The foundational premise of Eros is that all is perfect with room to evolve. The whole of the Erotic path is implicit in this statement. We practice immersed in this perfection, the feeling in our bodies of the richness and succulence of life, the full measure of the sensual world always and forever located within us. We feel a pulsing fullness, the body magnetized by the world around it. We are transfixed, unequivocally connected.
We are not engaged in fixing a broken reality. Rather, a perfect reality is helping us to perceive its perfection, using and including us in its seamless, ever-deepening evolution.
It’s not up to us to perfect anything. This disposition of mind accepts that both the present moment and its content, here and now, are already whole and complete; there is no need for us to activate or impose our will. Instead, we give implicit permission to the ever-evolving agency of Eros to move and emerge through our willingness. We do not need to do anything; we neither guide nor seek to expand or extend the experience of Eros. We simply need to allow the current of life to flow. We offer ourselves over as an agent of that flow, of what is inside our bodies, the very incarnated substance of us, here and now.
Our deepest desire for connectedness and ease comes from being turned on in this way. But we’ve been given all the wrong maps to enter its territory; abstraction, transcendence, and capturing perfection float us away and above the current of life, the source that needs to penetrate us. An Erotic axiom says,
We learn the mechanics of life both by becoming more like it—interconnected, dynamic, all-welcoming—and by developing the capacity that allows it to flow through us.
Eventually, this force animates every dimension of our being, activating an often dormant knowing that lies within. The beauty and fun of this life is to participate directly in this evolution, this unfolding; to immerse in experiences that open and refine the complexity of the mind in connection with an ever-more resilient body; to experience a sustainable and increasingly expansive sense of fulfillment. Our fulfillment, then, also evolves, as we move in perfect accord with the life force of Eros. We may, however, have patterns that are out of sync with this organic movement, patterns that have been grooved by a notion put into the mind that diverted the natural flow of Eros in our bodies. Eros says this, too, is perfect—part of what continues to create our uniqueness with room for ever-more dynamism.
It is never that there is something wrong with us; there is simply room for more experience of life, for more discovery and growth. Our existence contains both a universal quality of perfection and a desire for further evolution. This is our inescapable paradox, and it becomes painful only when reduced to the idea that perfection is “out there,” separate from us who are imperfect “in here.” We acutely feel the gap between what we imagine as the perfection of life and our capacity to experience it as such.
We can’t puzzle it out. We can’t get it to neatly resolve into a singular, non-contradictory axiom. But we can develop an equal heart for both the knowing and the not-knowing. Where there is knowing, we let it seek out the not-knowing and allow a new understanding to emerge. Resting in the knowing mind limits our ability to open, so we deliberately search for areas that yearn for integration and we pour the knowing that is within us into them. Where there is not-knowing, we allow ourselves to open so we may receive wisdom. In this way, we keep ourselves in dynamic flow, neither grasping the stasis of information nor the desperation of ignorance.
Without this realization, we will continue to labor under the delusion that we are separate from the flow of life, from Eros. The feeling that something is wrong will remain. Only the infinite can amend the pain of feeling fractured into the finite and separate.
