Okay: “Here’s lookin at you babe”: Eros and Perception: Feminine Beauty: Part 1: Marc Gafni

installation one in a series of blogs:

No sooner met but they look’d;
no sooner look’d but they lov’d;
no sooner lov’d but they sigh’d;
no sooner sigh’d but they ask’d one another the reason;
no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy.
– Shakespeare, “As You Like It” 5.2.33

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
-Thoreau, Journal, 1839

Good morning everyone. After that brief divergence over shabbot for the three life after death postings, we are back on course with our major topic. Eros.

So here is a recapitulation in a moment of where we are at this moment on our journey. The Journey we began in these blogs almost four months ago.

Sex is our teacher. Not our slave driver. Our spiritual master. Not our slave master. The sexual its best models the erotic. Its best may include variables like who and when and, to a far lesser extent, what and how. Even at its best, though, the sexual in no way even begins to exhaust the erotic.

Eros is the invitation to be a lover: to be a great lover in every fiber of your being in every facet of your life. To be erotically engaged is to be holy, to be on the inside. To experience the yearning force of being — the intense desire that connects us with our aliveness. It is to feel the fullness of being totally present, and the radical interconnectivity of the entire web of life. ‘Okay,’ you say, ‘I sort of get that. I need to hear more it definitely resonates. How do I go the next step? I want to live erotically. I want to be a lover. So what are the specific qualities of the erotic, of being a lover, that the sexual models. Bring it down for me and make it real in my journey. How do I become a great lover in every dimension of my life?’

What we have seen so far is that sex models four major faces of Eros.

living on the inside – interiority
fullness of presence
participating in the yearning force of being
realizing the interconnectivity of the all with the all or said simply- wholeness

each of these faces modeled in the sexual must be realized in all the facets of our non sexual lives; that is what it means to live erotically,

At this point we begin to extend our conversation and we will now turn to look at the other central paths in which the sexual models the erotic. This is the path of the lover.

The first path begins tonight in the next blog post. And what a journey we are in for…

wow…let it be in with pure intention and with the realization that all are words when spoken truly are – in the language of the talmud- “words of the living God”.

with love
marc gafni