The path of Eros can be confounding because it asks us to enter the profane areas of life with zero avoidance. Sex, money, and power being our three biggest torments, Eros wants us to drive straight into the center of these areas as they are most rife with delusion and difficulty. We would rather avoid them altogether for fear of being swept away. Eros offers no room for negotiation.
Spiritually, we cannot avoid them just because they create such a high degree of sensation in our bodies that we tend to go unconscious and get swept up in delusion.
We must develop a level of consciousness that can meet—even on their terms—the various mechanisms that make up the operating systems of the things that torment us. We meet them on their terms in order to know how to work with them instead of being worked by them. From consciousness, we develop the process;
This capacity is what gives us facility in every aspect of the mind so we can move around freely inside of the torment, avoiding nothing.
There is so much stigma and imputation piled onto these very human domains that we often want to avoid them. We don’t want to face the fact that self-esteem is so deeply tied to having skill in these areas. It bothers us how few people have ever mastered them, and even fewer while keeping a spiritual connection intact. These domains are marked by unique difficulties. We feel we are supposed to be naturally skillful with the profane, yet few people are.
they make us crave and chase them without ever getting satisfaction. Even at the height of confidence, we rarely reach art and éclat instead of simply pleasure. These domains hold the collective pain and trauma of all the people who entered without full consciousness, and in fact have used them as ways to check out of consciousness. These associations may create avoidance of these areas altogether, conflating how most people act in them with the domains themselves.
The fact that people suffer greed and abuse in these areas has nothing to do with anything inherent to the subject. It has to do with our abuse and misuse of them as a place to check out of our lives rather than understand them more deeply.
What we miss is the inherent call of the area to develop more consciousness in order to meet it.
Eros is not interested in the object of focus, but with our relationship with it.
On the path of Eros, we come to see that everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about where it takes us—a reality without filters, experiencing things just as they are. Everything is about money, except money; money is about an exchange that recognizes interconnection. Everything is about power except power; real power is about the capacity to be moved.
And yet, we must know the delusion to see the truth. It is through fully entering each domain that we uncover the aim that lies behind all Erotic endeavors: to undo itself. This can only happen when we enter with full engagement. We cannot skip to the end, nor stay in the story of it. At the end of the journey—the journey of developing self and gathering all we will need in our new destination of truth—we exit the vehicle that brought us there. We see the bait and switch:
The truth of all things becomes injected with reverence, so much so they are scarcely recognizable as the versions we once knew and now see were composed almost entirely of filters and falsehoods. Ironically, the same twist on perspective happens to what was considered profound: It is no longer precious, unattainable, or the domain of the select few. It is no longer seen as the ultimate and superior destination or refuge. It gets made right-sized and becomes integrated into our lives, just as they are.
