance. The candidate had been told for many months of the current threats and future threats and potential threats, but he was never given serious enough information in case he lost the election. From November 8 onward, the briefings got longer, and more privileged, but it was still nothing like the week he was about to have.

In the first official meeting on the Caymans, Bernstein sat down with three men, two in military uniform and one dressed in a suit. One of the military men started by asking him if he had any questions. Were there things he had always wondered about that were never satisfactorily answered?

“My God,” Bernstein said. “Are you kidding? Where do I start?”

“Fire away, Mr. President-elect. We’re at your service.”

“Okay. Here’s something I’ve always wondered. Did spacemen ever land here? What was Area Fifty-one?”

The man in the suit laughed.

“That’s almost everyone’s first question. No, Mr. President-elect, no one has landed here. There are no space creatures hidden anywhere, but something did go on in Area Fifty-one. The United States was testing an entirely new way of flight propulsion, and it was saucer-shaped. It crashed. People saw that. And the government at the time decided that an alien story was far better for our national security than to let our enemies suspect we had even a remote knowledge of what we were trying to accomplish.”

“What kind of propulsion was it?” Bernstein asked.

No one said anything. After a few seconds one of the military men spoke. “No one here is qualified to answer that, sir, but we will get someone to explain it to you.”

Bernstein just blinked. Was this whole week a waste of time? Were they going to tell him some things but not others? His next question was “Who really runs this country?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Who really controls this country?”

“You do, sir, starting in January.”

“I don’t believe that. There must be continuity that has nothing to do with presidents. Who has the ultimate power in the United States?”

“The Supreme Court?” one of the military men asked.

“This is not a test,” Bernstein said. “I’m asking you a question. Maybe the right way to put it is, is there a shadow government?”

The man who had given him the answer to the Area 51 question smiled.

“No, sir. There are very wealthy individuals and family dynasties that have controlled a great part of the world for hundreds of years, but they do not, as far as I know, have greater power than the government.”

“As far as you know?”

“Yes, sir, as far as I know.”

“Who killed John Kennedy?”

“Lee Harvey Oswald, sir?”

“Okay.” The President-elect got out of his chair and went to get a glass of water. “So those were my three questions. Why don’t you talk now?”

He wondered if these men were the ones who knew the secrets and, if they did, were they telling him? And if they didn’t, why wasn’t he meeting with the ones who knew?

What they did tell him over the next week was still more information than he’d ever wanted to know. The threats to the country seemed more severe than the daily briefings had made them out to be when he was just a candidate. The debt crisis sounded worse; the health care and child care and education systems all sounded as if they were beyond repair. Day after day he was shown figures, charts, data, algorithms, predictions by think tanks, names of famous people who might be trying to overthrow the country, bridges that were about to collapse, hurricane predictions, and on and on and on.

At the end of the fourth day he told Betsy he believed these transition periods were only set up to take the wind out of the sails of any new administration. “If there is a shadow government, this would be one way to make a new president feel powerless.”

Betsy took another approach. “You have nothing to lose. If it’s that bad, all you can do is make it better. Does the First Lady still get her own staff?”

“Of course.”

“There you go. Things are looking up already. What about the spacemen?”

“I asked. There aren’t any.”

*   *   *

Kathy and Brian sat on a couch in Sue Norgen’s office. Sue again suggested that maybe the conversation should just involve direct family and she was told again that Brian could stay. Sue never made it her decision. If family members wanted others present at times like these, it was their choice, and quite frankly she didn’t really care. She pulled up a chair and faced Kathy, only occasionally glancing at Brian.

“Your father was shot at work, as you know.”

“I don’t know anything! This is the first information I’m hearing.”

“He was shot at the school, one bullet in the left collarbone.”

“Oh my God.”

“Fortunately, it did not go into his heart, but he has lost a lot of blood, and the bullet was so deeply lodged that they had to remove quite a bit of bone to take it out. The nerve in his left shoulder may or may not have been damaged.”

“What does that mean?” Kathy was trembling.

“It means that we won’t know for a while if he is going to lose any movement or feeling in that area.”

“How much movement could he lose?”

“I don’t want to speculate. It may be fine or he may lose the ability to move his arm.”

“Oh, no. Oh God.”

“I think it’s much too early to speculate. I’m just giving you the details that we have now and the information that will pertain to his recovery. He will need to stay in the hospital for a week and then he might need extensive physical therapy.”

“I understand,” Kathy said. “Whatever he needs.”

This was the part Sue didn’t like. Kathy did not understand. No one did until they were told. For the most part, Sue liked her job, but she never understood why the task fell to her to explain basic economics. So many people thought these expenses were just paid for out of thin air. Do they teach nothing in high school anymore? “Kathy … may I call you Kathy?”

“Yes,” Kathy said, knowing that that expression never led to anything good.

“Your father does not have a comprehensive insurance plan.” Kathy’s face was expressionless. She knew what was coming. But it was much worse than she thought. “As a matter of fact, he has no real insurance at all. His universal coverage lapsed a year and a half ago when he stopped making the minimum payments.”

“But he was going to make those payments up. That’s why he took that job.”

“I understand, but he didn’t. If you let your co-pay go unpaid, the government guarantee of health care is void. It is everyone’s responsibility to keep that payment going.”

“Well, can I get the money somehow and pay the co-pay myself?”

“It’s too late for that. When the government saw that too many people simply stopped their end of the bargain, just waiting until they got sick to resume their payments, they passed very strict laws regarding co-pays. It’s really the same as a mortgage. If you miss your mortgage payment, you lose your house.” Kathy was getting angry.

“We got behind in our mortgage and we didn’t lose our house.”

“How many months did you get behind?”

“Two.”

“Well, your father let his insurance payment go for almost a year and a half. Even two months would have been a problem, but at eighteen months there’s nothing I can do.”

“So what does this mean?”

“Well, the good news is, we are going to treat your father for the time he is in the hospital. We will have no ability, though, to get him physical therapy if it turns out that that’s what he needs. You will have to arrange that.”

“Okay,” Kathy said. That didn’t sound so bad to her; maybe her dad wouldn’t need therapy, maybe he would be okay. Then Sue Norgen continued and Kathy heard it, but didn’t. Her brain could not comprehend what came next.

“Kathy, the hospital bill will need to be paid.” Sue looked down at her small screen, confirming the figures before she said anything further. “The bill, including the surgery, including one week of care, no more, will be approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

It was Brian who spoke first. “What did you say?” Brian was now standing.

“The surgery and the one-week stay will be approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” Brian started pacing like an animal. Kathy just sat there, still not comprehending what this meant.

“He has universal care; it can’t be that much!” Brian said.

“He had no care. He let his payments lapse,” Sue replied.

“But he was going to pay them; that’s why he was working at such a shitty job!” Brian raised his voice. “That’s why he got shot!”

“I know it sounds unfair, but I do not make the rules. My job is to collect money so the hospital stays in business.”

“We don’t have the money,” Kathy said. “Are you going to kill him?”

“Of course not, you know that.” Sue got up and went back to her desk. “I am going to send to your screen various plans where you can take out a medical loan, much like any other loan. This can be dealt with in that fashion. Did you ever take out a student loan for college?”

“I didn’t go to college. I had to work.”

“Well, this can be paid back over time by anyone you choose—your father, you, anyone.” Kathy got up. She looked terrible. No color in her face, no expression.

“So I have to borrow three hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“What if they won’t loan us the money?”

“Didn’t you say your father owned his home?”

“Yes, but I think he owes more than it’s worth.”

“Kathy, the medical loans are a bit more lenient because the expense has already been incurred, so I’m sure as long as someone has a job and is willing to make a serious attempt, you will get the money.”

“And what if we don’t?”

“You’re a healthy young woman. Even if your father can never work again, I’m sure you can, or someone else in your family can. And I am sure over time you can pay it back. But I’m not the lender; my responsibility is to the hospital. So when you get home, look over your choices. I can’t imagine that something won’t work out.”

“Can I see my father?”

“Not while he is in intensive care.”

“When can I see him?”

“Go home for now. Look over the material I’ve sent and I will call you and let you know when your father can have a visitor.”

Brian was furious. He wanted to punch this woman in the face. Kathy walked to the door. She honestly felt that if she didn’t take care of the money, she would never see her father again.

CHAPTER NINE

The President had asked for a meeting with several prominent health professionals for Wednesday, the twelfth of June, but something was about to alter his plans.

Wednesday morning, Jack Eller, Brad’s poorest friend, got up early. He had a terrible pain in his right foot. His insurance was the barest-bones coverage the government offered. For a low premium, he was allowed one doctor visit a year, and one visit to an emergency room every three years. Major surgery was covered if three separate medical sources wrote that it was absolutely necessary. Ambulances were not covered, home nursing was not covered, physical therapy was not covered, and the overall deductible was five thousand dollars.

The result of such a stringent plan was that patients simply stopped asking for help. If they passed out in their own home, they would be lucky to be taken to the hospital by a private car so they didn’t start out the visit owing three thousand dollars for the ambulance ride. If they were luckier, they woke up in a bed with at least two approvals for whatever it was they needed, a third approval at that point being pretty much guaranteed. Many patients died waiting for these approvals, but the government held firm.

As Jack was sitting on his bed rubbing his swollen foot, he glanced at the clock. It was 6:35 in the morning. The pain was so bad he thought maybe Brad could pick him up and he could use his one emergency room visit—he hadn’t had one in almost four years. He didn’t want to call Brad too early, so he hobbled over to the kitchenette and pressed “brew” on the coffee machine. As soon as he pressed the button, it started: a small shaking that either would be gone in a second, or not.

Living in Los Angeles, people were used to this from time to time, and most of the time it was nothing. The last sizable shake, which was in Palm Springs in 2020, measured a 7.1 and was felt throughout the Los Angeles area. Immediately after that quake, experts came on the news and declared that it wasn’t “the big one.” What did that mean, “the big one”? Everyone thought about it, but nobody had lived through a “big one,” so people could only imagine.

Jack waited for the shaking to stop. It didn’t. It had only just begun. After about twelve seconds it seemed to double in intensity, and then it tripled, and then everything fell down. Jack ran to hide under his bed. He didn’t make it. A beam from the ceiling hit him in the forehead and that was it.

Brad was literally thrown out of bed. As his ceiling started to come down, he ran to the doorway of the bathroom and just stood, expecting to die. Every piece of glass broke in his condo, everything came out of every cabinet, and the refrigerator-communication center fell over. The framed picture of Brad and his wife meeting Bill Clinton was shattered. The Lalique crystal water faucet he was given at his retirement lunch was smashed into a hundred pieces.

The electricity ceased after the first fifteen seconds. Handheld devices now communicated directly with satellites, so Brad reached for his watch, but he didn’t know who to call or what to do. He called Herb. There was no answer. He called Jack. No answer. Then he got a call. It was his son. The fact that they never spoke didn’t matter now; he was grateful to talk to anybody.

“Dad?” His son sounded panicked.

“Tom, are you all right?”

“No. We’ve had a terrible earthquake.” That his son lived near San Diego, two hundred miles away, and thought the earthquake was centered there, gave Brad an indication of just how big this was. “Are you all right, Dad, is it bad there?”

“It’s bad here,” Brad said. “You have to protect yourself from the aftershocks.”

There was no response. “Tom?” Nothing. “Tom, can you hear me?” The connection was gone. Now it was impossible to get anything on the watch. There were too many people using the satellite system; it was overwhelmed.

Brad made his way outside as soon as the initial shaking stopped. And then he felt the first aftershock. It was an aftershock worse than any earthquake ever recorded in California.

So this was “the big one.” This was the one scientists said in 2010 had a fifty percent chance of happening in the next thirty years. Fifty-fifty. Red or black. The San Andreas Fault had not moved substantially in over three hundred years. “Overdue” was an understatement.

The initial shake was a 9.1. The first aftershock was an 8.7. The second was an 8.2. The third, an 8.0, was bigger than anything that had ever been predicted.

It was funny. Brad remembered a science show he had seen years earlier that talked about the San Andreas Fault. “Compared to other faults,” the show said, “the San Andreas is only capable of something in the high sevens.” And yet the show did point out that in the next million or so years, Los Angeles would be somewhere north of San Francisco. Brad had wondered at the time how scientists could be so sure that a fault would never go higher than a certain magnitude, since obviously it was in the process of moving hundreds of miles. Couldn’t they be wrong, just once? Couldn’t the earth decide, one afternoon, to move a little faster than geologists agreed on? How could someone be that sure about the earth’s crust? They don’t even get the weather right. Brad remembered thinking how presumptuous that was, and today he wondered if the guy who hosted that program was in the city. To have your life destroyed and be wrong—well, that would be a bad morning.

