When we recognize the unified nature of all phenomena, we realize there is nothing we are not. Nothing is foreign or other in a state of intimacy.
What may be considered taboo holds within it a nutritive concentration most need but few access. The rejection of its benefit is based not upon truth but superstition. There is a path to unconditional freedom.
On this path, the procedure is to become intimate with all conditions: lust, desire, reverence, the profane, and the profound. To attend to all of it with undivided attention. Life becomes our intimate partner that we come to know by meeting it in all its various displays. This process is a delicate balance between honoring nature’s limits but holding no personal limits regarding what we are willing to explore.
Then we learn how to skillfully administer the medicine, and finally, how to make it available for use. Heat, light, vibration, the swell of yearning, the tension of desire—these become our dowsing rods, leading us back into the center of ourselves from which life itself emanates. The rules for entry to this path are 180 degrees different from what most of us have known. Rather than restrict or renounce, Eros suggests we nourish. Rather than discriminate or extinguish, it suggests we include. Rather than ascend or escape, it suggests we enter or engage.
We aim not for perfect wisdom, for pristine awareness, or absolute enlightenment, although those “states” are welcome. We aim instead to develop the deep listening and acute vision that hears and sees accurately into the heart of all things—not in spite of, but through our difficulties. And not outside of connection to our flawed humanity, but as the result of the skillful and authentic development of it. Each of us desires to experience that we are welcome not because we are good, or work hard, or produce, or have transformed, but that we are welcome—all of us—just as we are right now.
On the path of Eros, we come to discover the secret: Life delivers unkindly, through heartbreak, discomfort, and disaster, and we welcome all of it.
From this welcoming, we understand the principle is as much a description as an instruction: Stay connected no matter what.
