Monday, February 14, 2011

I Heart Access!

Happy Valentine's Day, Dear Ones. I can't believe this month is already halfway gone. It has been a busy few weeks. While some of my fellow critical bloggers are frying the really big fish such as Utah's corrupt Attorney General and boiler-room buddy, Mark Shurtleff, I'm still slumming around the New-Wage outposts taking potshots at some of the little fish. One of those little fishies is Access Consciousness, the (con) artists formerly known as Access Energy Transformation. Access is probably a far too easy target, but one I find irresistible, so I've blogged about them many times. They make my blogging job nearly effortless. And so, since I've been too distracted with Real Work again to do any Real Writing here at the moment, I thought I'd take a few moments to catch you up on some Access activities.

To begin with, it seems that Access has been creating quite a stir of late in my former and perhaps future home state of Colorado. A completely non-critical article about a dog-and-pony show put on by Access's ambassador of music and cleavage, Rikka Zimmerman, was published a couple of months ago in the Colorado State University Collegian.
Ten-year-old Kira Cookson bites her tongue, her will focused on the fork clutched between her tiny hands. Slowly, the metal twists to match her contorted face and Kira lets out a triumphant yelp, thrusting her fists into their [sic] air.

As the crowd turns to look, their grins grow to match her own, their eyes locked on the pair of forks –– bent like noodles –– she’s raised to the sky. The room erupts with cheers and applause.
Soon, the only person in the room with a wider smile than Kira is facilitator Rikka Zimmerman, and Zimmerman’s smile hasn’t faded a bit all night.

Kira isn’t the first of the group to bend a fork, but she’s far from last, so Zimmerman prods the crowd a little more. Let go of your judgments and limitations, she tells them. Be aware of the fork’s energy and bend it like Kira did...
Indeed, Access seems to be focusing a lot lately on sucking in the easily impressed by using cheap parlor tricks. If the cleavage or the magical eyelids don't get 'em, the cheap tricks will do it every time. Actually, fork-bending and wine transformation seem to be the only two tricks Accessories know, but they're getting as much mileage out of these as they can. They could also possibly be infringing on the Harry Potter® copyright but hey, I'm not an intellectual-property attorney. In any case, "Wizard's Parties" are the happening thing in Colorado right now.
Unofficial outposts of Harry Potter’s school Hogwarts have been springing up all over the state of Colorado, thanks to “Wizards’ Parties” created by Access Facilitator, Rikka Zimmerman.
Participants at the Colorado wizards’ parties actually leave saying, “Holy sh*t! That Harry Potter stuff is really possible!”
Cynthia Torp, who hosted a wizards’ party for 50 people in Ft. Collins, CO, found that the friends she invited called her the next day and said, “Oh my gosh, everything’s different in my life today!”
Memo to my friends Duff McDuffee, Steven Sashen, and Chris Locke: I know y'all are in Boulder, but could one or more of you go slap some sense into Fort Collins?

Accessories are leaving no stone unturned when it comes to exploitation of current themes. The media have been making a big fuss about Ronald Reagan in the wake of his 100th birthday and his son's new book. Not to be outdone, Access has come forth with the implication that their famous "Bars" trick can prevent Alzheimer's and, possibly, incontinence.
Nothing is as vital to the enjoyment of your later years and your quality of life than [sic] the three pounds of gray matter between your ears. Yes, your brain.
This was dramatically illustrated by the state of Ronald Reagan, once considered one of the most powerful men in the world, who was reduced to lying in bed wearing diapers before his death from Alzheimer’s disease, the disease that perhaps best demonstrates how essential the brain is to quality of life...
And it goes on about how the Bars can save your brain. I'm just waiting for Access to take credit for that whole Egyptian Revolution thing.
Finally, just in time for Valentines Day, we have some truly garbled thoughts on relationships and the law of attraction, presented by...well, I'm not sure who authored this first example. The title of the blog post is "Excerpts from the Divorceless Relationship A Book By Gary M. Douglas and Dr. Dain Heer." But the URL indicates that the book was written by someone named Jan Silk: http://access-consciousness-blog.com/2011/01/excerpts-from-the-divorceless-relationship-a-book-by-jan-silk/. And even though Jan Silk is not mentioned in the body of the blog post, "Jan Silk" is one of the tags at the end.

