Tolerance can be the deflated version of receiving. The woman who tolerates says, "This is how things are. I can't make a difference and I had best get used to it." And then, with her head down, her nose to the grindstone of righteousness, she makes her way through life. What she lacks in gratification, she tries to make up for in self-congratulatory behavior for being so "open" or accepting.
Eros is not interested in anyone tolerating anything. There is nothing exalted about living in the lowest common denominator of mind. Eros welcomes intense dislike and even disgust. It knows love cannot be welcomed unless hatred is welcomed. Rather than hunker down and make it through this travail that is life, Eros says to take a different approach, to make it a practice to receive this life, take it in and be changed and moved by it. This drawing-in of life can be done actively, not just passively.
The woman with the tolerating mind has little room for reception. She is so consumed with the difficulties and what it takes to make it through them that she can scarcely take the time to open and truly receive what is here. She is starving to see beauty yet keeps her eyes closed.
Tolerance is actually aggressive. She imposes her notion of the way things are on life. When a woman lives in true power, she discovers something radical and powerful—often how she feels about something or someone is how they want her to feel about them. There are actually people and groups that want to be disliked; provocation is a turn-on that gives them energy.
There are people and groups that want to be separate, not connected to other things. They like the feeling of privacy. There are institutions she thinks she really should like but she just doesn't—they rub her the wrong way, and this is actually perfect.
.jpg)
The tolerating woman wants everyone the way the masculine wants the feminine: happy and easy. In contrast, the receptive woman wants everything to be as it is, with all of its bristly characteristics, without having to tone it down or ignore any part of it. She can be ambivalent. She can be disgusted by it and want to know it better at the same time. She can feel rejected by it and want to care for it. She can feel a desire to be separate from it and love it deeply. She wants things to be as they are without forcing and contorting them into a perfect puzzle for her own comfort.
Tolerance is also rooted fundamentally in resentment. Eros would prefer to be hated for what it is rather than merely tolerated, as tolerating is a distancing activity. To tolerate a partner is to hate that partner with an overlay. Eros wants to remove the overlay so there can be engagement instead of the sensory numbing that is necessary in tolerating a person.
Eros also wants women powered and sovereign, and, as such, offers women the power to change their lives. There is never a need to tolerate anything. She does have the option of turning on to it, receiving it, drawing it in. And anything truly received is loved because it becomes part of her. Or, if that looks beyond what she wants to do, she can leave. Leave the bad job or the bad relationship. Tolerating is the poor woman's passion.
There is a huge difference in a woman's life between merely tolerating aging, for example, and receiving it. In reception, each change in her face, her body, her interior experience is so interesting and timely that she does not experience it as loss but benefit. She is prepared for it because she has been there all along. And this next stroke, this next stage, is fascinating new territory. When we receive life, we live life now. Because we live life, there is nothing that is lacking, nothing we missed out on. All that we needed was delivered.