Los Angeles was not prepared for this. No city could be. No freeway was drivable, no buildings were okay, and many came down completely. Ninety-eight percent of the property in Los Angeles County was severely damaged.

The death toll was close to fifty thousand and the number of injured was incalculable. First reports said up to half a million people were seriously hurt. Hospitals could do nothing. They were damaged beyond repair; all they tried to do was keep the patients who were already there alive.

And then, after all was said and done, after all of the damage and death and destruction, there was one looming issue. Where in God’s name would the money come from to fix America’s largest city? For a country so deeply in debt, this seemed like an impossible task.

The nation’s largest insurance company simply declared bankruptcy. It had liability in the great quake of more than a trillion dollars. It couldn’t pay a hundredth of that. That was the problem with earthquake insurance: It was a good bet in a small quake where your house was damaged but the house down the street was fine. Then, after paying a large deductible, you were likely to see some money. When all the houses in the entire city were damaged, that equation didn’t work. State and federal aid would be bare minimum at best. To fix the highways alone would cost fifty times more than it did to build them.

But all that would have to wait. This was a true humanitarian crisis, the worst the United States had ever faced. In images beamed instantly all over the globe, California looked like a third-world country. People were lying in the streets, bodies piled up along the sidewalks; fires raged all over the city, and the possibility of severe outbreaks of disease grew by the hour.

*   *   *

The earthquake occurred at 6:36 A.M., Pacific Standard Time. At 9:36 A.M., Eastern Standard Time, President Bernstein was in the Oval Office drinking coffee, eating a jelly doughnut, and reading the morning briefings. His chief of staff, John Van Dyke, felt a tingling on his wrist. His communicator was set on “tickle” and he immediately looked at his watch. He gasped. Bernstein stopped reading and looked up. “What’s the problem?”

“A colossal earthquake.”

“Where?”

“Here, sir.”

“Here? I didn’t feel a thing.”

“In Los Angeles. A nine point one.”

“Come on. No. Jesus Christ!”

Bernstein pressed a button and the wall in front of him changed instantly into multiple screens. He could see anything he wanted. Every news outlet, his Joint Chiefs of Staff, NORAD, live cameras placed on top of government buildings in every city in America, images from space—it was his choice. For three minutes he just watched the same images being fed to every other American. Devastation not seen before by a U.S. president.

Bernstein was known for his calm. He didn’t show emotion in public very often and he even tried to keep it from his staff. But he felt he was losing it. He started to sweat and he could feel his heartbeat accelerate. “My God, John. What has happened? Is everyone sure this was an earthquake?”

“What do you mean, Mr. President?”

“Could this have been a nuclear explosion and people assumed it was an earthquake?”

“No, sir. It registered a nine point one on the Richter scale.”

“My God. My God.”

That’s all the president of the United States could muster as he watched one image after another of America’s biggest city in ruins.

*   *   *

Dr. Sam Mueller’s G10 landed at Reagan International Airport at eleven A.M. He had been in flight when the earthquake happened, and as soon as he touched down, he, too, watched the screen in the private terminal along with dozens of other rich people. His mind was racing. Will there still be a meeting? Can I do something to help? Is there an invention to be hatched here to deal with this crisis? It would sound cold to some, but Mueller’s mind had always worked that way. He hated when he saw tragedy and thought of business, but he convinced himself that was how the brains of brilliant people worked. Don’t beat yourself up for being brilliant.

*   *   *

The government was in full crisis mode. President Bernstein ordered half the National Guard to California. Every army base in the western United States sent all available manpower and resources to the coast. He asked General Robert Roscoe, assistant head of the Joint Chiefs, to get to Los Angeles as quickly as possible and coordinate the rescue effort. Bernstein wanted the army to set up as many temporary hospitals, which were really nothing more than large tents, as it had. He wanted them up and running immediately, and even though there wasn’t enough staff for all of them, he felt it was important for the public to see those images.

The first country to offer help was Canada. They sent thirty doctors, over a hundred nurses, and supplies. Mexico also offered assistance. Bernstein had to make a decision about whether he should go to California immediately, but it was felt that it would be best to let the military get its foot in the door and then he would fly out and tour the area. It was such a production to transport the president of the United States, and he didn’t feel Los Angeles needed to give its attention to him at this moment of crisis.

There was another major issue that required him to stay in Washington. In a disaster this size there was always a higher likelihood of trouble from either inside or outside the country. Individuals, even nations, can take advantage of a weakened adversary, so the President ordered the United States on highest alert. Police in other cities were on twenty-four-hour watch for suspicious activities, and the Strategic Air Command went to DEFCON 1, its war footing. America was immediately turned into a no-fly zone: For forty-eight hours all commercial flights were grounded, and it was ordered that anything in the sky would be shot down. Los Angeles was so crippled that even a small attack during this time would destroy it for good.

The President was leaving the Situation Room when John Van Dyke reminded him, “We have the health team all assembled here. Do you want to cancel it?”

“No,” said the President. “Make it for later, but don’t cancel. This isn’t exactly the health issue I wanted to talk about, but their advice will be important. Make it after lunch. Feed them, show them around, take them to the zoo, whatever you have to do, but give me a few hours to deal with this. Why don’t you make it for three o’clock?”

“Yes, sir.”

The President returned to the Oval Office and just watched the screens as they displayed devastation never seen before. At least this wasn’t my fault.

*   *   *

Kathy Bernard and Brian Nelson were sitting in her home in Indianapolis, watching the disaster. “I’ve always hated Los Angeles,” Brian said. “A bunch of rich perverts. They deserve it.”

Normally Kathy would correct him when he made those kinds of gross generalizations, but this was the last thing on her mind. All she could think about was her dad. “It’s not fair,” she said. “He was trying to make his payments. He’s still young, compared to all those fucking boomers who won’t die. Why should we pay the health care for someone who has already had ninety years of life and not my dad?”

“I’m with you,” Brian said. “I say kill all those old fuckers.”

They went back to watching the earthquake. Kathy felt a bit selfish watching such devastation and thinking only about her own problems, but to her a $350,000 debt was the same thing as a 9.1.

*   *   *

The watch on Dr. Mueller’s wrist lit up. It was his assistant in Florida.

“The President’s appointment secretary just asked if you could stay later. The President would like to meet at three.”

“Sure,” Sam said.

“What do we do in the meantime?” Maggie whispered, overhearing the watch. His assistant heard her.

“You are welcome to come to the White House now for lunch and a tour with the First Lady, or you can spend the day however you wish and arrive there shortly before the meeting.”

“We’ll go now and do the lunch and the tour,” Maggie said.

“You heard her,” Sam replied. “That’s the decision.”

“All right, sir. A driver is waiting for you. Did you see the earthquake in Los Angeles, Dr. Mueller?”

“Yes. Horrible.”

“Our office building and lab there were completely destroyed, but nothing dangerous was released. And thank God it was early, so no one was in the building.”

“I know,” Sam said. “Bob called me an hour ago. It’s lucky for us they make it too expensive to do business out there or we would have lost a lot more. I’ll check in with you later.”

Sam and Maggie got into the limousine.

“Where to, sir?”

“The White House.” That felt really cool. Some things never got old.

*   *   *

The Situation Room was fully active now, as if the country had been attacked. They watched secure feeds of information flowing in, getting the most up-to-the-minute counts on the dead and injured, and watched close-up pictures from space.

Bernstein could never get over these pictures. They weren’t new technology—this had been around for probably fifty years—but they kept getting better. Stupendously clear photos of the smallest objects, with the best sound you ever heard. You could read a Vehicle Identification Number on an automobile from fifty miles up. And you could hear the conversation in the same car. The government had to go through the motions of getting judicial approval to hear what people were saying, although visual spying was allowed—it was odd, you could see someone in bed, you just weren’t allowed to hear him without a court order—but the orders were easy to obtain, and most of the time the government listened anyway and got the permission later.

Today, however, they weren’t interested in conversations. This wasn’t about a conspiracy. It was about a catastrophe. The worst the nation had ever seen.

CHAPTER TEN

The United States had always felt it was just a matter of time before a nuclear device went off somewhere in the country. But its worst fears—that of a full-fledged bomb exploding—had not yet happened. When a dirty bomb exploded in Chicago in 2023, it was handled well. The thing about dirty bombs is that they leave large parts of real estate uninhabitable, but they don’t kill on a large scale.

People were scared to death when it happened, but the explosion itself was over before anyone knew there was radiation involved. The area, about one city block, was sealed off, and remained that way for five years until they were able, with the help of new chemicals, to cleanse the buildings of any measurable contamination. Still, no one moved back there. They almost had to give the land away and they were forced to put up a big electronic Geiger counter, like a billboard, that always registered zero, just to put people at ease. The area was affectionately known in the city as the Hot Zone, and some strip clubs and dance clubs actually made money there, with strippers known as “Xray” and “NewCleo.”

Other parts of the world were not that fortunate. People had always expected the first nuclear explosion to be in the Middle East when Iran got its weapon, or Pakistan or North Korea. But North Korea surprised everyone.

When Kim Jong Il died in 2013, the country fell apart and into the hands of the south. Over the next few years the two countries became one Korea with not only no resistance from the north but almost an attitude of gratefulness. The people in the north had nothing, knew almost nothing about the world, but knew from messages that had gotten through to them from relatives who had escaped a long time ago that they had it as bad as it could get. And once change was offered to them, they ate it up like starving animals.

Israel waited through 2011 as the United States talked to Iran and tried to present a face of progress, but Israeli spies knew the truth. Weapons were being constructed at the rate of one a month starting in January 2012. With help from double agents inside Iran and secret help from Egypt and Jordan—two Arab countries more scared of Iran than Israel, if that was possible—a massive strike was undertaken to set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by at least a decade. It unleashed a conventional war that went on for almost six months, with tens of thousands of casualties and Arab nations fighting one another. The United States supplied weapons but refused to officially enter the conflict.

Fighting was brought to an uneasy truce toward the end of 2012, and for the foreseeable future Iran, other than by buying one off the black market, was not going to have its weapon. The odd thing was that as soon as fighting ceased, Israel went back to the same strained relationship it had had with Jordan and Egypt. They were there for each other in times of absolute crisis, but barring that, Jews were Jews and Arabs were Arabs, and that was not going to change.

Pakistan and India were not as lucky. By 2013 there was complete chaos in Pakistan. The Taliban, fighting the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, in a war that was making Vietnam look like a quickie, made their move to take over Pakistan once and for all. Slowly, each year, they gained the support of more of the people. Pakistan, unlike India, never distributed its wealth, and as the population got poorer and less educated, the Taliban took over more hearts and minds. The news reports that the Taliban had been driven out were true. Driven out of one place, but welcomed into another. Not dead and not gone. And when they’d become quiet for a few years, people made the big mistake of thinking the worst was over. But all they had done was go back into the population and fester. They cemented themselves with the millions of impoverished people and the thousands of soldiers who wanted a more religious state.

The Taliban made their move on Christmas Eve 2013, a date that meant nothing to them, almost as if to say to the Christian world, “Merry Christmas, you fuckers.” It was quick, coordinated beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, and because of the help they had within the army, relatively bloodless. By New Year’s Day 2014, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was under Taliban control. The remaining government basically surrendered without a fight. The rest of the world watched in horror as Sharia law was imposed on an entire nation. The Taliban immediately organized military parades, as they wanted Pakistan and the world to see thousands of people cheering for them in the streets. An Al-Qaeda bomb—actually, seventy of them—was finally a reality.

The United States went on highest alert, and war plans were discussed in case Pakistan had to be attacked before any of these weapons could be fired. But it was India that was truly petrified. Yes, the Taliban hated the U.S., but they hated India more. And, like all Pakistanis, they wanted the land they believed was rightfully theirs.

It only took two months in power before the first clash came in Kashmir. India noticed immediately that the Pakistani soldiers fought with a new intensity. Accompanying the fighting were strong warnings and threats coming from the Taliban government: “Give us this land, or else.” The last thing India wanted to do was now its only option.

Secret meetings were held with the United States, Germany, France, China, Japan, Russia, and the UK. None of these countries liked the new Pakistan, and only China and Russia, among the major powers, thought they could do business with its new government.

India said, and the intelligence backed them up, that it was going to be attacked with nuclear weapons and it had to strike first. The United States thought it was the right thing to do. China and Japan thought India should give it more time. Germany and France, with their large Muslim populations, were mixed in their reactions. They knew an attack would cause an uprising in the streets, but they were more scared of Taliban influence spreading into their own society.