Well, who the heck is Jan silk? She's an Access facilitator in Kiwi Land, apparently. But I can't find an actual listing for a book called The Divorceless Relationship by either Gary Douglas and Dain Heer or Jan Silk.
Anyhow, according to this article, the Law of Attraction is actually the Law of Contraction, because when you use it to attract something that you want to do, be, or have, you're actually thinking of yourself as not presently doing, being, or having what you're trying to attract, which only keeps you stuck in your limited little life. At least I think that is what the writer(s) is/are trying to say:
...So when you have the point of view you that you have to attract something to you so you can be it or have it, you always have to make sure that you are not what you are trying to attract.
This is the chink in the armor of the law of attraction. What you will do is you will attract to you those things that create a smaller life, rather than a larger life, even when you believe you are trying to attract a larger life. This is why the law of attraction, instead of creating expansion, creates a contraction.

Isn’t it amazing how brilliant we are at creating the most convoluted methods to control and diminish our lives? This is one of the ways you make sure you never get to be more than 10% of you.
There's more cutting-edge information to digest: Apparently the people we are usually attracted to diminish us.
Have you ever noticed that you are attracted to people that are usually less than you? Why is it that somebody who is less than you is attractive to you but somebody who is more than you is not attractive?
It goes on...
When you take on fixed points of view about relationship, the real difficulty is that you don’t function from choice anymore. You try to put relationship into the box of what it’s supposed to be rather than asking what do I really want to choose for me?

If you did relationship from the question of “Will this give me more of the joy and value of me?” that alone would change your life. Whether its [sic] copulation or relationship or both, if you were to look for it to create the joy and the value of you; how different would that be from what you have been looking for so far?
And then, a little later...
What if you could move beyond where anybody else was capable of living? Would that be of interest to you? Would that be more fun than what you are currently doing? Would that be more fun than anybody else is having? You would never know what was going to come next, which means you would never be bored again.
Would that be exciting? Or have you bought the lie that that it would be fearful for you to not know what the next moment brings? What about the joy of living? What is more fun? Having sex with the same person over and over again in the same way, or trying new ways and new people?
Of course Access, with its strong belief in sexual experimentation with as many people as possible, is truly a strong foundation for great relationships. Just ask someone such as "Stephen," whose story I told here a couple of years ago.

I should note that Accessories seem to have a love-hate...um...relationship with the very idea of relationships. Or with "relationship" as they call it, following the New-Wage-therapist convention that implies "relationship" is a defined state of being, kind of like coma or torpor. A few years ago Access' founder Gary Douglas and his sidekick Dain Heer published a "book" whose title sums up the Access philosophy on relationships: Sex Is Not a Four-Letter Word but Relationship Often Times Is. I've mentioned it here before. To date the work has eight reader reviews on Amazon; all but one are five-star raves. The other person, who gave it a mere two stars, said she had bought the book as a result of reading the raves, but that it was poorly written and pretty expensive for only being 65 pages long.

A California Access facilitator and psychologist named Dr. Kacie Crisp has her own Access-tainted ideas about relationship, which in this blog post she seems to be implying is a bad thing.
Did you know that relationship by definition is the distance between two objects, like the distance between the earth and the moon? If you’re in a relationship with another person, you have to continually create and maintain that distance! Is that what you’re really looking for?

There is an alternative: one word for it is communion. Communion is not the little white cookie they give you in church. Well, it can be that but it’s also much more than that. It’s a being oneness with everyone and everything, where there is no need to make boundaries or separations of any kind.

When you walk in the woods or on the beach, you know how expanded you feel? Like there’s more space between your molecules? And you don’t have to keep score about how much oxygen the trees give you or how much CO2 they take from you? And there’s no judgment of the leaves being wrong or the wrong color or anything else?

What if you could have that feeling in relationship with everything, not just when you walk in the woods? THAT is my target in facilitating people about relationships–to invite people to that place.
While in that post Dr. Crisp seems to be suggesting that "healthy relationship" is an oxymoron, in her very next blog post she appears to contradict herself.
“He feels he has to have a girlfriend or he’s not all right as a person,” was my son’s reply. How many people much older than my son or his friend have that point of view? How much freedom does that allow you? Hanging around with people who have that point of view can easily invite yourself into a stalker situation if you do cut your ties with the person. That can be a chilling thought…..

