The more parts of yourself you can bring into your relationship the more you will be able to feel that you can be open, love and commit, and the less you will feel that the excluded parts of yourself need to be searched for somewhere outside.
Category: Man & Woman
Wandering Thought # 131
In the age of feminism it almost instills in us a sense of guilt to say that a woman is feminine and beautiful.
Wandering Thought # 116
Loving each other meant transforming into the best versions of ourselves we could ever be; it meant finding, through each other, the secret source of joy in our own hearts; it meant opening up and flowing, but also being contained and cradled; it meant traveling away and going, but always connected by a hidden thread, and always under a watchful and caring eye. Love is being in becoming, always from the central place in our own hearts.
Wandering Thought # 93
Wandering Thought # 77
Behind its attempts to charm you insecure love wants to make you dependent on it, it scratches its insecurity by secluding you from the world and possessing you ever more deeply, it shatters your trust in yourself that you may trust it all the more, and exclusively. Insecure love doesn’t see you for yourself and doesn’t desire to gain a deep knowledge of you, it merely sees you as a projection of its own desires and needs, fantasies. Insecure love requires a symbiotic and fusional mode of attachment, but given its unstable core, it will never achieve emotional clarity and openness, it will always desire the other as a way to hide that inside itself it has a child trembling in the dark.
Wandering Thought # 73
One of the greatest taboos of modern feminism is on beauty; that a woman is beautiful, that a woman is perceived by a man as beautiful — modern feminism wants equality here, and by equality is meant sameness, and the infliction of guilt into the soul of the one who perceives beauty.
Wandering Thought # 67
A man is as strong as he is able to live the moment without being divided in his heart, soul, and mind; the stronger man is completely present and focused, rooted in the openness of the moment, in each breath penetrating with fullness the divine glow of the feminine that surrounds him at all times.
Wandering Thought # 66
Not the man who calls her beautiful, but the man who makes her feel beautiful, is the one a woman desires.
Wandering Thought # 64
The most deeply damaging thing one might come out with after reading authors such as Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade, is the idea that sexual impulses cannot be controlled, and that we are fated to live in a universe where we either suppress them and become ascetic and puritan morally or where we give them their sway and playful ground thus becoming libertines, and modern. The idea of “control,” which is different from suppression, does not enter the minds of both authors, and why? — because they themselves are the offshoot and a reaction to the morality of suppression, because the ascetic and the liberal are ultimately two sides of the same coin, mirroring each other. Sexuality suppressed kinks the heart, which is why the sexual forms prevalent in the imaginations of both men as seen through their writings is so tainted with darkness; it detaches itself from one’s emotional centers and becomes something cold and almost mechanical. Sexuality cannot be suppressed, but its discharge can be controlled, its form and quality can be given a different shape, and can be branched in one’s heart becoming an expression of one’s emotions and sensuality. Only control can pave the way to a sexuality of ecstasy, of which the former types haven’t got the slightest hint.
Wandering Thought # 62
The nice guy, so desperate to give, chases all the women away. His giving, in fact, is a weakness and a selfishness — through it he seeks to validate himself. But the validation will not come to him who is weak in his heart. And the less the validation comes the more neurotic the need to give becomes. His giving seeks to manipulate the woman into giving him back the validation he seeks. But no woman will have this because he is not a man who can stand on his own. The nice guy, however, should not revert back to the bad boy type, so craved by the feminine; he must reach into his instinct and come to his strength through his weakness. He ought to become himself, create his boundaries, and become able to stand on his own.
