In Eros we are liberated from the mindset that would tell us there is somewhere we need to get to and we should hurry there. We call this climax consciousness. This consciousness ultimately robs us of all experience. Since we lack experience, we have no gravity or ability to remain where we are.
Eros views both the procedures and outcomes of life as the reward. If we love what is, there is no reason to escape. So there is no "ultimate" or "there" to arrive at. This is why we can afford to learn the art of Samsara; Eros says, "Not only should we not avoid it, we should actually craft our lives inside of it."
Eros tells us how to know precisely where to enter to find the best materials and resources for crafting our life, the areas that are the richest with information on the workings of the mind. We look for the forbidden, the unexamined "ifs" and "thens," the places humans tend to get stuck, lost, confounded, or tortured. We look for every arena people spend their lives trying to escape.
Eros tells us to go there and offer ourselves so we may know all of it—the inevitability of the consumer, the special relationships, the opportunist, the challenging friend. We go precisely because we know. We get inside of it, and let it show us the way those behaviors work, how they lock into place according to preexisting programs in our own mind.
We learn from the inside how to dismantle the programs, what the gift is, and how to later include it in our repertoire. Most importantly, we enjoy some of the best experiences life has to offer. Eventually, having gone through these experiences, we go through a phase transition that carries us into the bread-and-butter relationship of a true friend.
From that place, should we choose to remain on the path, we wholeheartedly and in full-bodied style—without reservation—engage with others who are inside of the various programs and places we just went through. Now, when the experience peaks, we will share with our friends how to get out of the hole.
A true friend is someone who has gone through and exited the various experiences with the lessons intact, and is willing to share this with others. A true friend will often look like anything but, because right at the point where the climax impulse has been activated in one of the programs, right when we would scratch that itch, but immediately after we've gotten the drop, they'll pull us out. True friends are a valuable asset on the path.