The United States thought that India could dismantle Pakistan’s ability to strike back if it hit key facilities first, with bunker-buster nukes. These were still nuclear weapons, but they were exploded deep in the ground, not in the air, and they did phenomenal damage without catastrophic radiation release. There was no way to prevent Pakistan from firing something, but with advanced defense missiles and a population large enough that it could afford a million or so casualties, India convinced the rest of the world that it was now or never.

India kept the fighting up in Kashmir to divert attention and, in late 2014, it launched a preemptive attack on the Taliban’s nuclear facilities, along with sending in a million men to try to take hold of the country. The plan mostly worked, although five Taliban rockets were launched with nuclear warheads. Two landed in unpopulated areas, but three landed near cities, with one landing twenty miles outside of Delhi. Three hundred thousand people were killed instantly, with hundreds of thousands more getting sick over the following weeks. But India had secured Pakistan and now occupied it. The Pakistani people were shocked by how quickly their country was taken over, but they didn’t love the Taliban enough to rise up, and the Pakistani army was leaderless and too disorganized to put up any further resistance. With India now in control of the Taliban’s nukes, plus its own, it would be impossible for Pakistan to fight them and win.

India’s first job was to try to put a government favorable to it in power. It found some Taliban who were friendlier to the idea than others and cultivated them, along with leaders in exile whom the people still had some affection toward. But no new government was going to get the nukes back. Those went to the victor, and for the first time in fifty years Pakistan had no weapons of mass destruction.

The nuclear explosions that took place during this conflict did one positive thing, if one could call it that. They gave the world a chance to see firsthand what nuclear devastation really looked like. A nuclear bomb, to the majority of people alive in 2015, had meant nothing. It was a weapon that signified something terrible, but virtually no one had any experience or memory of it, or even read books on Hiroshima any longer. There were still some aging baby boomers who remembered hiding under their desks in grammar school, as if that would have saved them when their schools heated up to three thousand degrees, but short of that, nuclear war was just a lingering threat.

Then people finally were able to see for themselves what a nuclear bomb really did, and more people than ever before were determined not to let it happen again. On the other hand, it also confirmed that there was no better weapon of terror ever invented.

And that’s what Los Angeles looked like. As if a big fat fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb had been dropped in the center of the city. The same devastation without the radiation. Thank God terrorists didn’t know how to start earthquakes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At 2:45 President Bernstein finally left the Situation Room and went upstairs to the residence to take a shower and change clothes before his meeting with the elite of the medical establishment. His original idea for the meeting, to discuss a range of issues including the problems inherent in unabated longevity, now seemed unimportant. And yet the country’s business still had to go on. There were still forty-nine states with no earthquake.

The President had one question that he wanted a real answer to. Put simply, “Are people living too long?” He had to be careful how he phrased it, just as he had had to be when he was running. It was something the other side loved to get ahold of and distort. CANDIDATE WANTS SENIORS DEAD, one headline screamed during the election. But Bernstein knew that this was an issue that had to be dealt with by someone, so it might as well be him.

The United States had already pushed the retirement age to seventy-three, trying to stave off the Social Security debacle. They raised premiums on Medicare and cut the coverage to bare bones, but nothing really made a difference. The cost for these programs had overwhelmed the country, and the bigger question was always looming: At what price life?

When Bernstein was in high school he had been on a debate team, and one of the debates was pro-choice versus pro-life. He was assigned pro-life even though he wanted to debate for the other side. But he got all of his talking points straight and tried his best. He argued that life began at conception and other humans had no right to take a life, and asked, What if they’d aborted Jonas Salk or Winston Churchill? And he was winning. Then someone from the other side said, “The pro-life movement only cares about the human while it’s still in the mother. As soon as it’s born, the pro-choice people have to take care of it.” And Bernstein couldn’t answer. He agreed. And he lost the debate.

He believed that many of the pro-lifers never thought about life as an entire journey. Just get the human beings here any way possible and the rest will be figured out. Who would do that? Who would figure it out? Maybe now that he was president, he could at least start the discussion for real.

There is no essential difference between entering your woman's feminine heart and entering fully into the world. Both forms of intercourse sexual and worldly require sensitivity, spontaneity, and a strong connection to deep truth in order to penetrate chaos and closure in a way that love prevails.

Neither woman nor world are predictable. They will often seem to resist your gifts and test your capacity to persist. And, just as surely, they will tenderly respond to the authenticity of your relaxed ministrations, the freedom expressed in your humor, and the invasion of your adamant love. They will open in love and receive you fully-only to resist and test you again, moments or days later. Neither woman nor world can be second guessed, or fooled. They know when you are just dicking around. They want to receive you for real.

There are two ways to deal with woman and world without compromising your true gifts or dribbling away the force of your deep being. One way is to renounce sexual intimacy and worldliness, totally dedicating yourself without distraction or compromise to the path you choose to pursue, free of the seemingly constant demands of woman and world.

The other way is to "fuck" both to smithereens, to ravish them with your love unsheathed, to give your true gifts despite the constant tussle of woman and world, to smelt your authentic gifts in this friction of opposition and surrender, to thrust love from the freedom of your deep being even as your body and mind die blissfully through a crucifixion of inevitable pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, gain and loss. No gifts left ungiven. No limit to the depth of being.

Only openness, freedom, and love as the legacy of your intercourse with woman and world.

If you are going to tryst with women and world at all, better to go all the way and ravish them from the depths of your true core, blooming them open with the wide gifts of your unrelenting heart. Otherwise, if you sheepishly penetrate them to gratify your own needs, your woman and the world will feel your lack of dedication, depth, and truth. Rather than yielding in love to your loving, they will distract you, suck your energy, and draw you into endless complications, so that your life and relationship become an almost constant search for release from constraint.

You can be a renunciate and live alone, apart from woman and world.But if you choose a life of sexual and worldly intercourse, you will feel trapped by woman and world unless you are free in the midst of "true fuck," yielding yourself into the giving, holding nothing back, dissolving all time in the open of love. Through thick and thin, this is the way of the superior man.

Enjoy Your Friends Criticism

A man's capacity to receive another man's direct criticism is a measure of his capacity to receive masculine energy. If he doesn't have a good relationship to masculine energy (e.g., his father), then he will act like a woman and be hurt or defensive rather than make use of other men's criticism.

About once a week, you should sit down with your closest men friends and discuss what you are doing in your life and what you are afraid of doing. The conversation should be short and simple. You should state where you are at. Then, your friends should give you a behavioral experiment, something you can do that will reveal something to you, or grant more freedom in your life.

"I want to have an affair with Denise, but I don't want to hurt my wife. I'm afraid of her finding out," you might say.

"You've been talking about Denise now for six months. You are wasting your life energy on this fantasy. You should either have sex with herby tomorrow night, or drop the whole thing and never talk about it again," our friends might say, challenging your hesitation and mediocrity.

"OK. I know I'm not going to do it. I see now that I am too afraid of ruining my marriage to have an affair with Denise.

My marriage is more important than my desire for Denise. I'll drop it and refocus on the priorities in my life. Thanks."

Your close men friends should be willing to challenge your mediocrity by suggesting a concrete action you can perform that will pop you out of your rut, one way or the other. And you must be willing to offer them your brutal honesty, in the same way, if you are all to grow. Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another. If you are at your edge, your men friends should respect that, but not let you off the hook. They should honor your fears, and, in love, continue to goad you beyond them, without pushing you.

If you merely want support from your men friends.

If you merely want support from your men friends without challenge, it bespeaks an unresolved issue you may have with your father, whether he is alive or dead. The father force is the force of loving challenge and guidance. Without this masculine force in your life, your direction becomes unchecked, and you are liable to meander in the mush of your own ambiguity and indecision. Your close men friends can provide the stark light of love-uncompromised by a fearful Mr. Nice act-by which you can see the direction you really want to go.

Choose men friends who themselves are living at their edge, facing their fears and living just beyond them. Men of this kind can love you without protecting you from the necessary confrontation with reality that your life involves. You should be able to trust that these friends will tell you about your life as they see it, offer you a specific action which will shed light on your own position, and give you the support necessary to live in the freedom just beyond your edge, which is not always, or even usually, comfortable.

If You Don’t Know Your Propose Discover it Now

Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakened, impotent existence, perhaps eventually becoming even sexually impotent, or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex.

The core of your life is your purpose. Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.

But if you don't know your deepest desire, then you can't align your life to it. Everything in your life is dissociated from your core. You go to work, but since it's not connected to your deepest purpose, it is just a job, away to earn money.

You go through your daily round with your family and friends, but each moment is just another in a long string of moments, going no-where, not inherently profound.

Disconnected from your core, you feel weak. This empty feeling will undermine not only your "erection" in the world, but your erection with your woman, too.

However, when you know your true purpose, which is your core desire in life, each moment can become a full expression of your core desire.

Every instant of career, every instant of intimacy, is filled with the power of your heart purpose. You are no longer just going through the motions at work and with your woman, but you are living the truth of your life, and giving the gifts of your love, moment by moment. Such a life is complete unto itself in every instant.

The superior man is not seeking for fulfillment through work and woman, because he is already full. For him, work and intimacy are opportunities to give his gifts, and be vanished in the bliss of the giving.

BeWilling To Change Everything In Life

A man must be prepared to give 100% to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specificaction followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.

As you open yourself to living at your edge, your deepest purpose will slowly begin to make itself known. In the meantime, you will experience layer after layer of purposes, each one getting closer and closer to the fullness of your deepest purpose. It is as if your deepest purpose is at the center of your being, and it is surrounded by layers of concentric circles, each circle being a lesser purpose. Your life consists of penetrating each circle, from the outside toward the center.

The outer purposes are often the purposes you have inherited or learned from your parents and your childhood experiences. Perhaps your father was a fireman, so you wanted to be a fireman. Or, in reaction to him, you've decided to be an arsonist. In any case, the outer circles, the purposes you often apply yourself too early in life, are most likely only distant approximations of your deepest purpose.

If your deepest purpose is to meditate and realize God, you might find that before you can totally dedicate yourself to this practice you must work your way through the concentric circles of playing with sexual partners, using drugs, getting married, raising children, developing a career, and finally, having dissolved your fascination and need to do all of that, getting down to the business of full-time meditation.

As you dissolve each layer and move toward the center, you will more and more be living from your deeper purposes, and then your deepest heart purpose, whatever that is, in every moment. However, you probably are not living your deepest purpose yet. You probably need to burn off the karma, or fulfill the need, of the present purpose by which you are fascinated and distracted.

It's easy to feel disappointed by life; success is never as fulfilling as you think it is going to be. But there is a reason for this. Successfully completing a lesser purpose doesn't feel very good for very long, because it is simply preparation for advancing toward a greater embodiment of your deeper purpose. Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure.

For instance, you may take on a business project, work at it for several years, and then suddenly find yourself totally disinterested. You know that if you stayed with it for another few years you would reap much greater financial reward than if you left the project now. But the project no longer calls you. You no longer feel interested in the project. You have developed skills over the last few years working on the project, but it hasn't yet come to fruition. You may wonder, now that you have the skills, should you stick with it and bring the project to fruition, even though the work feels empty to you?

Well, maybe you should stick with it. Maybe you are bailing out too soon, afraid of success or failure, or just too lazy to persevere. This is one possibility. Ask your close men friends if they feel you are simply losing steam, wimping out, or afraid to bring your project to completion. If they feel you are bailing out too soon, stick with it.

However, there is also the possibility that you have completed your karma in this area. It is possible that this was one layer of purpose, which. You have now fulfilled, on the way to another layer of purpose, closer to your deepest purpose. Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these:

1. You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly.

2. You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it.

3. Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened.

4. You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project.

5. The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wall papering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to?

If you experience these signs, it is probably time to stop working on this project. You must end your involvement impeccably, however, making sure there are no loose ends and that you do not burden anybody's life by stopping your involvement. This might take some time, but it’s important that this layer of your purpose ends cleanly and does not create any new karma, or obligation, that will burden you or others in the future.

The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision.

There is no way to rush this process. You may need to get an intermediary job to hold you over until the next layer of purpose makes itself clear. Or, perhaps you have enough money to simply wait. But in any case, it is important to open yourself to a vision of what is next. You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions.

Don't watch TV or play computer games. Don't go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself.

Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.

When it comes, it usually won't be a detailed vision. You will probably have a sense of what direction to move in, but the practical steps might not make themselves clear. When the impulse begins to arise, act on it. Don't wait for the details. Learn by trial and error what it is you are to do.

