Eros and Holiness: Part Five – Marc Gafni
marc gafni
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Eros and Holiness: Part Five
Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being.
That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety.
When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros.
Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence.
If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations.
A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves.
A man makes contracts with the feminine, not realizing that, even if she agrees, those contracts may not serve her highest good. A man has too many lovers, failing to realize that boundaries might be a higher gift than boundless Eros, even when expressed in genuine moments of love, love-making, and sexual play.
All of these are forms of pseudo-eros. None of them are Eros.
Marc Gafni
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