It’s not about Sex

You wouldn’t think so. Yet sex is addictive – I don’t mean the tiger Woods kind of addiction.

I mean the illusion – seeking something better of hoping you will be found in another.

We feel the intensity. We know the instinct attention that those three letters grab and sadly forget that after the initial hormonal rush we are seeking far more and yearning greater horizons.

Growth comes from bridging ever expanding circles, said Emerson in Essays of Circles. In love,  like creativity, takes us across concentric circles in two directions simultaneously.

You are intrigued by the person because they remind you of a forgotten shadow of yourself. You are empowered to reach out, precisely because you have something you can hold onto within.

Unfortunately, as a mirror to our soul, those dearest to us,  have a nasty habit of triggering hidden demons.

This is at once creative and repressive, scary and inspiring. It is transformative; and  like any transformation experience it can be a frightening experience.

To find its transmuting power we must be cavers of the soul, seeking Paleolithic art buried hidden in cavernous tunnels. The passages seem endless, unable to be grasped, deep in the earth like the womb of the divine mother.

It seems in this confined finite space there is infinitude of experience.

Alluding to Jungian imagery, Anton Ehrenzweig compared it to the womb.

A fair analogy: Ideas are like semen. Without fertilizing an ovum they die out. The seed must grow, simmering in the hidden depths refined and eventually revealed.

Gestation is a time of massive upheaval and growth yet this pre-birth experience is so much like the birth of an idea. Fueled by experience, necessity is often the mother of invention. Of course, necessity focuses our energies.

However, the creative juice lay’s deep in an eternal uterus of past meanings and biological compulsions. Motherhood is at once biological, and experiential. Emotions are fueled both by raging hormones, others the product of life’s ups and downs, a beautiful melody or a spousal argument.

Like the Hindu divinity Kali, mothers are seen as elevated extremes of life. She can be an angel incarnate: supportive, kind, cheerful, good cook, neat dresser, humble, sweet, and nurturing at all times.

She is at times demonized as the “hungry sow who devours her young,” at once the image of the “terrible mother,” who gives life and destroys it.  She is connected with the cycles of the moon, women’s menstruation, the cycles of nature that can be at once creation and destruction, light and dark.

While, I am not Hindu, I think the metaphor of Kali powerfully captures the forces hidden deep within the creative soul. We all are creative, it’s just some capture that essence, and women embody it.

Such powerful earthy psychological forces can frighten us and in the past have men have harshly judged the ‘neuroses’ of women. Or  fearfully harangued as by Mecutio in Shakespeares Queen Mab speech.

However, when these powerful forces are accepted, and integrated, they can be powerfully inspiring and transformative.

Building stand high because they have harnessed buried energies of a deep, unseen foundation. Sadly, we often ignore what we don’t see –until we start to design a structure for ourselves. Our ideas lay dormant, unfertiliised by the gestation of experience, and die out.

There is direction,  of course – you know a baby is coming you prepare with focused anticipation. However, the creative foundation lays in the unconscious waiting to be harnessed, like a buildings foundation unseen and often forgotten, it is still there.

Similarly, our lives are built on foundations that include the stories and metaphors of generations that came before us. The power of religion and art allows us to access the unknown through metaphor.

Hidden beneath our public success are hidden pasts. stories, and meaning fed to us by culture and experience, religion and rationalism.

The effect is far deeper than existential mumbo jumbo

Clifford Geertz in Interpretation of Cultures decribed mankind as “incomplete or unfinished animals who complete themselves through culture.”

“Our central nervous system – and most importantly its crowning curse and glory, the neo-cortex – grew up in great part with culture” he said, explaining that the neo-cortex ““is incapable of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant  symbol.”

This is why women’s influence is so powerful – and at once frightening to some men who feel shunted to the sidelines of their children’s lives.

Women have leaned the power of being. However, like Kali, that means enduring the rollercoaster of experience. Unlike a man, a woman cannot compartmentalize motherhood.

The child is both in her and part of her. Even as a newborn grows into adulthood there remains a connection.

She knows that happiness, romance and love – true love – means connecting. It means giving your all for your child.

Yet, there is something messy about motherhood. Nappies, cleaning and, even before that, the profound changes of pregnancy.

Motherhood  is frightening. You are expected to be the calm embodiment of perfection. At once you yearn for the poetry of courtly love of chivalrous knights, or the poetic embellishments of Shakespeare.

No women can manage the romantic delusions and get on with life. The huge emotional; investment tears at the soul and sometimes weighs heavily on child and spouse.

No wonder, Kali’s metaphor is so powerful an expression of the grief, anger, fear, despair that can over shadow womankind. She can embody so much beauty or be destructively dark.

However, metaphoric death need not be so final. A child dies to her naivety as she is forced to fit a role, no doubt driven by mother, to fill.

Death to the past is like the corn seed scattered in death and resurrected as Osiris or Bacchus. Cast into the primordial ocean of a creative womb the new birth is both painful and rewarding – unless we abort the process of self transformation.

Here is where masculine and feminine energies must meet, not just in a union of passionate souls, but also in the process of selection.

It is like a gardener who realizes she must prune off dead wood and at times remove whole plants so that the hardier shrub has room to grow.

But then motherhood, like gardening, is holistic.

You stay part of this connection because you and your child are connected – even after decades.

What women know instinctively, or at least learn, men must learn through trial and error.

He soon learns that his trendy, zippy hatch back may be a chic magnet but he finds he is among strangers who one admired the same, now faded chariot.

A few scratches, the novelty gone, and one day he discovers that true love, and true happiness, means looking at your life-long lover and being willing to put your life on the line for her.

It’s not about scattered parts of the soul – each demanding supremacy, each afraid of being caught out.

A scattered mind, and a scattered love, cannot really care. Below the romantic façade, scattered unrealized shadows cannot truly connect.

When the façade is penetrated, our truth discovered, it’s no longer about me. Then you have the capacity for honesty, decency, consistency, and personal leadership.

You realize, finally, that you are indeed one, that beyond the limits of flesh and bone, we are, through our mirror neurons a greater collective whole bound in your soul mate.

When  you find the hidden Paleolithic art deep in your psychic cave, is revealed to the light, your fragmented psyche is made whole once more. Now whole you become able to give more to your soul mate that

The power of love is made whole, not by isolated analysis or fleeting passion, but by connection.