For instance, perhaps you were a stockbroker and then finished that particular layer of purpose. You saved up some money, so now you are waiting for a vision of your next layer. After three weeks of going crazy, not knowing what you are going to do with your life, you begin to feel that you want to work with people. You begin to fantasize about using your financial skills to help people set up their own businesses. You have a few friends who have great intentions to save the world, but they are lousy businessmen and can't seem to get off the ground. So you call them and offer your help.

As you help them, you continually feel for the "groove" of your purpose. You might have a few false starts. But, eventually, you find that dozens of non-profit groups are telephoning you, asking for your advice. It feels as if the universe is supporting you in this direction. You have no idea whether you can earn a living doing this, but it feels right for now. So you apply yourself fully to it. You give your gift 100%, without holding anything back.

Soon, a wealthy man finds out about what you are doing. He admires your total commitment and your orientation to serve others. He becomes your patron. Now, you are set. You have a good income, you are doing what you really want to do, and you are helping others. You love what you do, so you generate love in those who come in contact with you.

Your life feels full.

And then, one day, a few years later, it is finished. This layer has dissolved. And the cycle begins again, and again, until you have penetrated all the layers into your deepest purpose. Then, you act fully, until that purpose, too, is dissolved in the bliss of the love that you are.

Don’t use Your Family As An Excuse

If a man never discovers his deepest purpose, or if he permanently compromises it and uses his family as an excuse for doing so, then his core becomes weakened and he loses depth and presence. His woman loses trust and sexual polarity with him, even though he may be putting much energy into parenting their children and doing the housework. A man should, of course, be a full participant in caring for children and the household. But if he gives up his deepest purpose to do so, ultimately, everyone suffers.

Take care of the children and the house as much as you want. Just remember that if you give up your true purpose to do so for too long, you are not really helping anyone.

Parenting children, as well as any responsible commitment in love, requires that you transcend your own personal preferences for the sake of the larger commitment, for the sake of service in love. This is a natural part of being a householder. However, you cannot abnegate your deepest purpose to do so, or else you will feel frustrated, eventually resigning yourself to a lesser life than you know you are capable of living.

This self-resignation will communicate itself to your woman and your children. They will feel your weakness. Your woman will begin to take charge more than she really wants, since you are clearly not capable of taking charge yourself, and someone has to do it. Your children will challenge your capacity to discipline them, since they can feel your own lack of authentic self-discipline. Try as you might, once you have negated your own deep purpose, your household will become a place where everybody tests your capacity to stand your ground, and you will lose.

Obviously, as a father or a householder, you will want to give your love, skill, energy, and time to your family. It will be your joy, and it will also be a necessity. However, the motive to dedicate time to household-mg may or may not be symmetrical between partners, and this should bean ongoing discovery for each couple. This motive may change over time for both men and women as their lives grow through different stages.

The priority of the feminine, in men and women, is the flow of love in relationship. The priority of the masculine, in men and women, is themission which leads to freedom. Ultimately, true freedom and true love are the same. However, the journey of the masculine and feminine to this unity of love and freedom is very different.

If your woman has a more feminine essence than you, or if she is in amore feminine phase of life than you, then her priority will be the flow of love in her life: her core will be much more fulfilled by the love she shares with the children than yours will be. You will also feel great fulfillment sharing love with your children, but if you have a masculine core, or if you are in a masculine phase of your life, this fulfillment will not touch your deepest parts in the same way. Even if you love your children every bit as much as your woman does, your relationship with them will only be part of your deepest life purpose.

What is your deepest life purpose? For some men, their deepest life purpose is their family. If you are one of these men, then you probably aren't concerned about the issue of whether or not you are using your family as an excuse. Many men, however, regardless of how much they love their family, also feel a deeper calling. If they do not live true to this calling, then their core weakens, even if they genuinely love and desire to serve their family.

When you know your direction and are living it fully, your core is alive and strong. Your children will naturally feel this. They will respond to your clarity and presence differently than they will respond to your ambiguity that results from having detoured from your deepest purpose because you think its "right" or "fair" that you spend time with them. A short period of time with a father who is absolutely present, full in love, undivided inside, and sure of his mission in life, will affect your children much more positively than if they spend lots of time with a father who is ambiguous in his intent and has lost touch with his deepest purpose, no matter how much he loves his children.

Children learn most from their parents by osmosis. If their father is subtly weakened and compromised, this will flavor their experience of his love. Just as you did with your father, your children will unconsciously replicate or react to the emotional taste they absorb from you. Your essential emotional tone at ease in your deepest purpose or fearful in the ambiguity of your intent-becomes part of your children's home.

If you and your woman both work, it is better to make arrangements with other families to "timeshare" child caring, or to hire someone to help with your children, than to permanently compromise your deepest purpose and truth because you feel you must do so to spend more time with your children. It is not the amount of time but the quality of the interaction that most influences a child's growth. Children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional tone. If you are not full in your core, aligned with your deepest purpose and living a life of authentic commitment, your children will feel it.

For their sake, your sake, and your woman's sake, discover your deepest purpose, commit yourself completely to its process, and find a way to embrace your family as you do so. Be with your woman and your children without compromise or ambiguity. Don't use your family as an excuse to be less than you can be. With birth control so readily available, children are a choice. If you choose to be a householder and raise children, you are responsible for serving them with as much authentic love as possible, which you can only give if your life is aligned with your deepest purpose.

Don't cheat your family of your fullest core, and don't use them as an excuse to avoid the work it will take to manifest your highest vision. You can give love to your family and engage your life's work, if you discipline yourself to act on your deepest desires with priority. Then, when you are with your family, you are with them totally, since there is no chronically unfinished business in your life to distract you, and no inner ambiguity about where you want to be or what you really want to be doing.

Don’t Get Lost In Tasks And Duty’s

Whatever the specifics of a man's purpose, he must always refresh the transcendental element of his life through regular meditation and retreat. A man should never get lost in the details of his life and forget that, ultimately and in truth, life amounts to nothing other than what is the deepest truth of this present moment. Tasks don't get a man anywhere more conscious or free than he is capable of being in this present moment.

You have probably noticed yourself in the "do mode." You are totally focused, intent on getting a task done. You don't want to be disturbed. If anyone tries to interrupt you with a question, you ignore them or give them a quick answer so you can keep on track. This "do mode" is very common among men. Whether you are trying to hear something on TV or finish a report by midnight, your attention is focused on the task at hand and you don't want to be distracted.

This "do mode" is one of men's biggest strengths and weaknesses. It’s great to be able to plow through obstructions and get the job done. And it's good to keep yourself disciplined and on purpose. But if you forget your larger purpose while pursuing the small and endless tasks of daily life, then you have reduced yourself to a machine of picayune.

Even now, as you read this, you may be in a "do mode," totally ensconced in the process of reading. If you were to die right now, what would be the feeling texture of your last moment? Are you feeling the infinite mystery of existence, so that your last moment would be one of awe and gratitude? Is your heart so wide open that your last moment would dissolve in perfect love? Or, are you so absorbed in some task that you would hardly notice death upon you, until the last instant, whoosh, and everything is gone?

The test of your fullness in every moment is your capacity to die in free and loving surrender, knowing you've done everything you could do while alive to give your gift and know the truth of being. Have you loved fully? Or, do you have unexpressed feelings that would taint your last moment with regret? Do you consistently relax into the awe of immense mystery? Or, are you so absorbed in your work and projects that you no longer feel the miracle of existence, each moment emerging from and dissolving into the great unknowable? Has your task addiction built blinders that limit the vastness of your vision, even now?

Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness. You cannot do enough, nor can you do the right things, so that you will finally feel complete. Doing is simply the nature of your bodily life. If you want the body to continue, you must eat and breathe. You must work, care for your family, and brush your teeth. But these are just the mechanics of life on Earth. They never come to the absolute truth of your being.

When you do your tasks in the right way, they liberate your life energy so that you can attend to what really matters-the investigation, realization, and embodiment of true freedom. Do you even know what this means? Have you devoted yourself to finding out the deepest truth of your own existence? If, in this very moment, your tasks are not supporting your life in this way, you must drop them or change them so that they do. Otherwise, you are wasting your life.

Whereas many women waste precious time swirling in emotional currents and eddies, many men waste their birth seeking the completion of tasks. Nose to the grindstone, day after day, year after year, and you be-come a robot of duty. Rather, raise your eyes, see to the horizon, and do your tasks in the spirit of sweeping out your house on a sunny day.

To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers. These refreshers should cut to your core and strip the fat off the moment. Consider your own death. Behold an image of the most enlightened being you know. Contemplate the mystery of existence. Relax into the deepest and most profound loving of which you are capable. In your own way, remember the infinite, and then return to the task at hand. This way, you will never lose perspective and begin to think that life is a matter of tasks. You are not a drone. You are the unbounded mystery of love. Be so, without forgetting your tasks.

Stop Hoping For Your Girl To Get Easier

A woman often seems to test her man's capacity to remain unperturbed in his truth and purpose. She tests him to feel his freedom and depth of love, to know that he is trustable. Her tests may come in the form of complaining, challenging him, changing her mind, doubting him, distracting him, or even undermining his purpose in a subtle or not so subtle way. A man should never think his woman's testing is going to end and his life will get easier. Rather, he should appreciate that she does these things to feel his strength, integrity, and openness. Her desire is for his deepest truth and love. As he grows, so will her testing.

Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge.

The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: imperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all-pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her. She cannot scare you away, because you already penetrate her in fearless love, pervading her heart and body. She cannot distract you, because your one-pointed commitment to truth will not bend to her wiles. Feeling this hugeness of love and freedom in you, she can trust you, utterly, and surrender her testing in celebration of love.

Until she wants to feel you as Shiva again. And then the testing will begin anew. In fact, it is precisely when you are most Shiva-like that she will most test you.

Perhaps you have been working toward some financial goal, and finally you have succeeded. After months or years of effort, you have creatively earned a large amount of money. You feel happy, full, and successful. You feel great. You come home to your woman and want to share the news with her.

"I just made a million dollars today."

"That's nice."

"That's nice!!?? You know how hard I've been working for this."

"I know. It feels like I haven't seen you in months. Did you remember to pick up the milk on the way home?"

"Oh, sorry" I forgot. But who cares? We could buy a dairy farm now?"

"I asked you to pick up the milk three times this morning, and I put a note on your briefcase. How could you forget?"

"I said I'm sorry. Look, I'll go get the damn milk..."

Why is she being this way? Because she simply wants to deflate your success? No. She is challenging you because your success doesn't mean shit to her, unless you are free and loving. And if you are free and loving, nothing she says can collapse you. She wants to feel you are uncollapsable, so she pokes you in your weak spot.

Of course she knows how much this moment of success means to you. This is precisely why she is negating it. Not because she wants to hurt you. But because she wants to feel Shiva. She wants to feel your strength. She wants to feel that your happiness is not dependent on her response, nor on you making a million dollars. She wants to feel you are a superior man.

It's a tall order to be this free, and in your more mediocre moments you will wish your woman would settle for less. But if you are a man who is living his fullest, willing to play his edge and grow through difficulties, then you will want her to test you. You may not like it. But you don't want her to settle for some bozo who depends on his woman's response to be happy. If you are aligned with your mission, you are essentially happy, even though times cycle between difficult and easy. You don't need your woman's strokes to fulfill your mission. It still feels good when she strokes you, but you don't need mommy anymore, telling you what a good boy you are. And your woman doesn't want you to need mommy.

In fact, it sickens her.

If your woman is weak, she may settle for a weak man, and therefore play into your need to feel like a good boy. But if she is a good woman, a strong woman, she won't tolerate your childish needs for a pat on the head, collecting bigger toys, and being king of the mountain. A good woman will love the childlike part of you, but she wants your life to be guided by your deepest truths, not your untended childhood wounds. She wants to feel that at your core you have grown beyond the need for kudos and million-dollar toys. She wants to feel your self-generated strength of truth.

So she will test you. She might not be fully conscious of why she is doing it, but she will poke your weak spots, especially in moments of your superficial success, in order to feel your strength. If you collapse, you've flunked the test.

You have let your woman deflate you. You have demonstrated your dependence on her for external validation. Even if you just made a million dollars, you are a weak man. Your woman cannot trust you fully.

If you remain full and strong, humorous and happy, your truth unperturbed by her testing, then you pass the test.

"Honey, I'll get you some milk, all right," you say as you sweep her off the ground and lay her on the couch, laughing, kissing, looking deeply into her eyes, and "milking" her happiness with the confident loving of your caresses.

