One of the greatest challenges we face when we finally arrive in the body is feeling we are undeserving. Upon reflection, it’s not hard to see why.
We have treated it as a nuisance. We sensed, accurately, that surrender to the body would tear us from our daily toil and eternal earning mentality. But to stop compensating life for our existence? We certainly did not want to feel we owed a sense of gratitude, as we haven’t felt our life belonged to us in the first place.
And yet, we are suddenly faced with a truth: We have been given a gift we can never repay. With rotting coffers, we have demanded more when we scarcely knew what to do with what we had. We can suddenly see ourselves with our concealed abundance, shivering in desperation, starving, and demanding more. We look ridiculous. And then Eros, recognizing we have no idea what we are doing, wants to offer us even more. It brings us benevolent aid in the form of guides and companions who view us entirely without judgment and who, having been in our shoes, can relate to us and have a strange surplus of compassion—a compassion that makes our already bloated consciousness gag at the thought of receiving it.
Recoiling in shame, our consciousness wants to strip down, deprive, restrict, and self-punish until it empties out completely. And if that worked to restore us, Eros would be all for it. Unfortunately, it just swings the pendulum of stuffed and starving back in the opposite direction.
We need what this aid has to offer and we must humble ourselves to receive it. But in order to do so, we must open in reception—and it won’t be reception on our terms.
Having survived on its own recirculated fluids, our psyche is starved of the real nutrients it needs. The tumescent mind bucks at the notion, believing itself to be self-sufficient. The tumescent mind does not like to need anything from anybody and it is already smarting. It also resents the realization that it cannot outsmart the laws of nature by trying to somehow reimburse rather than receive abundance.
We find ourselves in a moment of true humility: We are struck with the recognition that we can truly never pay back what we have been given and thus may as well spend our lives offering what we have—not from indebtedness or shame, but from this humility and this humility alone. And while the mind will likely ruminate on what it has been given, without the intoxicant of greed demanding more to anesthetize it, it will have to feel what it has avoided for so long: that life is good and that it has been good to us—abundant and rich.
But this new openness arrives with its own warning label—it can be where the mind blows a fuse with the current of so much good flowing through it. Most people cannot handle this much wattage and
It can be hard to handle the staggering beauty, the truth of all that has been given.
So, when Eros starts to flow through, we can overwhelm our still-acclimating selves and “blow out on the good.” When this happens, we are in trouble. With the lights out, the tumescent mind resumes its dominion and we can begin to manufacture a whole host of negative reasons to explain what happened. After all, the tumescent mind is an evidence-manufacturing machine. When it’s operating, we are too prideful to admit that we simply could not handle the good, that we did not feel like we deserved it, and more importantly, that
Both worlds require work; the difference is that the tumescent mind keeps us working to keep working whereas the Erotic mind has us work toward our own evolution. And yet, many will crawl back into the cage of self-sufficiency and familiarity where the work never ends in order to avoid facing the overwhelming generosity that Eros is, a generosity that would bring us to our knees—not in prayer or supplication, but in awe and gratitude. No matter which we choose, we are chained: in one, to the chain gang; in the other, to the great chain of being.
