Having experienced a number of intense states that felt at the time like "love", some part of me knows not to believe the romantic stories the mind creates. And yet these unconscious forces are too powerful to simply devalue or ignore; to do so invites great calamity. We can't trust everything we think. And yet we have to trust ourselves.
To fully know ourselves, we must be acquainted with the cravings of the body and the psyche. With the stories we tell ourselves about what we need to be happy. With the impulse to "fix" loneliness— or horniness— using another human being.
Rather than viewing them as gratification-objects, can we truly see our loved ones? Is it possible to be romantically involved in an aware way, without being trapped by appetite, or terrified of loneliness?
Is celibacy an ideal? Is it the preferred practice for a person who has declared investigation of the Great Mystery to be life's defining focus?
From Toni Packer:
Sexual activity is a normal, infinitely creative function of all living forms, physically pleasurable to the senses and occurring in orderly rhythms and cycles....
Most human beings feel lonely, separate, and alienated from each other, and the only possibility for at least a momentary joy of togetherness appears to lie in sexual union with its delights and self-abandonment.
And yet there can also be that amazing awakening to our intrinsic wholeness beyond the sensuality of imagination and fantasy, revealing a vast stillness at the very core of this bustling existence. At a moment of touching this all-pervading, vibrant emptiness, our illusory isolation has disappeared. The ending of separation is love beyond imagination and sensual pleasure.