She can relax and trust your Shiva core. She can surrender the tensions around her heart. You are trustable. You don't need her validation in order for you to be loving. You simply are loving. The truth of you is love. Your fullness is independent of mommy. You are not only a man, you are a superior man: a man who does his best to live as love in the world and in his intimacy, a man whose heart remains open and whose truth remains strong even when his woman criticizes him, a man who can find the humor in forgetting to pick up the milk on a day he made a million dollars.

This is the kind of man your woman can trust. Now, the moment is amoment of celebration. Now, she can relax and truly join in your jubilation, knowing you are not dependent on her praise for your happiness. It will last, perhaps, ten minutes. And then she will test you again.

It never ends. A woman will always test her man for the pleasure of feeling his strength in loving, his capacity to transcend nuisance, his persistence in his own truth, and his capacity to share that truth in love with her, even when she is complaining-especially when she is complaining. Her complaint is the beginning of her pleasure. It is not true criticism, but a test of your Shiva-hood. The criticism is entirely dissolved in love as soon as she feels your humor and happiness in the midst of the poke.

It never ends. This is the secret. You can't get out of it. Finding a different woman won't get you out of it. Therapy won't get you out of it. Financial or sexual mastery won't get you out of it. Your woman is testing you because she loves you.

She wants to feel your truth. She wants to feel your love. And she wants to feel that your truth and love are stronger than the barbs she can throw at you. Then she can relax and surrender into the polarity of man and woman. Then she can trust you.

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won't settle

PART 2

Wemen Are Not Liars

"Keeping your word" is a masculine trait, in men or women. A person with a feminine essence may not keep her word, yet it is not exactly "lying." In the feminine reality, words and facts take a second place to emotions and the shifting moods of relationship. When she says, "I hate you," or "I'll never move to Texas," or "I don't want to go to the movies," it is often more a reflection of a transient feeling-wave than a well considered stance with respect to events and experience. On the other hand, the masculine means what it says. A man's word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels. A woman's word is her true expression in the moment.

When you listen to your woman, listen to her as you would the ocean, or the wind in the leaves. The sounds you hear from her are sounds of the motion of her feeling-energy. Of course, there are times when she speaks in the masculine style of meaning exactly what she says, but more often, and almost always in emotional moments, what she says is the sound of her feelings. Her feminine speech is far more like poetry than like a clear cut agenda for action. In an emotional moment, what she says she is going to do is actually an expression of what she feels like doing in the moment. Her feelings, and therefore what she is actually going to do, could change in five minutes. It could change every five minutes.

Whenever you are surprised by your woman's actions, and you say to her, "But you said...," you are forgetting that she has a feminine essence.What your woman says is like a cloud passing in the sky: well-formed, coherent, and unrecognizable moments later. The cloud is an expression of the precise physics of water, wind, and air. Your woman's words are expressions of the physics of her feelings, your relationship, and the nuances of the present situation, seen and unseen. A moment later, these factors will change, and so will your woman's expressions.

You might ask her, "Do you want to go to the movies?"

She might reply, "Not really."

Then you hug her and spin her around and say, "Let's go to the movies?" And she says, "OK!" She is not talking about her desire to go to the movies. She is talking about the feeling of your relationship in the present moment. If after she said she didn't want to go to the movies, you said fine and sat down to watch TV, you would be missing the point. She is not really saying she doesn't want to go to the movies, even though that is what she's saying.

This is not lying. For a man or for anyone speaking in the masculine style, to say something that is not true is lying. But, for the feminine, truth is a thin concept compared to the thickness of her flow of feelings. The "truth" of the feminine is whatever she is really feeling, in this present moment.

So, when she says that she wants to move to Pittsburghwith you, and then, after you have sold the house, she says she doesn't want to movewith you, don't start yelling, "But you said...!"When she first told you she wanted to move, she was feeling good about the relationship. When she then told you she doesn't want to move, she was feeling bad about the relationship. Instead of arguing about what she said or didn't say, establish love in the intimacy first.

The basic rule is this: Don't believe the literal content of what your woman says unless love is flowing deeply and fully in the moment when she says it. And even then, know that she is probably talking about her current feelings, not necessarily about the subject of whatever she is talking about. Never base your plans on what a woman says she wants to do, unless she is in the full flow of love when she says it. And then, expect her to change her mind at any moment when her feelings change. Remember that a woman's feelings may be more sensitive to an unseen realm of nature than are yours. Try to differentiate between your woman's shifting moods and her sensitive wisdom.

Women are not liars, although they often seem that way to men. This is why a man must ultimately be responsible for making his own decisions, based on the deepest truth he can fathom. Otherwise, if he bends his course of truth to compromise for his woman's current and changing expressions, he will probably end up blaming her.

You should hear what your woman has to say and feel her depth care-fully. Then, after you have fully considered her input, make your best possible decision from your own deep core. This way, if your woman subsequently changes her mind, you won't resent her for compromising your path. Rather, you can enjoy her subtle sensitivity and changing emotional weather patterns. You can proceed with or modify your actions in full gear, knowing you are always making the best choice available to you. Having taken her depth of wisdom and her fluctuations of expression and moodwholly into account.

Praise Her

The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise. A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman. Praise her freely.

To grow by challenge. As a boy, other boys would challenge you in order to inspire you: "I bet you can't jump over that fence." In a place like boot camp, you are told you are a worthless slime dog, and this kind of insult challenges you to be your best. So, as a man, you probably have a masculine habit of challenging people, including your woman, in order to get her to improve or grow.

Only the masculine side of your woman will grow through challenge. The feminine side thrives on support and praise.

Telling her, "I love the shape of your body," will be much greater incentive for her to exercise than telling her, "I hope you don't gain any more weight."

Praise always magnifies the quality of your woman that you praise. "You're so beautiful when you smile," is much more effective than," You're so ugly when you frown," although they both indicate your desire for her smile. When speaking to your woman, it is always better to call the glass half full than half empty.

Praise is literal food for feminine qualities. If you want your woman to grow in her radiance, health, happiness, love, beauty, power, and depth, praise these qualities. Praise them daily, a number of times.

It is a difficult practice for most men to learn, but you must learn to praise the very qualities you feel are not yet praiseworthy in order for them to become so. In other words, praise the tiny quality that you want to grow. If you know that your woman would be healthier if she exercisedmore, don't tell her that. It will feel like an insult to her, a rejection of her the way she is. Instead, tell her how sexy she is when she sweats in her leotards. Tell her how much it turns you on when she moves her body.Whatever parts of her body you really like, let her know, frequently.

Praising the things you really enjoy when she exercises will magnify her exercising. On the other hand, by telling her why she should exercise, you are indicating that she is not acceptable to you the way she is. Praise works. Information doesn't. Praise motivates. Challenge doesn't. Try it. Praise specific things you love about your woman 5 to 10 times a day. Find out what happens.

Tolerating Leads To Resenting Her

A man gets resentful and frustrated with his woman when he is too afraid, weak, or unskilled to penetrate her moods and tests into love. He wishes she were easier to deal with. But it is not entirely her fault that she is bitchy and complaining. It is also a reflection of her lack of being penetrated by love. When a man resigns, and simply tolerates his woman's self-destructive moods, it is a sign of his weakness. His attitude has become one of wanting to escape women and the world, rather than wanting to serve women and the world into love. A man shouldn't tolerate bitchy and complaining moodiness in his woman, but he should serve her and love her with every ounce of his skill and perseverance. Then, if she cannot or will not open in love, he might decide to end his relationship with her, harboring no anger or resentment, because he knows he has done everything he could.

The whole point of an intimacy is to serve each other in growth and love, hopefully in better ways thanwe can serve ourselves. Other-wise, why engage in intimacy if your growth and love are served more by living alone? Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting.

One of the largest gifts you can give your woman is your capacity to open her heart when it is closed. Sure, she can get herself out of her darkmood, but your masculine thunderbolt of love can brighten her darkness in a way she can't do for herself.

If you are like most men, however, you probably end up feeling burdened by your woman's mood. You feel your woman is a pain in the ass. You wish your woman would leave you alone and take care of herself. Eventually you feel worn down, or frustrated. You end up simply tolerating your woman's moods, while resentment builds inside of you.

You wonder, what's her problem? Why can't she just be happy?

The feminine part of your woman is either opening in loving surrender (easy moments) or closing in what ends up being an emotional test of your capacity to open her (difficult moments). This cycle of the feminine is like all cycles in nature: it never ends. The sooner you learn to embrace and dance with these moods of closure, the sooner both of you will grow beyond the psychodrama and see the humor of the play.

Instead of tolerating your woman's moods of closure and complaint, open her moods with your skillful loving. It is your gift to give. Both of you will grow more by your giving than by your tolerating. A superior man sees his woman's moods not as a curse, but as a challenge and an amusement.

There are many ways to creatively deal with her moods and help her to open. Tickle her. Take off your clothes and dance the watusi. Sing opera for her. Make animal sounds. Shout at her louder than you ever have and then kiss her passionately. Press your belly into her until she melts. Lift her off the ground and spin her around. Occasionally, talking with her helps, but not as often as humor and physically expressed love.

If you have tried every creative, humorous, and powerful way of loving through her mood and she still refuses to let go of her closure, then simply relax. You have done everything you can. If you are not skillful enough to serve her, or she is not willing enough to receive your gifts, perhaps you are with the wrong woman.

Just remember that any woman you are with, if she has a feminine sexual essence, will cycle through moods of closure every day which seem to have no "reason" to them. You cannot avoid this by changing women or waiting for the moods to stop. You can only develop your skill in serving your woman into openness. It never ends though, even if you are passionate, fearless, loving, and humorous with her. The weather continually cycles through rainy and dry spells, night and day cycle in their turn, and your woman will continually cycle through openness and closure, even when her life and relationship with you seem great.

If you find yourself merely tolerating this feminine mood cycle because you have been frustrated by endless discussions that go nowhere, you can he sure that you and probably your woman are building up resentment toward each other. Don't tolerate her mood. And don't talk about it with her. Participate in it. Bloom her into fullness. Move her body with your body. Open her heart with your humor. Penetrate her closure with your fearless presence. Open her heart, again and again and again. She could do it by herself, but if she could grow more by herself than by receiving your gifts, perhaps she shouldn't be with you.

Don’t Analyze your Woman

The feminine moods and opinions are like weather patterns. They are constantly changing, severe and gentle, and they have no single source. No analysis will work. There is no linear chain of cause and effect that can lead to the kernel of the "problem." There is no problem, only a storm, a breeze, a sudden change in weather. And the bases of these storms are the high and low pressure systems of love. When a woman feels love flowing deeply, her mood can instantly evaporate into joy, regardless of the supposed reason for the mood.

As a man, you probably want to find the cause for the problems in your life. That way, you can eliminate the source of the problem. By getting to its root, you can solve the problem, hopefully once and for all. And so, when your woman seems to have an emotional problem, you want to know why. You want to know what is upsetting her. You assume there is a specific cause. You want to know what triggered her bad mood so you can fix the situation.

Because you love her, you begin asking her questions to get to the root of the problem. "What's wrong? Did I do something to upset you? What are you crying about? Are you about to start your period? Did somebody say something horrible to you?"

You are under the illusion that when you find out the cause of her affliction, then the cure will easily follow. But it doesn't work that way; your questioning is probably making her mood worse.

The amazing thing is this: 90% of a woman's emotional problems stem from feeling unloved. So don't stand back and analyze her, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, or like a therapist questioning a client. Give her your love-the same love that is motivating your questioning immediately and unmistakably. Walk over to her, look deeply into her eyes, hold her and stroke her, tell her how much you love her, smile, hum her favorite song and dance with her, and chances are, her emotional problem will evaporate. She may still have some situation to deal with, and you may be able to help her with that, but the emotional aspect will be converted to love.

It is a very rare occasion when your analysis of her mood relieves her of it. Most often, your analysis and attempts to fix her will just piss her off more. Ask her if she would rather you gave her love or analyzed her when she is upset. It's so easy to give her love; it's what both of you really want anyway. But as a man you are more likely to try to fix her. That's exactly not what she wants, and exactly what will make the situation worse, most of the time.

The next time your woman is in a bad mood, try this: Assume she is not feeling loved. Simply assume it, even if it seems that it can't be that simple, that there must be some underlying reason for her upsets, a reason that you could fix. Assume she is more like a flower that needs watering than an engine that needs a carburetor adjustment. Don't assume anything is wrong at all. Assume that she wants love from you, in a deep, strong, steady, and sensitive way.

Look into her eyes with love, touch her how she likes to be touched with love, and speak or sing to her with love. Discover what happens to her mood. Then, after her mood has been dissolved by your loving and she is happy and relaxed, you can talk about anything that still needs to be talked about.

