Feminine Beauty: Eros and Perception: Part V: Marc Gafni
Feminine Beauty: Eros and Perception: Part VI
My partner, Cary, tells me that in high school, she and her friends always said that one of their favorite things about hanging out with their African-American guy friends was that “they knew how to look at a woman.” Now Cary did not mean that they were ogling or rude, or that they looked at a woman in an inappropriate sexual manner. What she did mean is that she and her friends felt seen and appreciated in a special way with this group. “Not just girls others guys would think were good looking. No, they knew every woman was beautiful and were more than happy to let her, and anyone else around, know it as well.
All this and more is understood by the Maggid later in his life. In a parallel source he makes a religiously radical suggestion. The spiritual initiate should seek out sexual beauty in the market places; Why? In order to practice the cherubic mystery which transposes sexual seeing to the soul’s perception. Sex models Eros. Sexual seeing can either be avoided, neurotically crushed or expanded as a door to the higher seeing of love. In picking which path to walk you must employ common sense. Clearly there are time for avoidance and discipline. Yet in the higher world for which we strive it is only the path of expansion that will lead us back to love.
Alan Bloom in his erudite work on Love and Friendship is correct in critiquing a society that has lost it’s natural Eros. Our inability to distinguish between inappropriate and even abusive looking — on the part of both sexes- cuts us of from a natural and sacred Eros that is one of the essential passages ways to love.
The Babylonian wisdom masters speak of a blessing which one recited upon encountering a beautiful person. And the masters remember to tell us that a beautiful and virtuous person is not determined by the artificial impositions of a penthouse culture; it is as beauty must always be — in the sacred eyes of the beholder.
marc gafni
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