The Nutty Nut and the Wild Slut (6)
Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice
Such are the Gates of ParadiseWilliam Blake
Is paradise lost forever? Let us see, let us investigate. Many of us make mistakes in how we deal with our loved ones because we are confused about this issue, so the topic has importance. Our loved ones, or our lovers, are not going to help us to return to paradise. Our lovers are not in our lives to make us happy. We have to get rid of some false expectations here. Still, some sort of return to paradise is possible, for all of us. That’s the brief digest.
Let us try to talk about Love, a bit. Talking about Love is talking about unity; talking about the absence of Love is talking about separation. So let us try to talk, a bit, about separation and unity. Talking about the unity part is difficult, almost impossible. As soon as we congratulate ourselves on any quality whatsoever, our goodness, our insight, the openness of our heart, we separate ourselves. That’s why we cannot really be conscious of unity, of Love. As soon as we try to be conscious of it, Love disappears. But if we go through a process where a veil after veil of separation gets lifted, we can be aware of that, we can notice the shifts. If all veils disappear, Love is what remains. Love just is. Love has always been there. But Love can never be an object of our attention. If we try to look at Love, try to inspect it, Love vanishes.
We all have to become subtle artists. We all have to learn how to express ourselves, subtly. Or better, we all have to learn how to get out of the way, so that the universe can express itself, ever more perfectly, through us. Willingness is all, ripeness is all. We have to be there, we have to be available, we have to show up. But other than that, nothing is needed. No need for our conscious mind to guide our expression. No need for us to search for words or prepare our speeches. Instead, we can learn to trust the process that grants us perfect expression in the here and now, in the way in which the Apostles learned to trust the voice of the Spirit.
Our expression will guide itself, if we invite the universe to come to expression through us. It helps if we see that we cannot not express ourselves. Our lives are the expressions of our souls. What we can do is strive to make these expressions more and more beautiful. This new way of looking at myself also gives a new way for me to look at you, at what you express. In looking at you, I can decide to search for your soul, to look for what is beautiful in you. I can invite you to reveal your inner beauty, invite you to express your true self in the outside world, to reveal yourself to me, in ways that get ever more beautiful.
Our eyes are the gateway to this. If my eyes meet yours and we both, at the same time, always here, always now, allow exploration by revealing ourselves to the gaze of the other, miracles can start to happen. The sense of separation vanishes, the veil lifts, and we can sense that we expand. If we manage to keep our attention on our own body in this process, we may sense an opening in the region of our heart. This is an experience of growing boundlessness. A sense of falling in infinite space. Like we are in free fall, without a parachute. This is tinged, perhaps, with a slight sense of panic, at first. Our free fall may not yet feel safe. We may be afraid that we will hit rock, disappear completely, get annihilated. We may be afraid we will cease to exist, afraid we will die in the process of opening up. We do not trust, yet, that we are going to be all right.
Surrender is sweet, but we first have to learn trust. We may need help in this, the help of some high priestess of surrender, the help of a fearless woman who has managed to heal herself and can now assist us, help us to get born to a new life. We should search for such fearless women who have healed their wounds, honour them, make attempts to be with them, invite them to be with us, learn to be brave enough to confess to them that we need their help. OK, I am now talking as male to female, as man attracted to woman. If you are female to female, you may also need a priestess. If you are female to male or male to male you may need a priest, a masculine healer. So please make the appropriate substitution, and be aware that you are not left out in these musings.
I am not talking here about priests in the traditional sense, for most of them are wearing garments that do not fit, that are way too large for them. Most of them are not fearless. Most of them are in need of a bit of sinning to heal themselves sexually. Indeed, they may need a lot of sexual healing. They will also need courage, lots of it, to liberate themselves from what a misguided tradition has taught them to believe about the relations between the sexes, about the dangers of intimate contact with women, about the sinfulness of sexual attraction. Or about the sinfulness of sinning, for that matter. It all depends on context, right time and place. We are more in need of priestesses than priests, these days, priestesses who are not afraid of sinning. If the traditional priests come to their senses, many of them will consider a career change, leave the field, make room for the polarity shift that is needed now, the polarity shift that is going to manifest anyhow.
Suppose we have found the fearless priestesses or fearless priests that our polarity directs us to. We can learn to be brave by looking in their fearless eyes, by trusting the process of our surrender to them. Looking another human being in the eyes, and surrendering to their gaze is difficult at first. If there is also some sexual tension it may be a real challenge. This feels like dangerous terrain. We sense the risk of falling for someone who might reject us. The still immature part in us may express as clinging. They will point out to us that that is inappropriate, that their offer to us is to be healed here and now, and to be set free. In particular, we are invited not to bind ourselves to them.
Their gaze may seem to take us apart, but it will finally make us whole, to our immense benefit. This is the exact opposite of the masculine impulse to dominate the female element. There is much to unlearn here, for all of us, men and women alike. Especially women are vulnerable here. Before they engage in this work, they should have learned to distinguish the male predators from the male healers. Women in search of a good man should first learn to recognize maturity, or else they will never find him. If we are attracted to the immature version of our sexual complement this means that we are still longing for a paradise that is lost forever. There is a paradise that we had to leave when we discovered ourselves as separate beings. We have to accept, at some point in our lives, that we cannot go there again. We should beware if we want to melt again with a mother or father figure who is able to fulfil our every desire. Going that way is regression.
