The Eight Stages lead, like doorways, into various manifestations of the whole of consciousness. At any point, we can land in any stage and move backward or forward. We experience the stages in OM and they may reveal themselves as dimensions making up the broader experience of life.
In Eros, an underlying principle is that truth is a throughline of congruence. The abstract and concrete coexist in a mutual system of checks and balances. If an idea cannot be brought down to the physical, or abstracted into the absolute, it’s questionable. This makes our body and mind effectively the laboratory in which all research is carried out. We seek for the throughline and release ideas that pull us off our search, concentrating on the ideas that correlate. Through this process we can tap into universal and unique truths concurrently.
Words refer to something specific. Take, for example, the word “cow.” The actual animal is the referent for the word. Then there are abstractions, ideas that contain the original referent, but with fewer specific details. “Cow” may go into a collection of likenesses such as “livestock,” which can then go to the next collection of likenesses minus certain details, which we call “animals.” These can become “farm assets,” “assets,” and then “wealth.” When we can follow a line all the way down from the high-level abstraction of wealth to the physical reality of a cow, and carry the physical reality up to a high level of abstraction, we call this an Erotic truth.
This kind of truth is dynamic while also reflecting an internal order that can be examined. We understand a dimensional reality, rather than a merely linear one, by seeing the congruence across levels of abstraction. This is how Erotic beings operate. When we mentally walk back through our experience to test for proof, we discover we are not stuck at the ground (or physical) level of reality, unable to abstract into the deeper dimensions of the body. We also do not get stuck in the higher-level abstractions, where our abstractions relate to only other abstractions but are completely disconnected from the physical level.
The Eight Stages fasten our understanding of experience across all the abstractions of life. As we learn to inhabit them, they become further abstracted into healing, connection, liberation, and purpose. Our heart-based, mind-based, and soul-based experiences with family, relationships, and work reveal that they all operate according to the same basic laws, but may play out at different levels.
We may expect, or want, to progress from one stage to the next, moving sequentially from the density of climax into the ever-more subtle aspects of stillness. But life does not work like that. Eros does, however, provide the opportunity to attain equal facility on all levels. It reveals that, while many of us live at levels of greater density, few of us have great facility there.
In Eros, the ascent and descent as well as the travel between the two—the stability, smoothness, and suppleness of the movement— are all of equal importance. We can develop acumen in each of these. Eros aims to have us inhabit the whole of reality equally in all directions, with equal reverence for all its aspects with no presumption that one is more sophisticated or more worthy of our aim.
In the world of Eros, this arrogant perspective is most likely driven by ignorance, by an incapacity to see the interior wisdom of a particular realm. It’s easy to dismiss a realm when we are holding it against the perception that another realm is higher; we assume the higher realm is better—a goal to be attained. The secrets within the lower realm cannot be seen with that particular eye.