Wandering Thought # 47
Whatever men insisted women should be or are feminism insisted that women should be its opposite, or that the power relation should be inverted so as women gain the upper hand — this reactive stance as much as it is lauded and needed (we’ve been waiting for it for millennia) will not take us beyond the dynamics of the power relation, the dreadful either/or so entrenched in the breast of culture and the shaping of men and women. This reaction should, instead, grasp itself differently, channel its energy differently — rather than being a reaction it should affirm itself, it should be an affirmation and an affirmative act — women are women irrespective of men and the will and desires of men; woman is woman not as an act that is directed against men, but as an affirmative act of herself and her own being, her own life, aspirations, and embodiment in the world — a creative act and a first act. That is essential, since only this will suspend the opposition struggle of men and women and allow each to find itself entrenched in the other — the woman in man, and the man in woman, and their struggle together in the creation of a new culture that goes beyond the limitations of the old. This will truly be the blow that dismantles the gender dynamics that have governed culture since millennia, giving men and women the space needed to discover themselves and each other anew and in a new light. The relation no longer power-centered, its destructive edge will be replaced by a more supportive and mutually understanding spirit that refuses to slide back into the old modes of relating even when conflicts and tensions arise. What will it look like, this culture? What will its men and women be? — it and they are flourishing right under our eyes, they are coming and will come at a quicker pace in the coming decades. The love-flower that daring spirits dreamed a thousand years ago — we are the witnesses of its coming of age.
Wandering Thought # 45
A man who can only love or hate a woman, or a certain kind of woman, suffers an impotence of will. What leads him to her and what in her cripples him is a certain lack in his emotional and sexual life. His maturity is the maturity of his will, his ability to choose, and be aware of the moment where his choice is made, and his will to go one way or another activated.
Wandering Thought # 43
The sorrow, greatness, and foolishness of the poet — the compulsion of his instinct that wills him to unify the poetic and the amorous acts; intimately, poetically, amorously, he is dumb otherwise.
Wandering Thought # 42
The power play in sex is one of the most difficult things I had to come to term with. This being said, to make a fetish of the power play, to make it the focal point of the relationship is to miss out on the spiritually interpenetrating aspects that truly form the throbbing core of why two people are together, and what makes them expand and grow together into that which is held above them. The power play is a form of expression, this character or that being suited to this spectrum or that, this essence or that. On its own it does not supersede or form the essence and budding center of the connectivity.
Wandering Thought #40
After reaching his peak in orgasm a man will feel either one of two things: he will be repulsed by himself, the world, and his lover (in case he wasn’t alone), he will feel himself withdrawing from what he just experienced and by effect withdrawing from his world and lover and will hate himself and the world for it. This, by far, is the most widespread reaction, and this reaction is usually kept at bay and hidden, rationalized and left without recognition as men waft themselves out of the moment in one way or another. The other reaction which is much rarer is one where a man will feel at rest and at ease in himself, in his partner, in the world and in what just happened. He will feel that he actually gave something, that something rose out of his soul and flowed outward unifying him in the most ecstatic and happy way with his lover and world. He will feel an openness in his soul. Alas, so much, oh so much is required of us men in order to be able to hold ourselves and arrive at this moment.
The Agony for Beauty in a Poet’s Soul
To affirm beauty is to set a standard that, at the same time, affirms ugliness. To say that this woman is beautiful or desirable is to say that another, that that one is not. This “blatant injustice” that scratches our human dignity has been and to a great extent one of the prime movers of the drive towards equality. But what did then equality do?—it said that beauty, being culpable, is therefore none-existent and that all women, being human, are equal, the same. Although one cannot but bow to the nobility of this drive and aim, one cannot also suppress one’s drive for beauty and desire for long — one’s drive and desire for inequality — without turning hypocrite himself, plagued with a sort of resentment that turns the world ugly. One feels that this drive to equality acted as a channel for resentful and latent forces within society and the human soul — the resentful forces were there waiting for this opportunity or that to be allowed discharge. Of course, our eye should be subtle enough to disengage equality itself from this clumsy way to translate it into society and human consciousness, into the way the self relates to itself and others. Equality itself is blessed, and is something we waited for for millennia. By affirming equality in such a way a great favour is done to its enemies (and these affirmers of equality themselves are often deeply reactive souls who, in different circumstances, will turn fascists in the blink of an eye). The injustice of setting standards and affirming beauty as a way to channel one’s desires and energies needs not impinge our moral and humane sensibilities. The notion of difference together with the hierarchy it raises is not necessarily one that dehumanises that from which it is different. One can still relate humanely and deeply to all while affirming the difference of one’s taste and predilections. That we might have erred so far from this rather simple realisation and crystallisation of the drive for equality can only be due to the fact that there are other reactive forces at work in the strata of our soul, forces that, feeling the break with the old morality and mode of living, took to the front of the stage and made us suffer and struggle. This suffering and struggling are the throes of birth of the new human being that has come, that is coming. Do you have eyes and souls refined enough to see him/her?
