The Nutty Nut and the Wild Slut (4)
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
As the reader of these posts will surely have become aware, the play we see staged here is an investigation into the nature of intimacy, and also into the polarity between the masculine and the feminine. What is intimacy? How does it come about? What does it have to do with the gender polarity? To really ponder these questions, we have to take a step back. Several steps. Many steps, in fact. We have to talk about separation and communion. About the difference between rape and surrender. About drastic dreamed responses to rape, where the ultimate revenge is castration.
Let’s go back, way back. Let’s go back to the point where animal mind turned into human mind, the birth of self-consciousness. No doubt, the higher animals are conscious. But they have no concept of a me as separate from the universe, a me that can be looked at from the outside. The story of the fall from Paradise is connected to this. Having awareness without self-awareness is a state of bliss. An animal that is coping with its own survival, is fully present in its body. Animals either survive or they do not, but this is never a cause of worry to the animal itself. Animals do not worry, ever. There are large periods when animals are not in survival mode, and in these periods they are in bliss, experiencing the pure joy of being. To experience worry, projected fear, you need to be conscious of your own existence as a separate being.
The experience of “this is me, separated from the world” was the experience of the first man, Adam. We don’t know how long ago this happened. No doubt there were many Adams. Those Adams all had navels, for they had mothers. We must not forget that the Biblical creation story is a mythical narrative. For grown-ups, Biblical stories are not stories to be taken literally. But the story of the fall from paradise is a narrative with deep meaning. The Adams were somehow different from their mothers. Their mothers had been fearless and without worry, but the Adams could not be like that. They could suddenly see themselves as separate beings. With this, lots of perturbations arose. The Adams developed fear, anxiety, worry, shame, remorse, for they had lost their innocence. Some of the Eves they were with were still in eternal bliss, and this created untold confusion, misery and discord. Paradise was surely over for the Adams and Eves that learned to see themselves as separate beings, and that also started to become aware of the gender difference between them.
Not all people have a memory of how self-consciousness arose in them, but some people have. I happen to have a vivid memory of it. I was standing in the annex to our kitchen. Sunlight was falling in through the back window, it was early morning. There suddenly was a sense of “This is me, standing here, observing the sunlight, observing all this.” This was at a time when we did not yet have a shower in the house. The shower room was built as an extension, when I was four years old, and the back window in our kitchen annex was removed then. So my I experience must have been before that.
If you have self-awareness, you are able to look at yourself from the inside and the outside. If you also have the gift of empathy, you are able to look at the people that surround you as beings with an inside and an outside. Looking at a female human being like this is seeing her as a sister. Looking at a male human being like this is seeing him as a brother. When self awareness arises, the three persons arise that are in the core part of any human language: first person I, me, second person you, third person he, him, she, her. The first person perspective looks from an inside, the second person perspective looks to an inside, the third person perspective looks at another as outside. Note that we are talking about persons as singular here. The shift to plural is deeply connected to the topic of intimacy.
In the Trinity of Persons, the third person corresponds to the Father, the second person to the Son, and the first person to the Holy Spirit. We are talking metaphorically, of course. For grown-ups, the language of religion is a language of metaphor, a language of myth. The holy books of religion have precious little to say about how the world is, but they brim with mythical stories about how meaning can emerge in my world, in your world, in our world. First person singular, second person, first person plural. To be inspired by a religious myth or by a religious concept is to be inspired by a myth or concept that has truth for us.
There are layers and layers of truth in the concept of the Trinity. The Trinity is an unfathomable mystery, because it is deeply mysterious to us how the three Persons interact. Science may look like a third person game, but scientific insight arises in the individual mind, in first person. It is, or should be, a mystery to any scientist where the flashes of insight come from. It is a cause of deep wonder that human minds have access to the language in which the book of the world is written, are gradually able to read in it, make some sense of it. Learning science, learning to use the key of mathematics to get access to the world around us, is a first person activity. Diving into first person may transform us as third person, how we appear to others. I remember that some years after I had taken up meditation as a practice, people I hadn’t seen for a long time and hadn’t told about my practice remarked that they noticed a change. How could that be, if third person is all there is?
Sins against the Father are sins of disregard for the natural order of things, against the laws of creation. Sins against the Son are sins of disregard of our neighbour as brother or sister. Sins against the Holy Spirit are sins of disregard for the deepest stirrings of our souls. Sins against the Holy Spirit are the gravest of sins. They are the hardest to correct or to forgive.
This talk about sin and forgiveness, isn’t that a bit old school? We are through with all that, aren’t we? Well, not quite. The thing is, there can be no meaning in our lives without the concept of sin, without the distinction between good and evil. A deep reason why many people are fed up with talk of vice and virtue, good and evil, is that they have been taught to look at these concepts from a third person perspective. Somebody else telling them what they should or should not do. This is unfortunate, for this perspective is unhelpful. Is it for someone else to tell you whether you heed the deepest stirrings of your soul? Shouldn’t everyone be their own master here? No to the first question, yes to the second. And with these answers comes responsibility.
