In some worlds, it is suggested we drive all our energies into visioning the positive and avoiding the negative. In the eyes of Eros, this is still a child’s way of being afraid to look at the dark and demanding the light. Eros also has a different aim: to live life on life’s terms. To do this, we must be open to all of it. In Eros, we are only a slave to what we reject; at the mercy of the enemy we cannot love. And Eros is too fierce to accept servitude. It is just not enough to win in the conditional world.
Eros may not be able to change the conditions of life, but it can change our heart. This eroticization, this choosing whatever happens as if we ourselves had designed it, is the most powerful tool we have for maintaining Erotic dignity, for developing a skill set we would not have otherwise, and for remaining open to flow no matter the condition. It is our ticket out of torment. And yes, there may be an initial egoic burn as “they” win, but Eros plays a long game; the only game there is, in fact.
Eros says we can have all the wins from achieving conditions we want, but what it cares about is fidelity to creativity that can be experienced under any conditions. It says, in fact, our situations may be the greatest facilitator for its growth. This is the strange reconciling of Eros that allows us to love all people and all things. Not because of who they are or what they seem to wish on us, but because no matter how they appear—as benevolent aid or malevolent force—with Eros inside, we have the capacity to use all input for our growth, for our capacity to be with them exactly as they are. We are equally thankful to all, because everything brings us closer to our source.
It is often in this realization, when we have transformed a really tough experience of love into growth, that we get a glimpse of it all being for our ultimate benefit. The more practical aspect is that anything we put ahead of this process, we have already lost. The outcome we cling to for fear of losing it is already lost. It has lost its pleasure and has turned into something that brings pain. The situation we close against already owns us in that it got us to close off.
We all have the fight instinct. It is not if we fight, it is how we fight. We can punch our way through an experience. We can turn the other cheek. We can avoid. We can employ a position of against-ness. We can just wait for it to come and get us. Or, if we are in Eros, we can choose to get so big that we open and swallow the experience until we make it ours, absorb it, eroticize it, live it, digest it, and send it back into the world metabolized as love.
Our statement to the world is there is nothing it can do or bring that can make us not respond to someone with love. We do not need to so rigidly hold to our beliefs that we are willing to lose our relationship with them. But we also are not willing to give in and roll over. We will make every moment—chosen or not—chosen. And in doing so, we will find a way to make it our own until from self-possession, we are able to choose love.
This is how we fight the unforgivable and the insurmountable. We get out of the Chinese finger cuffs, trying to pull in two different directions with our aspirations on one side and the worst-case scenario on the other. We bring in the big guns of desire, volition, and Eros. We say, “If it were this way forever, how would we live inside of it with the most life? How would we express our deepest self in that circumstance? If the horrors never ended, how would we continue with aliveness, dignity, grace, power?”
In the end, we do not know; maybe an opponent gleefully self-congratulates. That is not our business. Our business is to be an example of Eros in the world. And eventually, it may be the case that we discover something powerful: “bad” never actually wants to win. And it may be that our opponent, outwardly or not, is happy to see there is something on the planet more powerful than force, something that can stand up after the hardest of blows.
Fundamentally, what we are working with is our capacity to be in the free, open state of uncertainty. In actuality, we are living as close to the vein of truth as possible in life. The truth is, we have control over absolutely nothing. Nothing whatsoever. And if we live in Eros, a good mantra when we start to feel controlling is, “and then a meteor could hit.”
Control is not bad because control does not exist. It is the grip of the illusion of control, something so powerfully untrue that we are like the child who keeps opening our hand with the bottle in it, shocked every time that it falls. We have not put together the concept of objects and gravity. The issue with control is that sometimes it seems to work. It has a longer time-domain before it all falls apart, so the illusion can really grab hold of the mind.
In reality, with imposed experiences of uncertainty and insecurity, we can choose to make the very center of uncertainty our position. Again, this is invoking Erotic volition—choosing what is or what we would otherwise deny. When we align with uncertainty in this way, a power comes up from below to support us because we are aligning with life itself.
We do not have to act in accord with the laws of nature. Sometimes it looks as if we have managed to subdue it before the tidal wave comes. But it does not demand that we do. When we do, however, it confers a power of moving with. Moving with or being with uncertainty draws us into this moment, where something miraculous occurs; we experience a distinct sensation of knowing.
We know the only thing we can know, we know this. But this is so rich and full that we are willing to forego the analysis and projections of the future. More will arise to be looked at now, in this moment. Not to control or direct, but to see and open to them as possibilities. People will tell us we need to plan for our future. Eros will tell us we need to be here for it. And the only way we will be here for it then is if we are here for this now.
Those who are situated in this moment, entering the door of uncertainty, know a secret: now gives us all the information that we need about the future, and it is far more effective in that we do not need to get dragged out of the moment, which is the only place to access the wisdom to see it. Because in the true now, time is spherical; past, present, and future happening all at once.
It is only when the mind unwraps itself from the central pole of control that it can spread out enough to perceive and then open. Open with the question “What wants to happen?” Now that we have turned down the clamoring of the catastrophic mind and have drained the charge, we can begin to listen.
We have landed in a new place. That is the nature of a wrecking ball entering; it comes to bring us into a new territory in ourselves. We will not necessarily know what to do, so listening is all the more important. Keep a running tally of the ways it has grown us already. Keep a running tally of the fears that arise, and face them. Keep connection and when we get gripped, pull closer into those connections.
We savor what is here. It may still all be taken away, but that is always the case. The curtain that has kept that fact hidden has just been lifted. We have been given a clear printout of truth in a way we could not have gotten otherwise, and a training ground in which to work with ourselves in a much more effective way—hitting change in one peak that may have previously taken an entire lifetime.
The best part is that we really get to see what we have made of it, and if we really play, if we really give it all we’ve got, we will discover it was more than we could have imagined.
