(Not Renunciation)
The way the path of Eros works is not by ascending above our lives and avoiding the chaos and snares of our psyches, but by entering and inhabiting the commotion.
Eros is a profoundly experiential path which holds, at its foundation, trust in the resilience and volition of each human being.
This means that “stuck” is not a problem; there is nowhere to get to—no ultimate nirvana where we finally make it to the top of a mountain away from it all.
We love to read the last page and pretend we know what happened, but in doing so, we rob ourselves of the power that comes from having gone through it, and of the compassion and empathy that develops experientially.
If we try to bypass the arduous process of understanding our own inner workings, it’s impossible to know how to convert delusion to wisdom.
Yes, the conditioned world is delusion, but if we are at the mercy of it to the point we must renounce, avoid, and resist, doesn’t it still control us?
And most of all, are we not missing an opportunity to use that delusion as the base metal for the gold of wisdom?
At the same time, it is vital to recognize the power of delusion and to respect it. We cannot afford to get cocky. Just because it is not ultimately true and at some point, we must bow to the deep truth, does not mean delusions cannot have their way with us. Of course, Eros would say that would be fine, too, but we might not be fine with that.
Respect and seeing everything as vital consequence are the weights we can enter with that potentially keep us from being utterly taken over.
We respect our obsession and our fantasy and our jealousy, our big, egoic self-importance and our hunger for money and prestige. Our tendency is to want to diminish, or, in order to save face, to drive the desires underground and pretend we are not motivated by these things.
Respect includes admission. We admit these things are in us. We get to know the size, shape, and intensity of our obsessions. How fervent the sway is when we do not try to counteract it with self-will.
And then we enter.
We enter wanting to know this phenomenon with every cell of our bodies. We enter as if we may spend the rest of our lives there—because we might. It may thrash us about; it may retract from our view. We do what it says. We follow instructions precisely. This is what we do not do most of the time.
But there is a promise:
All things are born from freedom and will lead us there if we let them have us. We have the choice. We can simply be imprisoned by them; we can escape them by never entering for fear of being imprisoned; or we can enter with consciousness and respect and possibly know a life where we can come and go freely in our own reality.