There is also a way forward, once we have healed the child in us that is afraid to grow up. Ripeness is all. The process of learning true love is mainly a process of unlearning. We need discernment, the ability to recognize maturity, to recognize the mature people who are willing to invite us to be with them. Intimacy between mature people is never enforced. Any desire or attempt to enforce intimacy is a sure sign that we are not yet mature. What John Searle did was not mature. Enforced intimacy is an inner contradiction, it is a kind of emotional and spiritual rape.
We have to learn to reflect on our past mistakes with the loving eye of who we are now, the eye of forgiveness. All forgiveness is ultimately forgiveness of self. That is where it starts. I have to forgive myself first, and then slowly let the forgiveness grow, extend, and expand. In the eye of love there is no sin, so ultimately there is nothing to forgive. By trusting your gaze as you look at me, a desire wells up in me to reveal myself completely to you. This is without words, for this process is beyond words. We cannot find words for what happens when we trust love, and fall, and fall.
The story of the Fall is the story of separation. But this story is ultimately false. We can have a common life with each other. We can have union with each other. We do not have to live like isolated units. The sense of isolation creates great suffering. Fortunately, the sense of isolation is an illusion. That is good news, for it means that we can come to our senses and be cured. How can we restore unity, how can we return to Paradise? How can women help men to accomplish this restoration within themselves? How can men help women to accomplish the same thing? Women, generally, are more aware of the possibility of a cure than men, generally. This generalization will make some men and women mad. So be it. We are painting in broad strokes here, on a canvas that is too large to be covered by tiny scribbling.
Women need courage for this. Stop the competition for the “best man”. Stop trying to correct men, stop trying to make men more like women. This will never work, for men and women are different. Broadly speaking, again. This statement should not enrage anyone, but if it does, so be it. Men and women should better be aware of their differences. It is a matter of common sense, really. A women has to feel what her man needs before she starts giving him what she thinks he needs. It is easier for a woman to sense what a man needs if she is open to the possibility that these needs are different from her own needs. And vice versa. Women may assist men, and men may assist women, to achieve unity consciousness. We cannot do this alone. We all need each other. We all need help from our opposite polarity. Women and men who are into men need men to heal them. Men and women who are into women need women to heal them. We can all start doing this once we decide that we wish to leave the autistic stage of human interaction that is common in our culture behind us. We all need to relearn to touch each other, emotionally but also physically, get comfortable again with physical nearness and cuddling.
Unity consciousness is the plural version of self consciousness. Consciousness of the singular self, and reflection on that consciousness, makes us aware, at some point, of the fact that we are the witness, and that the witness is the ultimate subject of our experience. The witness is and must be “free of qualities”. This means that there can only be one ultimate witness in the entire universe. Experiencing together that we are that witness can be called we-feeling, we-consciousness, we-awareness, we-dreaming. This experience is not tribal. There is no non-tribe that gets excluded. So there will be no marching in brown shirts, or shirts on any colour, no singing of songs that define us as opposed to others, no mob that could turn against an individual. None of that at all. Instead, we can sing about brotherhood, sisterhood, togetherness, joy.
There is good reason for joy, for the we that we are discovering includes every living being with self awareness. We are together, and we can be aware that we are together. No I speaks on behalf of the we, voicing its needs, but projecting until a tribal entity gets constructed through resonance, an entity that defines itself by antagonism, by juxtaposition of an us against them. There is no them in collective we awareness. We are all in the dream.
There may be differences in awareness, though, and differences in spots that get illuminated, or are seen in the dream. We are the dream, together, and when the dream gets bigger and bigger we start to see that what we first viewed as imperfections is revealed as part of a larger whole, and in that larger context gets a new splendid lustre. Thought plays only a tiny role in this process. Thought can be turned on outward things to bring them into the collective dream experience.
The collective we awareness is not denial of the existence of an objective external world. It is the experience that this outside world is much richer than we did assume before. The world around us holds tiny seeds of future experience that we can already perceive in a collective dream. By focussing our attention, the seeds that are right for us will sprout and grow into outward reality.
Reality has an inside and an outside. In collective we awareness we experience and explore the inside. These are all words, and they will not make sense except for the dreamers. We-dreaming is self inquiry in its collective form, a collective quest for the self that inheres in all living creatures, the self that is the essence of life. At some point we realize that the dreamer or the witness of the dream is who we truly are.
The witness of the dream we can never perceive, for we are that witness. These words just appear, the one who perceives what slowly forms itself on the paper or on the computer screen never appears. It is not the pencil or the keyboard, nor the fingers that hold the pen or hammer the keyboard, nor the eye that sees the tip of the pencil move or the letters appear on the screen, nor the brain that registers what is written and interprets it. The giver of meaning is beyond all that, forever.
Talk about the witness of all experience only makes sense for those who take their first person experience seriously. Roughly speaking these are the existentialist philosophers, as opposed to defenders of the materialist metaphysics that is the unarticulated world view of Western civilisation in its current phase. This metaphysics accepts the third person objective view of the world as the only ultimately correct view. As we mature in collective first order being, this modern metaphysics of scientific materialism is recognized as simply false. Matter is not all there is. But never mind.