If you ever find yourself asking your woman questions about her mood while she is still in it, you are already on the wrong road. First, give her love through your eyes, touch, movement, and tone of voice. Then and only then, after the connection of love has been made, find out what re-mains to be talked about.

Don’t Suggest A Women Fix Her Own Emotional Problem

Asking a woman to analyze or try to fix her own emotions is a negation of her feminine core, which is pure energy in motion, like the ocean. She can learn to surrender her mood to God, she can learn to open her heart in the midst of closure, she can learn to relax her edges and trust love, but she will never "fix" anything by analyzing her "problem.”

As a man, you can learn a lot about yourself by clearly analyzing your problems. One of the best ways for you to grow is to use your discrimination, feeling what is causing unnecessary pain in your life, and then changing whatever you need to change. You may notice, for instance, that you are unhappy with your job. You think about it. You realize it is because your boss is taking advantage of you, and you haven't said anything to him. So, you determine that the best way to deal with the problem is to walk up to the boss and say something. You get up the guts, you walk up to the boss, you get it off your chest, and it's over. Problemfixed. Finished. You learned how important it is to talk to your boss, and you've cleared up all the old stuff that has been burdening you.

You probably apply the same system to your intimacy. You realize that you're not happy about something your wife is doing. Maybe you talk about it with your friends or think about it yourself. You realize that your wife isn't caring for you like she used to. So, you determine that you'll be happier if your wife cooks more and massages you more. You then think maybe your wife wants you to do something more for her. So you tell her what you want from her, and then you ask her, "What do you want from me?" You tell her to think about it and let you know.

This seems fair to a man, but it is not. It is a no-win situation for your woman. Why? Because what she really wants is a man who can figure it out for himself. She wants a man who loves her, and escorts her with his loving, without having to ask her what she wants all the time.

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy is precisely not to have to always figure it out for her man and guide him. She wants to be able to trust him in his direction. There’re some times when she does want to figure it out for you, but far more often she feels your gift when you offer her a direction in your intimacy without her having to ask you for it or tell you what she wants.

Suppose it's your woman's birthday. If it were your birthday, you'd love it if your woman would do anything you wanted.

So you think she'd like that, too. You say to her, "Happy Birthday For your birthday, we can do anything you want. We can go anywhere and do anything. And I'll do anything for you. What do you want to do?"

This is exactly the opposite of most women's idea of an ideal birthday present. Most women would get far more excited if you were to say, "You've got 30 minutes to pack your bags. Don't ask me where we're going, but we'll be gone for the weekend. Everything is taken care of. Just pack your bags, and leave the rest to me. I'm going to give you the best birthday you've ever had."

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything. Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do. She can be pure energy, pure motion, pure love, without having to analyze all the options and decide which ones are best. She can enjoy her man feminine pure energy.

Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great over and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. Themasculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy itself is undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever changing, beautiful, destructive, and the source of life.

This same principle applies to problems in intimacy. Any time you try to force your woman to be more like a ship than an ocean, you are negating her feminine energy. Any time you talk to her and expect her to analyze her mood and situation to the point of being able to fix it, you are talking "masculine" with her. She can do it, she might even be better at it than you, but it won't make her a happy woman.

A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive, or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart. When you ask her to analyze her heart's emotions, it's like building walls around a part of the ocean and turning it into a swimming pool. It's safer and more predictable, but far less alive and enlivening. Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can be analyzed to the point of "fixing" them.

Don't waste your time doing this, but especially don't expect your woman to do it to herself. It would be like forcing you, a man, to read romance novels or watch love stories at the movies. Sure, you could do it. But it probably doesn't touch your core the way it touches hers. And, if she made you do it, over and over and over, you would begin to resent her. If she felt that the basic problem in your life is that you just don't watch enough soap opera on TV, you would think she was crazy.

Soap operas, romance novels, and love stories touch many women deeply because the feminine priority is the flow of love in relationship. But the masculine priority is purpose and direction. By analyzing your purpose and re-aligning your direction, you can solve many of your emotional problems. But love is the feminine priority, not purpose and direction.

Women do not become free by analyzing themselves. They become free by surrendering into love. Not your love. Their love. They become free by surrendering to the immense flow of love that is native to their core and allowing their lives to be moved by this force in their heart. Itmay involve moments of analysis, but primarily it involves deep trust.

The best way you can serve your woman is by helping her to surrender, to trust the force of love, so that she can open her heart, be the love that she is, and give this love which naturally overflows from her happiness. THIS DOES NOT INVOLVE ANALYZING THE BLOCKS TO HER LOVING. Analyzing blocks is a man's way. Men love to analyze blocks, on the football field, the chess board, in the stock market, and even in their intimate life. But it's important that you, as a man, don't project your way of doing things onto your woman.

Let her be the ocean. Encourage her to be as free as the ocean, as deep as the ocean, as wild as the ocean, and as powerful as the ocean. Be so full in your loving, so strong and stable in your presence, that she can just let go and surrender the limits she has put on her feelings. Let the emotions of her heart flow unguarded. Let her love be expressed with no limits. Let her go mad with love.

Love has its own intelligence. Honor love's intelligence by realizing that analysis is not usually necessary to serve your woman's openness. Love your woman with your whole body, perhaps pressing her against the wall with your belly and chest, pressing your love into her, breathing with her so that she relaxes her tension and surrenders to the love in her heart, and let her relaxation and surrender liberate the wisdom in her, enter her loving. You have much to gain from the depths of her feminine gifts.

Stay With Her Intensity- To A Point

When a woman gets emotionally intense, a mediocre man wants to calm her down and discuss it, or leave and come back later when she is "sane." A superior man penetrates her mood with imperturbable love and unwavering consciousness. If she still refuses to live more fully in love, after a time, he lets her go.

If you are like most men, you probably aren't too fond of feminine bad moods and hysterical emotions. You may find yourself wondering, why is she so complicated? What's her problem? You may find yourself saying, "Just calm down and take it easy." The feminine bad mood is so foreign and dark to you that you may actually find it somewhat repulsive. And when your woman really goes wild, a part of you is afraid of the damage she might do. Her emotions are so much wilder and less predictable than yours that you'd rather not be around them.

Basically,most men are afraid of, or disgusted by, feminine emotions. That's why you try to fix them or escape from them. "I'll come back later when you can act like a reasonable human being," you might say.

One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present, and unreactive in the midst of his woman's emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax.

The way you relate to your woman's chaos reflects the way you react to the chaos of the world. If you are the kind of man who needs every-thing placed neatly in its nice little box, then you will also try to box your woman's emotions. If you are the kind of man who would rather hire other people to take care of the chaos in your attic, or the chaos of your finances, you would probably also rather leave it to someone else to take care of the chaos of your woman.

You can, however, train yourself to master the world-financially, creatively, spiritually-by learning how to be free and loving in the chaos of your woman's emotions. And you do so by standing your ground and loving so strongly that only love prevails. You can't quit when you seem to fail, but rather, you must learn from your failures and return to love.

Give your gift. Like wrestling a steer or surfing ocean waves, mastery involves blending with your woman's powerful energy and feeling the rise and fall of the moment, without lapsing in presence for a second.

You're going to get stamped on by the steer, you're going to get swamped by the ocean, and you're going to get hurt by your woman. This is how you learn. You get up, dust yourself off, swim to shore, and turn and face your woman again. The only options are fear or mastery.You can quit, you can choose small steer and tiny waves, you can wait for your woman to calm down, or you can even threaten her. Or, you can take the moment as a challenge to your ability to conquer the world, and your woman, with love.

Keep your breath full. Keep your body strong. Keep your attention present. No matter what your woman says or does, give her love. Press your belly into her. Smile. Scream and then lick her face. Do whatever it takes to crack the shell of her closure, get your love inside that crack, and touch her heart. Learn to enjoy her anger, her tears, her silent hardness. The world will give you the same at times.

The game of life is to find each situation workable, to transform each occasion through the magnification of love, to give your fullest gift in every moment, and to have no attachments to the outcome, knowing it's all going to rise and fall and rise again.

You have mastered women and the world when no desire either to avoid or attain sways your loving or limits your freedom.

Don’t Force The Feminine To Make Decisions

A man abandons responsibility by expecting that his woman will always make her own decisions and then be accountable for the results. This expectation is a withholding of his masculine gift. It puts a woman in the position of magnifying her own masculine. It is good for some women to learn to animate their masculine capacity to make a decision and stick with it. But if a man abnegates his responsibility to provide his woman with the gift of masculine clarity and decisiveness, then she will become chronically sharp, angular, and distrustful of his love. She will cease surrendering in love with him, cease trusting his masculine capacity, and, instead, become her own man.

our woman asks you for input, and you say, "Whatever you want to do is fine with me." This is the statement of a friend, not a lover. As friends, you want to treat each other fairly and give each other space and independence. As lovers, you and your woman are more than just friends. You are playing the full dynamic of masculine and feminine polarity.

Wouldn't you like your woman to be a goddess and offer you her feminine gifts? To evoke them, you must offer her your masculine gifts.

One of your most valuable gifts is the ability to see all the options and make a decision based on this view of all the potential outcomes.

Feminine decisions are based on what feels right, and often this is the best way to make a decision. However, the point in intimacy is not simply to make the best decision, but to make the best decision while maintaining the force of masculine/feminine polarity that attracted you together to begin with. If that polarity begins to diminish, conflicts will begin to increase.When that polarity disappears, attraction disappears, and the life of the intimacy disappears with it.

You need to play the masculine pole if you want your woman to play the feminine. Offering your perspective on decisions is one way to give your masculine gift. Eve on the most trivial decisions, never say, "Do what-ever you want."

If she asks you which shoes you think look better on her,make a decision, and tell her. Don't just say, "They're both nice." Say some-thing like, "I'd like the red shoes, but what's the most important to me is that you're happy." She is of course free to wear whatever she wants, but she is also the recipient of your masculine gift of decisiveness.

Perhaps your woman is trying to make a career decision, something that will affect her for many years. She might feel into it, and do what feels best to her, which would be a feminine style of making a decision. Or, she might be trying to make a decision based on the different possible outcomes of her choices, which would be a masculine style. Because you have a masculine sexual essence, you will naturally be able to contribute to her masculine decision process. And, more importantly for the intimacy, if you don't contribute to her masculine decision making process, the two of you will become depolarized by each other's energy. She'll be in the masculine, you'll be neutral, and there will be nobody in the feminine pole this is fine for short periods of time, but if it becomes chronic, then the two of you will begin to feel like friends rather than lovers. The attractive juiciness of polarity will be replaced by two buddies discussing options.

If you refuse to offer your masculine gift by saying things like, "I don't really care. It's up to you," then she will have to learn to depend on her own masculine capacity. Another way to say this is that she will begin to trust her own masculine more than yours. Then, you will find that she trusts you less and less across the board. She will refuse to surrender to you even sexually, because she hasn't been able to relax and trust you all day you haven't offered her your masculine clarity and perspective, so she has to be her own man and give it to herself.

As a practice, always help your woman make decisions by giving her your perspective and telling her your choices, while letting her know that you love her regardless of the decision she makes. Often her feminine feelings will be a much better basis for a decision than your masculine analysis. So, encourage her to feel into the situation and trust her feelings. But, for the sake of polarity and happiness in intimacy, always tell her what you would do and why, even if you think she should make her own decision.

PART 3

Working With Polarity and Energy

Masculine men are attracted to forms of feminine energy: radiant women, beer, music, nature, etc. If a man tries to hide his attraction, it reveals some degree of shame with respect to his own sexual core.

If you are like most men, you probably hide the amount of sexual attraction you feel toward women every day. At work, on the street, and in the grocery store, you see women that turn you on. Sometimes youmight want to have sex with them. But many times the feeling is more of a wave of refreshment washing through you. Seeing an especially radiant woman can fill your whole day with delight. A woman's exquisite scent can transport you to an enchanted paradise. A woman's smile can melt the moment into sheer beatitude.

There are two ways to deal with your daily "ahhh" of attraction to the feminine: wisely and foolishly. To respond wisely, you must understandwhy you are attracted to whom. Your sexual essence is always attracted to its energetic reciprocal. Masculine men are attracted to feminine women. Feminine men are attracted to masculine women.

Balanced men are attracted to balanced women.

About 80% of all men have a more masculine sexual essence. The semen, of which you are probably one, are attracted to all things feminine. Not just feminine women, but anything with feminine energy, anything Energy gets you out of your head and into your body. Music, beer, nature, women, they are all forms of feminine energy.

