The Choice

 

So why would I choose my experience of love over my experience of Jhana, or vice versa?

I think I have to accept that they are both incredibly powerful experiences and neither one is really better than the other. A nun once said on a TV program that had she known how powerful sexual love was (i.e. love for someone of a different sex) she would never have become a nun! The wise chose “peace over pleasure” – or so the Chinese proverb goes – and this I know is true, but to actually take the long view is incredibly hard. What spurs me on is that sexual love is fraught with difficulty, imperfection and compromise – none of these ailments afflict True Spiritual Love which is infinite, unconditional, eternal and perfect.

So why do I come to think of sexual love so much after a decision to embark again on spiritual awareness? I think this is the sticking ground that has swallowed me up before. The first level of energy I now know is associated with the basal chakra and energy at first awakens this – our thoughts turns to sexual love. But, as I have discovered not all beings are so spiritually long sighted and sexual love is often trivial, carnal and basic suffering as I have found from all the imperfections of mortal existence – heart break, disappointment, loss and death.

There is only one real choice in Life. It is the choice we are offered in retreats at my last temple: our attainments can either be for the improvement of this life or may they be for the journey to realisation and liberation. The short sighted seek to improve their current lot: the feelings of their senses and the feelings of their heart. But in time we come realise that this is only building sandcastles on a beach at low tide: and while they will be splendid and afford us moments of intense joy they will be tainted by a short life. Maybe this only heightens the pleasure to be had that it is made special by its fleeting existence: but such tastes of heaven only make us want the real thing more. I don’t care what umpteen million teachers say – to have tasted the pleasures of the mortal world is to have sold ones soul to death. They say that we can both taste these pleasures and then like a bee leave the flowers behind – but I don’t see how this is really possible. To taste is to love, is to need, is to miss, is to suffer. That which we do not desire we cannot enjoy (is this sense). Passion (as in Christ’s passion) is suffering: our soul is tortured on the rack of desire for without this what real pleasure actually lies in gaining the objects of our desire. Suffering cleanses the soul and punishes us for our foolish yearning and from this we can either learn to compromise with Life and its imperfect cruel allocation of resources or we can learn to be free.

I realised yesterday that want I seek most deeply is love. Yet I know that if I take the bait again I will be hooked on a line which leads to all the things that I detest: bound to worldly capital; the weight and confines of property, money, responsibility around my neck: and within this the limits of a single mortal carnal knowledge. How insulting to the spirit is this existence! really!

So the choice is to take the spiritual path (either alone or with a partner or with friends) and seek once again to raise my energy above the level of the worldly, carnal and mortal.