The masculine, duty-based mind has the notion it is in charge and believes that not only it can, but it must monitor and manage consumption. This mind knows that overconsumption causes pain and discomfort, so it issues an order to not overly consume as a rational means of avoiding pain.
Because the rational mind wants to maintain dominion at all costs and does not want to face the consequences of gluttony—pain, humiliation, loss—it employs the faculty that consumes in the effort of control and constriction.
Eros wants more for us. Eros wants the rational mind so worked out that it can finally rest and let go. It wants us to know the fluid desires of our system—not in theory but in practice, not in black and white but on a spectrum.
Eros wants to take our internal system out of the hands of an external order and allow for self-organization to run the whole rather than the singular do or do-not doctrine of the rational mind. Eros knows that if we are in our bodies, these instructions are unnecessary and outmoded. When we can feel what full feels like, we do not need to issue a command to not take another bite. When we feel the consequence of pain from hitting the side rail when we go out too far, we know for ourselves.
The pain the rational mind is trying to save us from is the pain that could save us from the constant management of the rational mind. Gluttony will put us on the path to Erotic adulthood—because true gluttony is a teacher. We learn our limits. We move the disciplinarian into the body that knows and has power and out of the mind that guesses and contracts.
The only power the rational mind can employ is a greater rejection of life, a decrease of stimuli, and retreat—or else it faces temptation and is dragged out by addiction and craving. Choice is removed from the larger self in either scenario.
What Eros suggests is that feeling is the missing mediating force. There is a fallacy of insatiability that comes from the savior rational mind that prevents people from discovering their resilience. It never gives itself over enough to be changed, to be brought fully to the shore in the way that can only happen when we get worked out by gluttony and excess. The issue is not that we want too much, it is that we don't want enough to take ourselves over into freedom.
This is a dive-in-and-learn-to-swim path. Some will drown. Some will tap into a source that cannot be found before the edge. This is a reality the helicopter parent of the rational mind wants to keep us from at all costs. And perhaps wisely so. The only issue is that we will spend the rest of our lives in rank and file, instead of living.
Eros-approved gluttony, however, has much power. To access this power, we allow gluttony to run through us. If our life is a faucet and there is rust in it, the rational mind would simply not turn on the faucet and thereby avoid facing the rust. But, when we do this, we wind up living a brittle, dry life.
Eros, on the other hand, turns the faucet on and lets gluttony run through until it's clear. The power here is that we live in a place of true optionality, neutrality, and openness. There is no avoidance or rejection of anything. No management is required. The buildup of craving runs itself through.
The process, though, is not pretty. Eros disciplines with pain. But, pain has the capacity to make us an Erotic adult. Real pain, experienced pain—the pain that drives us into a source inside ourselves that we never would have found if we were able to withdraw from the experience—the rational mind wants to protect us from this.
It talks about pain a lot. It points to its pain, yet will never let itself go to the depths of pain that lead to breakthrough. It is always in pain precisely because it will not give itself to pain. If it gave up the fight, it would float, but because it keeps trying to swim away, it perpetually feels like it is drowning.
Fundamentally, the lack of trust in what lies below—in the feminine and Eros—is why the rational mind can never sink down to the place where it can release its control, be cleansed of ideas, then be lifted back up, finally knowing for itself. It so wants to dominate that it will not let Eros take what no longer serves and keep what does in an organic, natural way.
It just pushes everything away or grabs for everything, having no sensory idea of what actually serves. It is like giving the digestive process over to the mind rather than the body.
The rational mind is self-reinforcing, always in the pain of not having what it needs. Control is just gluttony inside out and instructs us on neither the specific experiences nor the quantity necessary to keep us strong and balanced. Both are blanket statements about consumption. Control looks good and spends a lifetime efforting to maintain that position. Gluttony looks terrible, but there is actually still hope.
There is hope that with gluttony, we can pick up enough weight that it will be like a ballast pulling us down, down into the body and into Eros where we can be cleansed, informed, and buoyed back up with real humility, real information about our limits, and real letting go.
Down here is where the relationship with the feminine is reconciled. If we have not known a gluttony that brings us to our knees, again and again, we have not been brought down to the feminine. If we have not been brought down into the feminine, we do not understand who she is and what she can do.
We can spend the rest of our lives fairly sure of the rationally managed results we will get—primarily an underlying sense of discomfort but never too bad, or too good. Never too anything. Never touching bottom and bouncing back up, with new resilience and capacity.
The capacity we are developing is the capacity to be taken, to be possessed by greatness, and we cannot get there while the brakes are on even a little. We cannot get there when we don't know who we are and what our edges are. And we cannot get there until we know firsthand the experience of what happens at the bottom, and recognize it is not something to be avoided; it is to be sought.
But to be clear, the consequences are great with the potential for much to be lost. Eros disciplines without holding back. This is how we can know in a most incontrovertible way.
Until we are fluent in the bottom, the most we can hope to achieve is a greatness that requires constant input of effort and never allows us to have free attention. We remain as the type of person who still believes there are distractions, who cannot afford to have our attention consumed, who travels the surface layers of experience in most of our life, driving for efficiency. We can only take so much in.
We either reserve the depths for one or two people, or we desperately cling to and demand to live in a perpetual state of environmental control. Everyone and everything must comply with our need to stay with our limited capacity of being in our depth with heightened stimuli. Without the feminine, our peace is held together by blocking out most of the world.
With the feminine, it is as if we are immersed at all times in deep waters, wherever we are. Anyone can do anything without our peace being disturbed. We can allow the world to be the world and appreciate it and participate in it without fear of loss.
Eventually, we have a mind without limits and a mind that self-manages. It is put in the hands of something deeper. This mind can penetrate reality in untold ways. If we are very successful, we have a mind that is located in a body that has fully incarnated down to earth, wealthy in the capacity to give ourselves fully to everything and everyone that is right here right now with no holdouts.