It is not just a visually gorgeous woman who attracts you. If a woman is free and radiant in her feminine energy, you are probably attracted; sometimes more attracted, sometimes less attracted, but always attracted, at least enough to steal a glance at her form. This attraction is not only natural, but healthy. It is a sign of polarity, the same kind of natural flow of polarization by which electricity flows between the positive and negative poles of a battery. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's why there are men and women. The nature of nature is polarity, from the magnetism that flows between the North and South Poles of the Earth, to the attraction that flows between your masculine core and the feminine radiance of a woman.

If you feel uncomfortable with your attraction to women, you are probably uncomfortable with your own masculine essence. If you feel it is demeaning for a woman to be the "object" of your polar attraction, then you have probably disowned your masculine core. You have energetically emasculated yourself by condemning and suppressing your native desires. You are negating your sexual essence, rather than being at home with it.

Any negative attitude you have about your attraction to women is a sign of fear; somewhere along the line you learned that such attraction was "bad" or "evil." Your attraction to women, all kinds of women, is natural, normal, and beautiful. In fact, it is an aspect of the same desire that will ultimately lead you toward spiritual freedom.

Your desire for a woman is an aspect of your desire for pleasurable oneness. Your confession of desire is a confession of your desire to embrace life. To embrace life, to relax into oneness so that all opposites, including masculine and feminine, find their unity in love, is to be spiritually free. Eventually you will recognize that all desire is an aspect of your native impulse to give love. From beginning to end, your attraction to women can be seen as the essential gesture of your heart, your desire for love and unity.

If you are a man with a masculine sexual essence, you will always feel sexual polarity with anyone who animates feminine energy. You may feel this attraction many times a day, with many women. Enjoy it. Women are a blessing!

The feminine, even in the non-human forms of a lush tropical island, a cold beer, or your favorite tune, could make the difference between dreariness and ahhh-ing in ecstasy. Our acceptance of sexual attraction, even with music and places, is at the root of our capacity to experience bodily pleasure. Sexual attraction, however, is very different from having sex. There is a big difference between choosing to be intimate with a woman and simply being attracted to her energy and radiance. Intimacy is a choice between people who want to commit to loving and serving one another.Whereas the zing of attraction is a choiceless natural flow of energy between your masculine core and feminine energy, wherever it is found.When a woman is relaxed in her feminine radiance, she is like beautiful music or a warm ocean breeze. You don't need to have sex with her to savor inexpressible joy.

If you are like most men, a radiant woman can inspire you for hours or days. Remember, the desire she arouses in you is a blessing in itself. Acting on that desire and pursuing her is another matter entirely, dependent on whether such an action would truly serve both of you or not. But the mere inspiration felt while beholding a radiant woman is one of nature's gifts to you: the gift of feminine blessing.

The next time you come upon a woman who sends a thrill through your body, relax into the thrill. Let her waves of feminine energy move through your body like a deep massage. Breathe fully, without resisting the joy her sighting affords you. Breathe the joy all through your body, down to your toes. Don't stare at her, don't even interact with her. But when you see her, and you experience your attraction, fully allow the-energy of attraction to move freely through your body. Learn to magnify and sustain your desire, so your whole body and breath open and deepen its force. As you behold her, receive her vision as a blessing.

Choose A Women Who Is Your Complementary Opposite

If a man is very masculine by nature, then he will be attracted to a very feminine woman, who will complement his energy. The more neutral or balanced he is, the more balanced he will prefer his woman. And, if a man is more feminine by nature, his energy will be complemented by the strong direction and purposiveness of a more masculine woman. By understanding their own needs, men can learn to accept the "whole package" of a woman. For instance, a more masculine man can expect that any woman who really turns him on and enlivens him will also be relatively wild, undisciplined, "bonkers," chaotic, prone to changing her mind and "lying." Still, from an energetic perspective, this kind of woman will be much more healing and inspiring to him than a more balanced or neutral woman who is steady, reasonable, "trustworthy," and able to say what she means in a way he can understand.

You have probably met a woman who seemed fantastic, only to discover she has some emotional weirdness that you don't really want to deal with. She seemed incredibly sexy, but also a bit "honkers" have' probably also met some very reasonable and trustworthy women who don't seem to constantly change their mind and, in fact, with whom you: could have good conversations that don't end up frustrating you. Although you may love these women and enjoy spending time with them, they don't arouse your passion as much as the women whose words you wouldn't trust to remain true for an afternoon, but who move their body in a way that drives you wild.

"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" many men have wondered. But, of course, it is precisely those ways in which a woman is least like aman that most attract you sexually, if you have a masculine sexual essence. A woman's feminine shine, the energy that moves her body, her utterly refreshing spontaneity and mystery, not to mention her delightful smile, are what attract you. And the more feminine a woman is a there core, the less she is likely to evidence strong masculine traits, such as speaking clearly and unequivocally about thoughts and desires, rather than primarily expressing her feelings of the moment.

A woman with a more feminine sexual essence will say she loves you one moment, and then, when you have done something you are not even aware of, she will say she hates you. This is the beauty of the feminine; to her, the masculine grid of words and events is less relevant than the fluidity of relationship and feeling. Thank God for such women, who make no apologies for their oceanic depth and riptides of emotion.

You are always attracted to your sexual reciprocal. So, if you have amore feminine sexual essence, you will be attracted to a more masculine woman. You have probably seen men and women in couples like this. The man is more radiant and lively than the woman. The woman is more committed to her direction in life than the man. The relationship is more important to the man, whereas the woman likes to be left alone much of the time. These are signs of a relationship where the man has a more feminine essence and the woman's essence is more masculine.

Other men, with more neutral sexual essences, prefer women who are also more neutral, neither particularly masculine nor feminine. This kind of couple can talk about anything, and they like talking about everything. They share hobbies, friends, even career goals. Though equally loving, this kind of couple is usually less sexually passionate than highly polarized couples. It would be unusual to hear about this kind of neutral or balanced couple yelling at each other, throwing pillows, wrestling each other down to the floor, and passionately making love right there and then.

Through lack of understanding, you might have depolarized yourself and your partner into a relationship that seems neutral, but actually isn't. Only about 10% of couples are actually the neutral or balanced type in their true essence.

Another 10% of couples are made up of a feminineman and masculine woman. But if you are like 80% of couples, you have a masculine sexual essence and your woman has a feminine one. That is, her feminine way frustrates you, drives you crazy, inspires you, or turns you on, more often than she is simply your sexually neutral buddy.

The false neutralization, or depolarization, of relationships is one of the main reasons that couples break up. The rejuvenative charge of sexual loving becomes weak, while all the things that irritate you and your partner remain just as strong as ever. The secret is not to try to change your woman's irritating feminine ways, but to help cultivate the depth and rejuvenative power of her feminine blessings.

If you are like most men, you have probably minimized your appreciation of the full spectrum of your woman's feminine energy by numbing yourself to the aspects that most irritate you. For instance, she doesn't drive you crazy any more because you've learned not to take her too seriously. Perhaps you have learned to seem attentive while not really listening to her endless chat. Or, maybe you have learned to give her a daily dose of affection as a way to quell her ongoing need for more intimate time than you really want to spend with her.

This is the wrong approach. The feminine is an infinite source of love, inspiration, and power, both physically and spiritually. Feminine women are connected with the elements of nature in ways that more masculine people, such as yourself, usually aren't. Feminine women may seem wild, un-trustable, or even irresponsible from a man's perspective, but such women are simply free of the masculine need to live in a world governed by reason and control.

Feminine women are free to feel flows of natural livingness that you are unable to feel. They are free to be moved by currents of energy of which most men are unaware. They are free to allow their bodies to be transparent to the flow of their hearts, uncontrolled and undirected by goals and structure. The feminine body is free to be moved by love, and by life itself. And this is highly valued by most men; to behold a woman free in her expression of bodily ecstasy is one of the most awesome visions most men have had.

Men will even pay to watch a woman's body express ecstasy, even if she is only faking it, like in a porn movie. In our secular culture, mostmen are only familiar with sexual ecstasy, and so it is this form of free bodily expression that men pay to see, in movies, on the stage, and in private rooms around the world. However, in cultures that admit a greater degree of spiritual revelation, women's bodies are viewed with the same masculine awe, but for a different kind of expression: not merely for their capacity to express sexual ecstasy in a way that is foreign, and unbelievably attractive, but also for their capacity to express spiritual ecstasy.

'Temple dancers in India, for instance, are traditionally feminine women trained from an early age to combine skill and heartfelt devotion in a style of dance which frees their bodies to be moved by divine force, bringing tears to many men's eyes and openness to their hearts. A woman who is at home with her feminine essence is at home with energy, he it sexual or spiritual. For such a woman, there is no disconnection between sex and spirit. Her sexual surrender, if she is with a worthy man, is the same as her devotional or spiritual surrender. She opens from head to toe, receiving divine love-force deep throughout her body, so that she is rippled, arched, and undulated by its boundless flow.

More masculine or neutral women are less likely to allow such freedom of bodily expression. Yet it is a woman's expression of this kind of ecstasy that invites a masculine man to leave his heady world of thoughts and goals and celebrate the moment, in the flesh, through the heart. Whether in a strip joint or a sacred temple, men have been attracted for thousands of years to witness the feminine embodiment of ecstasy. Women are liter-ally worshipped in such occasions. Men shout their praises to the goddess dancing before them in ways they would never do in public.

The fullest of such occasions is completely sexual and completely spiritual at the same time. Men leave such an event transformed and inspired by the blessing power of free feminine embodiment. This is one of the unique gifts of the feminine form, of woman.

This is what you get in a woman with a feminine sexual essence: Awoman who is all over the place emotionally. A woman whom you can depend on to change her mind. A woman who is much more sensitive than you are to the flow of subtle energies in your relationship. A woman who brings you delight and awe in the ecstasy, both sexual and spiritual, that her body expresses so freely and beautifully.

It is all one package. You can't have a woman who is always logically consistent, reasonable, and on time, and who also fills your heart and flesh with energy, instantly and throughout the day, with her bodily expressed love and ecstasy.

She can animate reasonable masculine energy when she wants, but if she has a feminine core, much of the time she will want to dance, in wrathful anger or enchanting joy, beyond the need for reason.

So, choose a woman who is your complementary opposite, which formost men means a more feminine woman. It is only a feminine woman who can give the gifts that you, as a masculine man, need. Along with these gifts, however, come the relative chaos and emotional weather storms that most men dread. Realize these are aspects of the same energy that turns you on. In fact, you can learn to be turned on by her dance of anger as much as by her slinky purr.

This capacity is one of your gifts to her. You can learn to stand free and strong no matter what emotion she displays. You won't leave, turn away, or dissociate in disgust. You can meet her enormous energy and stand full, loving her through the storm, embracing her complete feminine power, dark and light.

You will only be happy in intimacy if you choose a woman who is your sexual reciprocal as a partner. And you will only be able to survive such an intimacy if her dark and light sides are equally embraceable to you. It takes time to develop such skill and strength, but in doing so you learn to provide your woman, as well as the world, with a man whose gifts are uncompromised by fear of feminine power and chaos.

Know What Is Important In your Woman

The feminine is the force of life. The more masculine aman is, the more his woman's feminine energy (as opposed to other qualities) will be important to him.

If you are looking for a woman business partner, you probably want certain qualities in her, such as financial acumen, dependability, and the capacity to persist in the face of difficulties in order to achieve a goal. If you are looking for a woman friend, you probably want honesty, compassion, humor, and respect. If you are looking for a consort, you probably want a woman who freely embodies and expresses feminine energy and love.

The more you seek a woman who gives you everything, the less you get of anything. Business skills are for the most part masculine skills (in both men and women). Friendship, in itself, is a neutral, nonsexual matter. And sexual passion requires a clear polarity between your masculine core and your woman's feminine energy. When you don't prioritize the purpose of your relationship, these different energies often cancel each other out, and you are left with a sexually neutralized alliance.

You can share many aspects of intimacy-business, friendship, parenting, and sexual passion-only if you choose a single priority to the relationship and allow all the other activities to align themselves around your main purpose for being together. If you aren't clear about what's important, though, each aspect will conflict with the others. She will want affection when you want to get business done. She will want to talk about her day when you want to have sex.

You will both end up compromising your true desires, and your relationship will be reduced to a functional but mediocre partnership.

Over time, sexual polarity and attraction will diminish. You will be eyeing other women as sources of rejuvenative feminine delight, the same delight you have smeared out in your intimacy by obliging your woman to be everything for you all blurred together: your business partner one moment, your friend another moment, a mother this moment, and your lover the next. Eventually, the deep gifts that brought you together to begin with become lost in the ambiguity of your relationship.

