Marc Gafni – The First face of Eros: On the Inside

The Interior Castle

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The cherubs in the magical mystery of Temple myth were not stationary fixtures. No, these statues were expressive, emotive. They moved. When integrity and goodness ruled the land the cherubs were face to face. In these times the focal point of Shechina energy rested erotically, ecstatically, between the cherubs. When discord and evil held sway in the kingdom the cherubs turned from each other, appearing back to back instead of face to face. Back to back, the world was amiss, alienated, ruptured. Face to face, the world was harmonized, hopeful, embraced. Thus, face to face in biblical myth text is the most highly desirable state. It is the gem stone state of being, the jeweled summit of all creation. Face to face, to be fully explicit, is a state of eros.
As we shall see, face to face means first and foremost, being on the inside. Indeed the God force said to rest between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies, the Shechina, is no less than the radically profound experience of being on the inside. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination.
Being on the inside is of course not about a geographical place, but about a soul terrain, a place inside ourselves. Socrates writes at the end of the Phaedro, “Beloved Pan and all ye other Gods that haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.”
For the Temple mystics, exile is when one’s inside and outside are not connected in the day to day of living. Or, said differently, exile is non-erotic living. The first, although by no means the only, problem with exile is that it is extraordinarily difficult. When I am not living from the inside, I am not living naturally. My choices, reactions and responses do not emerge spontaneously from what Teresa of Avila called one’s “interior castle”. I am not in the flow of my own life.
Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore writes, “Where is the fountain that throws out these flowers in such a ceaseless flow of ecstasy?” Eros is to be in the flow of the fountain, what the Zohar calls in one of its evocative mantras, “The River of Light that flows from Eden.”

Marc Gafni
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