On Men’s Polygamous Need
Men’s inability to devote themselves to a single woman and their insistence on a continuously varying excitement is telling in one fundamental way — they have failed in unifying their energies which peak in reason and love. Hence, the need which drives them like a moth to a flame to viewing women as sexual objects that are to be pursued in such a manner is a result of a fragmented and diffuse psyche and energetic flow that are in constant need to discharge in order to maintain their modicum of inferior dis-unity, a way of achieving a certain harmony in the internal economy of the being that enables it to thrive and struggle through life. The sexual act impoverishes them since it is not the crowning point of their energetic alchemy but is a tension suffered by a diffuse and disorganized creature, one that is bored and does not know what to do with itself; the climax is not followed by joy and a certain sense of hilarity and lightness but is experienced with a foretaste of sadness and depression, self-hate and a hate of the “object” used. A man’s inability to unify and peak his energies is consequential in another fundamental manner — he is unable to penetrate and engage his woman emotionally and intellectually; he thus fails to unify himself in her, through her, and through her with all of life. His life is lacking, as he remains motivated by a lack instead of an overfullness and abundance. He needs, and is driven like a slave to his fateful end.
The way into the arms of grace Rumi points at in his verse, “The kernel of true manhood is the ability to abandon sensual indulgence.” Rumi, in his simple manner, wants to nudge the will, not to repress but to attain control and mastery. Being in control means precisely being in unity; a critical edge where the impulses and faculties of the being are brought into harmony, are willed into harmony.
And a tantric verse, to echo Rumi’s, “One who, possessing desire, represses desire, is a living lie.”
Libertinism (polygamy) and its apparent opposite, asceticism’s abstinence, both have repression at their roots — a diffuse being struggling to maintain itself.
Wandering Thought # 26
The circle is vicious when, in the relationship between man and woman, the focal point remains power—the dominance and submission of one side or the other. Feminism drew on patriarchal energy when, in a shoot for equality, it asserted women’s right to power too, to dominance. The paradigm shift happens with the shift in the focal point—not power, but a form of relatedness centered along spiritual and soulful lines. The turn out is that dominance and submission lose their holds as needs and outlooks upon the spirit in whom the shift takes place. Here are the all too tender beginnings of love. Ludicrous, when you come to think of it, the things we have to overcome in order to reach the threshold where love on intrapersonal and societal lines becomes a possibility.
Wandering Thought # 14
The deepest and most needful change that my spirit underwent in relation to women is this: that I am repulsed by certain women whose bodies are “picture-perfect,” that I find them unappealing, even ugly, and that I am attracted by certain other women whose bodies leave “something to be desired,” that I find them beautiful and appealing. Appealing is no longer figure-fixated, but soul and heart motivated. Fulfilment is soulful and not just physical. Soul permeates the body, and this is now what my eye is becoming more and more able to see and appreciate. In other words, I am now confident and mature enough to view women as human beings instead of mere objects of my desire. This is, by far, most essential for a boy to develop into manhood, and one of the deepest cultural and educational distortions that I’ve overcome.
Dominance & Ecstasy
There is a fundamental difference between a sexuality of dominance and one of ecstasy; only in the latter are complementarity, interdependence, and true spiritual union made reality. Only in the latter are the lovers interfused into one. The main difference lies here: whereas one seeks only sexual gratification, pleasure, and control, the other is primarily a spiritual quest that uses interpenetration as means to open up and blend the deepest recesses of being and soul — culminating in an ecstasy that sends the body hurling towards the sky.
Rooted in Love 