In other times and cultures, you might have had multiple intimate partners, each fulfilling a different purpose, each partner contributing different skills, functions, and sexual energies to the whole. In our modern world, however, polygamy is not much of an option. For social and psychological reasons,most men and women of today want to limit their intimate scope to one committed partner at a time-although, if you are like most men, you've certainly entertained the notion of multiple wives, or at least a mistress or two, each fulfilling a different purpose.

Because you expect your intimate relationship to serve so many purposes, it begins to veer toward the utilitarian. By constantly talking about finances, work, household, and children, you turn your woman into a neutral companion. You become so familiar with each other that themystery of sexual enchantment becomes standardized into the ritual mechanics of kiss, stroke, lick, pump, spurt, and snore. You begin to long for the depth of desire you once felt with your woman. Domesticity replacesmystery, and talk replaces tumble.

Yet, if you have a strong masculine sexual essence, you will need frequent refreshment by the power of strong feminine energy or else youwill begin to feel weary and burdened by life. You may seek this rejuvenative feminine energy in a few beers, a few rounds of golf, or a few girlie magazines. Or perhaps you favor long massages and walks on the beach.Although these and many other means can temporarily relax you and put a smile on your face, few of them can arouse you as deeply in heart and body as the uncompromised force of feminine sexuality offered by your radiant woman in love.

You are the only one who can decide what is important to you in your relationship. You are the only one who can clarify for yourself what the purpose of your intimacy is. If you decide, however, that the purpose of your intimacy is the passionate transmission of love, the rejuvenative healing of sexual energy, and the cultivation of heart through your mutual commitment to spiritual awakening, then be careful. Don't force your woman to be your on-call accountant. Don't expect her to always help you with your financial problems, like a career consultant. Don't emphasize the daily chores while disregarding the bodily transmission of love for days and days. Don't squash the fullness of her feminine energy into merely functional roles. Your woman has the capacity to awaken your heart and fill your body with life. You, however, must give her the opportunity-aswell as the fullness of your masculine transmission of love.

If you want your woman to be your spiritual and sexual consort, not just your housemate, you must skillfully maintain your household and lively hoods so that the potency of your union is not diminished. She can be the mother of your children as well as your business partner, as long as these functions do not cut into the primacy of your purpose: to serve one another's enlightenment through your unwavering commitment to love, and to enliven one another's core by the bodily transmission of love via sexual polarity.

When these two aspects of your loving-spiritual awakening and sexual transmission-become diminished by your daily duties, you will both begin to seek elsewhere for daily refreshment and fulfillment. You will seek feminine energy in the form of a six-pack or a mistress. Your woman will seek masculine direction in the form of a social cause or a masculine style career. Your relationship will become relegated to a well-meaning partnership of domestic duty. This may be exactly what you want. Or it may not be. In any case, you must know what is important for you, what is the purpose of your intimacy, and align all other activities around this central priority, if you want your intimacy to maintain and increase its potency for both of you.

You Will Often Want more Than One Woman

Any man with a masculine sexual essence will desire sexual variety. Even if he loves his intimate partner and is completely committed to her, he will naturally want sexual occasions with other women besides his chosen intimate partner. How a man deals with his desire for other women is up to him. He should know, however, that there is no way to avoid such desires. He should also know that acting on such desires, though temporarily enlivening and exhilarating, often ends up complicating his life far more than the occasion itself is worth.

Even if you are totally committed to your intimate partner in love, you probably think about having sex with other women. Even if you are totally fulfilled by the sex you share with your woman, you probably still desire sex with other women. Your desire for other women is not a reflection of any lack in your intimacy, it is a reflection of your nature as a masculine sexual being.

But this desire is not an excuse for promiscuity, any more than your enjoyment of TV is an excuse for becoming an obese couch potato. Desire springs from many sources, such as your addictions, your biological heritage, your childhood conditioning, and your open heart. To live a life of impeccable integrity, you must discriminate the source of your desire, so you know when to discipline your behavior for everyone's benefit, including yours.

The fact is you probably want to have sex with other women be sides your intimate partner; how you respond to this fact is a reflection of your purpose in life. If your purpose is to enjoy physical pleasure no matter the consequences, then you should screw as many women as you want. If your purpose is to be a nice boy and please “mommy,” then you should do what makes your woman happy. If your purpose is to liberate yourself and others into love and freedom, then you should do whatever magnifies the love and freedom in your life and in the lives of those whom you reactions affect.

It's your call. Just remember that self-discipline is not self-suppression. Suppression is when you resist and fight against your desires. Keeping them as buried and unexpressed as possible. Self-discipline is when your highest desires rule your lesser desires, not through resistance, but through loving action grounded in understanding and compassion.

How many women you have sex with is your business. Before you consider more than one, however, it is best to prove your capacity with one. If you can't handle one-if deep communion, rejuvenating passion, and spiritual happiness are not the main features of your present intimacy then you have not passed the test, and it is best to discipline your desire for other partners, since nobody is likely to be served.

In general, youth in a woman bespeaks radiant, unobstructed, and refreshing feminine energy. A young woman tends to be less compromised by masculine layers of functional protection built up over years of need. Traditionally, young women were understood to offer a man a particularly rejuvenative quality of energy. Older women may maintain, or even increase, the freshness and radiance of their energy, but it is rare.

Imagine you are driving your eighteen year old babysitter home one evening. She is so fresh, so innocent, so alive.

You can feel that she is totally open to you. You consider all the consequences. You look at her radiant skin, her clear eyes, her incredible smile. The way she moves, talks, and laughs makes you happy and fills you with energy. You arrive at her home. She says goodnight, leaves the car, and enters her house. You sit in the car for a moment, breathing slowly and deeply, smiling.

There is something unique about being with a young woman, and allmen with masculine sexual essences feel it. You feel rejuvenated by her. Just sitting next to a young woman can make you happy and fill you with life force. You might have nothing in common. But that doesn't matter. It is her energy that delights and inspires you.

Uncompromised, youthful, feminine energy turns you on and opens your heart. You actually feel happier around young women you feel (Young Women Offer You Special Energy) more energetic, alive, and loving. As women get older, they typically take on more and more masculine tasks and responsibilities in our culture, so their radiance begins to decrease. In other cultures, this is less true. Women maintain and even deepen their radiance. But even in these cultureswith more wisdom, it is understood that young women provide a special energy that is fresh, uncompromised, and enlivening.

Our culture reduces this youthful energy to a sexual thing, where a sit is actually a whole body transmission of energy, affecting the heart asmuch as or more than the genitals. In other cultures, young women were honored for their gifts of spiritual rejuvenation, tending to holy sites and performing sacred arts, not just ogled for sexual titillation. As a man, it is your responsibility to honor the heart-rejuvenative gift of a young woman, without violating this honor by imposing your sexual desire on her.

If sexual desire arises, fine. Circulate it through your body. Learn to conduct the magnification of desire without needing to throw it off in a spasm of release. A major part of mastering sexuality is learning to sustain greater and greater degrees of pleasure and desire in the body, with out needing to rid yourself of the force because you can't handle it.

When you find yourself really enlivened by a young woman, breathe in her fragrance. Breathe in her energy. Relax your body and allow your heart to open in her presence. Take in her beauty through every pore in your body. Allow love to radiate from your heart toward her. Maintain a respectful formality so that she is free and empowered to give her gift, without being complicated by your personal agenda. Use the energy she has given you in your own service to others, passing the gifts of heightened aliveness and passionate heart into all of your relationships, so that all beings may benefit by the delight you have received from this woman, who, for now, manifests the youthful gifts of uncompromised radiance and life force

Each Woman Has A Temperature That Can heal You Or Irritate You

Some women are hotter, some are cooler. In general, blonde, light-skinned, Japanese, and Chinese women are cooler.

Dark skinned, brunette, red-headed, Korean, and Polynesian women are hotter. Even though a man might choose to remain in a committed intimacy with one woman, his needs for different temperatures of feminine energy may change over time. A hot woman who aroused his passion several years ago may irritate him now. A cooler woman who soothed his heart several years ago may seem tiresome to him now. By understanding how different temperatures of feminine energy may affect him, a man could makemore skillful life choices without confusion.

You probably have certain "tastes" in women. You might prefer blondes.

Or Asian women. Or perhaps you have a special preference for red-heads. Your tastes come from many sources: your early childhood experience, cultural influence, and perhaps even your genetics. But one aspect of "taste" has to do with how a woman affects you with her energetics.

Some women are cooling. Being in their company feels like a cool drink of ice tea on a hot sunny day, you might have referred to a woman, for instance, who is an "icy blonde" or who has "cool blue eyes."

Other women are hot. They are fiery, tempestuous, and quick of temper. You might have spoken of a "fiery red-head" or a "hot-blooded Latina."

Of course, not all red-heads or Latinas are hot, nor are all blondes cool. Nevertheless, there is something true enough to be said about a woman's "temperature." Most men have a good intuitive sense of the difference between a woman who is cool and soothing and a woman who is hot and exciting, regardless of how they describe it. And this difference has a lot to do with why men have different tastes for women, and why your taste could change over time.

More than simple psychological preference determines your taste. Energy plays a major role. Sometimes you can be with a beautiful woman who just doesn't do it for you. You can see she is beautiful, you can understand why your friends find her attractive, but she just doesn't suit your taste. Different women offer different kinds of feminine energy.

And one of the simplest forms of this difference is the difference between hot and cool feminine energy.

To help understand this, you could look at your relationship with food. Some men thrive on hot Mexican peppers or spicy Szechwan food, while other men are healed by soothing and cooling food, like salads, sweets, or milk. And any man's needs for different kinds of food may change over time. The same is true of his needs for feminine energy.

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her friend to stay and wait. Then, seeing your fatigue, she apologizes and begins kissing you passionately. Her hands quickly go to your crotch, but you're still thinking about her friend, remembering how refreshing her energy was, wondering what the heck you're going to do about it.

What you should do about it is this: understand what is happening. You used to really enjoy your wife's spicy temperament, but now that you are boiling all day at work, you need to be balanced by a cooler energy. This doesn't mean you need to end your marriage. It doesn't necessarily mean you need to have sex with her cool friend. What is means is that you need to find a way to balance your life.

You can change your diet to a more cooling diet. You can keep your body cooler, wearing caps on sunny days, and wearing lighter,more breathable clothing. You can take soothing walks around lakes or along rivers, and let the water absorb the heat of your day. Or, you can receive cooling energy directly from a woman, even non-sexually.

You could get a professional massage, for instance, from a woman with cooling energy. Sometimes all you need to do is spend a little time in the same room with a cool woman. In any case, it's important to realize that your needs for different kinds of energy will change throughout your life. It's something you will need to learn how to deal with. It's important that, in the meantime, you don't mistake a changing energy need for a reason to end your marriage. It's also important to know that you can receive energy from different women in entirely non-sexual ways, if you so choose.

In the end, you must make your own choice. When one man's energy needs change and he finds himself getting the energy he needs from the woman in the office next door-the kind of energy that he isn't getting from his wife-then he might end up having an affair, or getting divorced. Another man might communicate his changing energy needs to his wife, then find that she is more than able to creatively provide him with the flavor of feminine energy that most heals and rejuvenates him.

Don't confuse your energy needs with a commitment in love, though.Energy needs are relatively easy to balance. You can probably get the energy you need from a masseuse or a change in diet. If you react drastically, and decide to leave your wife for a woman whose energy enlivens you more, you may be surprised when, in a few months, your energy needs change again, and you realize you have made a very superficial choice.

You must decide for yourself how to deal with your need for the particular feminine energy that fills your body with life, heals your rough edges, and soothes your warrior spirit. But energetic rejuvenation won't make any fundamental difference unless, at your core, your heart is growing more free, open and loving. A cool glass of fruit juice, a vacation in Hawaii, or a red-head may temporarily balance your physiology, but only persistent commitment to the practice of love can take you through your fears, through your sense of separateness, and bring you to the absolute ease of being that is your deepest truth. Remember your priority, and decide what you need to do.

PART 4

What Women Really Want

If a man wants a woman who doesn't want him, he cannot win. His neediness will undermine any possible relationship, and his woman will never be able to trust him. A man must determine whether a woman really wants him but is playing hard to get, or whether she really doesn't want him. If she doesn't want him, he should immediately cease pursuing her and deal with his pain by himself.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you want to be with a woman but she doesn't want to be with you, you must speak with your friends. Ask them to be honest with you. Ask them if they think this woman really does want to be with you, or if she really doesn't.

If your friends honestly tell you that