THE SEXES
Primal Consciousness, One beyond form, transcends male and female. Then appearing in shapes, we’re each both yin and yang; as in myths, the gods have their consorts; these qualities fluctuate in each of us, around the central pole of unified being.
Female and Male Created It Them
We create a dance of duality from our Oneness as Father/Mother God, polyphonous Reality is being born, out of visions, out of the omnifertile godhead. The sexes are a master metaphor from our mass psyche, a myth spun for our movement out while rooted in our Source, Operation Bootstrap spanning this human plane to a Renewed World of luminous pairings in conscious unity.
The two halves differ so in each of us, yet are complementary, equally of inestimable worth, nestling together for our Great Mission, driving the search engine.
God’s always both the origin and the process we’re going through now, transcendently harmonizing. In this world of duality, our feminine side represents the aspect of evenness within the primordial, No Thingness, O, the womb of cornucopia, the ground of being. Then our masculine side must unstably rise, a spearhead, from our +1/-1 balance act. (Machismo bravely puffs men up to compensate for our evanescence.) We all step out, odd man out, tool around and return to the Other, to our evolving origin, together in birth, in sex, in death, at the end of the day, at the end of the world. So in myth, the Great Mother Being shoots the rising and falling Sun Hero Becoming out from herself, a space probe or escape pod fashioned to cross the unborn unknown and lead us out to the Renewed World; spreading out the universe from our womb of primal Being, the Baby-lonian hero Marduk breaks his way through the dragon belly of Tiamat; then we find we’re out of joint, we don’t secure our advances, until we reach these feminine way stations of reconciliation. The masculine element within us heads us towards worldwide birth, sent by both the literal and spiritual sense of our mother, while within the galactic reaches of space we remain ever embraced by our Mother, and when awakened in prayer we so presently feel how we’re embedded within the living Love that we are, how every movement rests round the moment that’s eternally Now.
Beloved, let’s feel compassion for the fragility of both our male and female sides. Parties to myth, a man and woman truly loving each other feel this: the great divine nature of our feminine half, the roundness of the nurturing primality of Being, which is yet inevitably ushering us into this world; primal Being in its male aspect is heading this wandering as well. Combined in the wholeness of divine love, we’re the spiral staircase.
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With every act of love, we contact the Divine Appearing As Other. When the anxious insecurity of feeling separate from God drops away, we release the need to control both God and our partner, and both of us surrender in our kinship with God. In sacred relationship, karma is wrapped up, and we wave in free cooperation.
Andromeda and Perseus Save Each Other
We harbor such sharply split feelings inside about divinity, our own divinity, and so likewise about our dearest loved ones, flashes of hope against hope mixed with rage against the slipping sinewave of life and dread of death, in this Operation Bootstrap. There must be some way out of here.
Perseus: Son of Zeus, floating in his baby basket like Osiris or Moses to his foster parents; like all of us he’s more than human, he’s, per se, us. As a youth, through no virtue of his own, like us, he receives magic gifts suited for his adventures, winged shoes and the cap of invisibility. When he swipes their Single Eye, the three Fates give him directions and he reaches the isle of gorgons. Watching Medusa’s reflection on his shield so he won’t turn to stone, he beheads it. With his shield, he holds the mirror up to the world to see how everything is its own opposite, a powerless theatre, and so he loses his fear of the endless generational repetition of birth-and-death (from a Freudian outlook, the gorgon’s head can represent both conception and destruction), he uncovers the activity of eternal life, his true origin, his spiritual being.
We’re encouraged by deep relationship to heroically liberate ourselves. Perseus comes across Princess Andromeda, enchained, with the sine-uous sea serpent, and falls in love; with the gorgon’s lethal head he petrifies the monster, showing it the non-power of its birth-and-death blind alley, puts it in its place without contention, and whisks her away. Do we feel superior to Andromeda, whom we see tied up in the movies, looking like a victim? Do we try to gain an advantage over the Other, be the dominant party even in our thoughts, take things out on them, blame them for this vale, try to feel safe and separate from the One Life? What we do to another, we do to ourself. We always unconsciously identify with the Other, with Andromeda’s brave sacrifice of entering our seemingly submerged, evenly repeating dreamworld (which is subtly opening out). Perseus and Andromeda recognize their heroic parity in this episode, their married functions; sympathetically, they find they are the Other. Perseus has seen through mundane power, and compassionately honors Andromeda’s sacrificial mission. He can freely take the whole world from the shoulders of Atlas, and just as freely shrug off the burden, knowing it’s a vision. So when we drop our own defenses, realizing there’s no foe to fight, we stop waiting for the Messiah to perform this rescue for us, we see that God doesn’t really need saving.
Our sensuality pulls us deeper into this human interim, and so we sometimes condemn these feelings. Such guilt and resistance just slow down our journey to blessed rejoining.