Even if it doesn’t go into stalker-dom, how can a healthy relationship ever develop from this point of view? Can anyone come from anything but a sense of desperation if they feel they HAVE to have a partner to be complete?
Whew. I just can't keep up with the whirling thoughts on that blog. In any event it seems that with Access, relationship is almost never about the other person. Instead it's all about me, me, me. (You would think that as an insufferable narcissist I would find this appealing; I don't know what's wrong with me.) 

But enough about that already. There's more great news on the sex and romance front: sex can be as meaningless as a game of Frisbee!
What if sex didn’t mean anything?
How could the subject that sets people a twittering and guffawing faster than any other not mean anything?
It all depends on what you mean by meaning, according to Gary Douglas, best selling author and founder of Access Consciousness.
Gary Douglas, by the way, is a noted expert on word meanings. Or perhaps he is not; I suppose it all depends upon what you mean by "is." Here's more:
What would sex look like if it had no meaning? For one thing, there would be no relationship expectations attached to it. Having sex could be as casual and non-entangling as a casual game of Frisbee-and with no greater expectations of a phone call in the morning....Sex without significance would be sex without caring if you played Frisbee with that particular person or group ever again. Don’t you have full confidence that you could always find somebody to play Frisbee with if that’s what you really most desired to do at any given time? And if the people you played Frisbee with yesterday play with someone else today, is that a problem for you?
Um... it might be a problem if you could get STDs from Frisbees, or if playing Frisbee had sex's potential to affect your mind, body, and emotions. Oops, there I go, thinking like a human again, as opposed to a humanoid.
I know I've given you a lot to think about, Dear Ones, perhaps too much. So let me leave you with some very bad music inspired by Access and their Ocean 300 project. Here's the link: http://www.ocean300.com/Articles-Info/love-this-planet-earth-by-delany-delaney.html

Give it a listen, and then go out and...um...play Frisbee with your Valentine. Even if you do feel that he or she is less than you, or is not truly giving you the joy and value of you.


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17 comments:

Steven Sashen said...

Oh, man! I was invited to Ft. Collins and I passed without even looking at what it was. Damn.

I'll be on the lookout for the next silverware ruining event (and I'll bring pre-bent forks and see if they straighten!).

Chris? Join me?

Kathryn Price said...

Connie, Re Dr. Kacie Crisp's blog snippet: I do feel "expanded" in nature and there is no need to judge the trees, and comparing that experience to "relationship by definition...the distance between two objects, like the distance between the earth and the moon" makes no sense. Relationship is also attachment, which I guess would be considered a sign of weakness in her construction. I'm going to get all crazy wild here and posit the idea that the ability to feel attachment is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Regarding Gary Douglas and Frisbees: "What would sex look like if it had no meaning?" It would look like a cold ass, Gary, a very cold ass. True, the universe is amazingly abundant that way but I have no interest in giving the abundant asses a Frisbee whirl. And that is the point, right? What an appealing thought...you go into it so cool that you're already shrugging it off: you won't need to do this ever again with this person. How about a redefinition: that's not being "light," that's shallow, the place where we always find expanded consciousness, right?

Finally, "If you did relationship from the question of 'Will this give me more of the joy and value of me?' that alone would change your life" from the maybe Jan Silk: Yes, the "joy and value of me" is how we should approach all matters in life. It's like Byrne advising readers to allow only the happy versions of other people in our lives. What is at the root of many of these types of prescriptions for becoming beings of "light" tossing multiple Frisbees is nothing but selfishness: raw, gaping, clutching selfishness. Clutching myself to me and for me and by me, I go off to forge my destiny to be me in the universe of me. Yawn. And I really think I'm kind of interesting, I just don't want to be the only inhabitant of my universe. I want to be "heavy" if that means being in a place where passion and love and struggle and negotiation and responsibility and freedom and loyalty all come together in one jarring, colorful package. Frisbee is not an aspiration half deep enough for beings of moral complexity, which we are.

Cosmic Connie said...

