Published May, 2024
Eros teaches us that there is a vital distinction between telling the truth and being honest. Telling the truth is the letter of the law in a world that lives from the neck up. It is bureaucratic, protocolled, formulaic, and managed.
True honesty is a process. Telling the truth is a concretization of honesty, but when we are honest it is fluid and contradictory, and that is offensive to the truth-telling, fact-based, just-give-it-to-me-straight-without-all-the-paradox-and-contradiction mind.
The greatest impediment to being honest is that we demonize, rather than honor, desire. Desire is a process. It is the energy of the human realm. When we demonize it, we necessarily have to distance ourselves from it, and if we distance ourselves from it, then we are saying a partial truth. We think if we do not admit something, then it is not true.
If we demonize the involuntary—this process orientation to life—then we demonize the body it issues from, which makes the rational mind that much more rigid. Most of us cannot get into agreement with what is happening under the radar, and suddenly, we are exhibiting behaviors or experiencing consequences that seem out of line with the person we have perceived ourselves to be.
Desire is natural law communicating itself to us, and it is quite simple. It is call-and-response between us and our lives, to the extent that it calls and we respond. Our lives incentivize us by conferring a feeling of fulfillment; to the extent we do not, we experience insufficiency.
Being honest about what we want trumps our conception of eternal truths, because the eternal only exists in the now. It is only in listening to this desire that our lives can let themselves be known without having to conform to our ideas.