Beloved, transmute the sight of Tiamat, seadragon mother, into princess daughter Andromeda, from sunk into this world, to the Renewed World of Sacred Relationship. Our dream-monsters come to befriend and instruct us, the Senoi tribe in Malaya says, so honor this incipient world without belief in its constraints, and help unfold the principles. Shake things out of their natural cycle of sleep, disrupt these enraptured billows of pillows, awake, awake, awake!
Unintentionally, without malice, Perseus throws the discus and slays his grandfather the king. In shifting from ancestors to youths, he flies beyond the tragic repetition of Oedipus, the maiden Andromeda marries him. Being and becoming, the two sides within each of us finally find we were always together, fulfill the circling, consciously continue spiraling out, and wed this awareness to the higher level, Sacred Relationship within Oneness, beyond the picture of birth-and-death, shedding history in the unveiled Now.
These metaphors plummet deeper than our bodies, profound as the reverberating wave.
Sine wave of male and female, sine wave of parent and child; between these two metaphors, complexity enough to form worlds, and then bring them across to deliverance, to this Moment. Beneath these mechanisms lies the absolute fundament of our unity and total freedom. Through meditation, we consciously grasp these age-old metaphors; like Andromeda and Perseus, we recover our Identity with the Other, Oneness in Relationship. For meditation: An ever greater Love.
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Vision: One mystical marriage marries us all. God’s constant love and recognition flowers As us two, sacred union of the whole city floating above in a great silver globe.
If by grace we cast off ulterior motives, recognize our destined one, and honestly, compassionately, forgivingly, lovingly deal with both our karmic scripts, we can build a mystical marriage, and we’ll understand divine love in this very place.
Embedded in sexual congress lies the authentic mystic expression, the delight of Union, dissolving our ego’s loneliness, its sense of separation, opening the glass doors. Semiconsciously, we fear that our ego self could drown in this bliss, man and woman fear their vulnerability in depending on the Other; and we hope for eternal life through the metaphor of progeny.
People’s absorption in sex is fostered by the advertising, the proselytizing. It not only sells products, it is sold. So sex can be out of synch with love, although it travels alongside. Since it’s often felt as a necessity, like breathing out, our anxious craving for sex can confuse love with manipulation and using others as objects---the essence of a physical belief. Yet this compelling passion really seeks for holy communion, and like all metaphors, finally helps push us through to the other side.
Propagating children through surpassing the self is basic to our passage through material awareness, and at its core is a secret religion for all life, cracking the shell of our ego, a transcendent impulse leading into the heart of Love.
A great outburst of sexual energy can sometimes accompany a spiritual spike. It could be
described as our body’s anxiety regarding its feared extinction, for we have an ego sense of body and
mind: but both body and mind are revealed in their higher identities by spiritual unfoldment. Then we look and see that our body is spiritual substance, God appearing in expression, it needn’t feel sexual compulsion, get sick, or labor under any constraint. We now see what we always are, each thing unbounded in the ground of being, but we must go through the alchemy.
Bodily, in our perfect wave we as happily respire as aspire, spinning about, running round a field, speechless ecstasy. After we mystically reenter this inner orb beyond form, we uncoil easily outwards, for it’s an always opening circle.
My closest friend on the path confided this: Early in his spiritual work, his sexual desires
simply evaporated for several years. Then they resumed in normal strength again, though without the old feeling of being forced into it. (And the spiral may turn more.) This experience shows that celibacy, which often occurs on the Path, is the final level for some seekers, a passing stage for others. We don’t try to coerce one way or the other; there’s holy purpose to wherever we’re presently at.
Celibacy may result from such concentration on some spiritual lessons that we lose interest in sex. In a much wider way, we feel our ego subsumed by the meditative life. Then eventually we may get something else to work on, so we might swing back awhile. The balance takes care of itself.
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Holy love alchemizes every being, linking the stairs both up and down, yoking the different stories of awareness together.
In love, our passion is evoked by feelings of Recognition and openness, our passion travels in their wake, the horses are neighing in front of the cart.
Love offers many metaphors, to live out our spiritual bond:
It uncovers and heals our loneliness and hurts. Our vulnerability and nakedness are the woundedness leading to unboxing our sense of separation, and pave the way to Union.
Our personal experience of the divine: When we fulfill ourselves, we no longer need another to save us, we make a space of freedom to live with our Beloved. Released, neither of us dependent on the other to validate our existence, both free to follow our missions, we’re paradoxically both safe to ask for help and healing.
The flowing love lets us broach our problems in trust, surety, and approval.
The love of man and woman is the Oneness in Relationship that starts to draw us forth, a gift that shows us the Renewed World: As we enter this fresh garden of Life, this danceline that pulses while never broken, we salvage all the nascent elements of our interim world, so it’s built-in that the sensual must be brought along, the pleasure of love and sensations. There will never come an end to God in expression, Consciousness appears As metaphors that alter, progress and grow; in some way, we will always be embodied and engender free new Being.
When we find the Beloved after long years, this whole sweet cosmic game of hide and seek is won happily after aeons, Really Being with You.