Do not despair, Steven. Rikka is going to be keynoting at the Celebration Metaphysical Fair in Denver March 11-13.

http://www.celebrationfair.com/denver_keynote.shtml

Then there's the Just Get Happy! two-day Law of Attraction Workshop Extravaganza on April 2 and 3...
http://justgethappy.com/facilitators/

...scroll down to
"Cory Michelle Johnson, Conscious 360, Founder & Chief Inspiration Officer."

As for official Access-sponsored courses, you only need go here...
http://www.accessconsciousness.com/schedule.asp

...and search for "Colorado."

Have fun!

Meanwhile, I hope Chris is OK. His Mystic B blog seems to be MIA.

Cosmic Connie said...

Thank you, Kathryn. But see, the problem is that you are actually putting thought into your responses to the Access writings, and Access is all about getting rid of thoughts, along with all judgment. Access is about feeling "light," and things such as judgment and attachment cause feelings of "heaviness." In the Access p.o.v., freedom from moral complexity is the way to happiness.

And all of the above is why I find Access so ludicrous and yet so sad.

I agree with you that Kacie Crisp's "relationship" comparison makes no sense, but then, Access has never been about making sense.

But hey, it gets Dain Heer laid, and it puts the money of easily duped heiresses into Gary Douglas' coffers. And I imagine that as long as there are self-centered, horny people who are willing to be duped (and have some money to waste), Access and scams like it will continue to grow.

Chris Locke said...

Thanks for the Valentine! I'll be on the lookout for Colorado appearances of these laughable miscreants.

Cosmic Connie said...

Hey, you're welcome, Chris! I'm sure you can get a ride with Steven to the next Access do in Colo. He'll even provide the pre-bent flatware.

Idioteque said...

I think I got an STD in my eye from this YouTube video by the ACCESSory that scammed me back in 2007.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OdFgey8CX0

Um...this is really Captain Obvious. Any Cosmo magazine can tell you that! -_-

Cosmic Connie said...

Thanks a lot, Id... now I have another headache from rolling my eyes. But hey... I forgive you. After all, you are the one who first alerted me to the nuttiness that is Access!

Anonymous said...

I just love it. The law of attraction is all wrong. Too funny! It's really the law of contraction.

Nuts! All of 'em are nuts!

Barbara

Cosmic Connie said...

You're right, Barb. Good thing I'm not allergic to nuts!

Idioteque said...

Connie, I think that any New Wage hustledork should be listed in that controversial book "Undateable: Things Guys Do That Guarantee They Won't Be Dating or Having Sex". There was even a VH1 show about this book, and it was HILARIOUS!!

I tried to submit the "Guru of Poo" to the official Undateable website, and I crashed the server :P Does that mean he's REALLY undateable? lol!

Cosmic Connie said...

LOL, Id. By the way, is Guru of Poo still actively involved in Access? Even if he's not, it seems I owe him so much, for having been the (unwitting) inspiration for my Access-related posts.

Idioteque said...

I do believe the Guru of Poo is still active in ACCESS. I mean, he did interview Gary Douglas and Dain Heer for his YouTube channel.

Oh, and he's got a blog now:

http://www.theguruofyou.blogspot.com/

My eyes...I cannot unsee!

Cosmic Connie said...

I'm having trouble seeing too, because my eyes are rolling so much.

Idioteque said...

Oh, I've submitted both the Guru of Poo and Don Mario Ramos (my exes) to the Undateable website successfully. I had to put the embed code in there.

I just hope those people will accept my submissions. ^_^

Cosmic Connie said...

I hope so, too, Id. You'll probably save some other women from making the same mistakes. :-)

Daniel said...

Hi there! Interesting blog you've got here. Actually I've attended two Access Classes, both their Bars class and the next level up, Foundation. Now before you all pounce on me over it (lol) I have to admit I got some value out of Access. Not too mention they were all pretty fun nice people. Now I'm not a facilitator or am I affiliated with Access in any way, but the clearing statement that is much maligned on this blog actually did remove and resolve some issue I had. For me Access actually worked where other more traditional methods failed. One person I know had long standing grief over the death of her son in a car accident two years before. It had totally incapacitated her to the point where she could barely leave the house. After a few Access sessions she was able to finally move through her grief and regain control of her life. So there are success stories that I believe do go beyond what skeptics would label as the placebo effect.