Talk about virtue and vice becomes a bit more palatable, perhaps, when we open up to the possibilitiy that there may be virtue in a bit of vice, and vice in too much virtue. Those people with only virtue and no vice, those always-do-good-ers, aren’t they unsufferable, no fun to be with at all? Every virtue has to be spiced with a bit of vice, and sometimes with quite a lot of it, otherwise we cannot stomach it. Trying to be too virtuous, trying to live up to standards that are not right for us, is dangerous, we all know that. Who knows whether priests, or bishops, even cardinals, who do not deny themselves the pleasures of some healthy masturbation and some joyful sex with consenting adults would be less likely to abuse children?
Many religions are not at all at ease with sex and with sexual expression, and many people with a religious upbringing have learnt to connect sex with sin. Well, the writings of medieval female saints like Hadewijch tell a different story. The poetry of Hadewijch is deeply sensual, a blend of spirituality, sensuality and sexuality. Hadewijch’s writing is hot, full of wet pussy talk really. These female saints are in love with the Son, and in what they write they reveal and express their longing to make love to him. For them, the experience of blending with God is an erotic experience. And isn’t that natural? For us, the act of sexual union, of making love with full presence, can be an experience of the nearness of the Divine. The first person talk about nearness of God is again metaphorical. If God talk puts you off, please forget. By all means, substitute your own stammering for what ultimately cannot be put into words.
Call the Trinity of Persons that we talked about above the Trinity in masculine gender. It is also about the Persons in singular, but we can let that pass. Now take a deep breath of imagination, and … switch the gender polarity. Then look at the Trinity again. This is all metaphor, of course, as all religious talk ultimately is. But the choice of metaphor matters a lot, and a switch of metaphor can be very enlightening. In the Trinity of Persons, under the light of the feminine, Goddess as third person is the Mother. She is the manifest universe, Mother Nature. We see Her from the outside, we study her through science, and we are awed by Her incredible vastness. The laws of nature have been written by Her. She is the Mother as universe, She is the all and everything. Outside Her, nothing can exist. She is the ground of all being. In Her the seeds of all that becomes manifest sprout, find nourishment, blossom, bear fruit and decay.
While the Divine Mother is the universe as third person, her gorgeous glorious Daughter is the universe as second person. We can fall in love with Her. Ultimately, we should love Her. But if we have the audacity to make love to Her, She will annihilate us, for She can be fucked, but She cannot be fucked with. Making love to the Divine Daughter accords us absolute, infinite bliss, everything we long for. But at a price. We cannot survive this sex act as separate beings. She is absolute beauty and infinite bliss, but She annihilates us. Why would we want to have sex with the Daughter? Because She lures us and beckons us and pulls us until we surrender. The ultimate act of love is to give up oneself.
Mind you, the Daughter of the Goddess is not jealous if we prefer other things, relative things, to Her. She bides Her time. No need for Her to be jealous, for nothing compares with Her. There is no knowledge like self-knowledge, but with love it is different. In true love we have to give up, transcend, our self-love, our love of ourselves as separate beings. The beautiful thing is that this is not difficult once we surrender to the Daughter of the Goddess. She gives us infinite bliss, She grants our truest desire, for being with Her is the ultimate goal of our existence. Hence when we fuse with Her, our separate existence has lost its purpose. We are home, we have completed our journey.
Seeing the world as the Divine Daughter is becoming aware that there is bliss everywhere. The animals are in bliss. Being eaten is blending with the universe, return to the Mother. When seen as third person, this looks bloody awful, but first person being just blends. First personhood, Spirit again, but now as Intuition and Inspiration, is present everywhere. It shifts every time a body decays and returns to its elements. Where am I, as first person? Always here, always now. So there is never anything to worry about, really. Is it my soul that survives? That is hard to say, for what is my soul? Anything that I can form an image of will ultimately perish. What does not perish can have no form. It has no properties or all properties. What has form springs into being whenever it is called forth by the ongoing act of creation and it blends with the closure of this particular window to the world.
We manifest as windows to the world, windows that open somewhere to provide a unique view. Then after a while this particular window closes. Somewhere else a new window opens, and after a while closes again. Open and close, open and close. We are infinite, without beginning and without end. Identification with our bodies hides this truth from us. But reflection makes clear that we are not our bodies. Identification with the body is connected to taking the third person view as the only true view of ourselves. In love, looking at our partner as third person, and third person only, is a recipe for disaster.
Hell is a place where everything is ultimately reduced to third person, to what can be observed from the outside, to what can be measured and compared, to what is part of the world of objects. Hell is a place where mysterious and splendidly free female beings are being reduced to objects, or let themselves be reduced, are being put in golden cages, or let themselves be put, be kept as trophy wives. Hell is a place where there is only a me, and never a you, and therefore also never a we. Hell is where toads rule and count their money, where toads put trophy wives in cages, where toads grab pussy, where toads surround themselves with more toads, with sycophants who tell them only what they want to hear. In hell there is no truth.
Truth arises where there is a we, where what is spoken from the heart can be received with the heart, received, acknowledged and understood. Intimacy with another or with several others occurs when the heart opens, when there is a shift from there is a me to there is a we. Just a small shift of attention, but if combined with the energy of gender polarity, the experience can be mind blowing. And it leads to all kinds of turbulences, for the gender polarity provides the push and pull that mixes good and evil.