New Love, New Marriage

For the sake of clarity, the following is largely an explanation of a personal Upper Left Quadrant exploration that drifts, as it progresses, toward a discussion particular potentials in the Lower Left Quadrant.  I encourage responses from any Quadrant of the reader's awareness, should you feel so inclined.

I must be honest.  I have not loved, in this life, in any form that in any way, typifies the implications of the word “traditional”.  I have not been engaged in any kind of so-called “romantic relationship” or “girlfriend-boyfriend” dynamic.  This does not mean I have never wanted to; I have simply never actively engaged this aspect of our living world.  I would have said, in the past, that this is because the proper opportunity has not yet arisen.  But I now know that I have chosen this; this life, this love, this method of being in the finite world.  And I have chosen not to become involved in what many would envision as a central aspect of living one’s life to the fullest. 

There is a part of me that believes this is because I am a coward, afraid to “put myself out there.”  This part of me holds that I am asked simply to perform my essential function, my set role in this world, laid out before me by my society, my culture, and my interior sense of what my group requires of me.  Most importantly, this part of me stipulates that if I do not fulfill these vital requirements, I am not deserving of affection, or respect, or love.  This part of me will likely exist as long as I live.  It is the distillation, within my individual mind/brain apparatus, of a rigid, mythic organizational structure of human consciousness, constructed over millions of years of evolution and transformative development.  It is a voice to which I must listen if I want to pursue a fully embodied understanding of the perspectives behind myriad socio-cultural divisions in our world, but it is not a voice I can afford to give authority over my actions.  This mythic voice would have me act in such a way that would secure for me the relatively immediate gratification found in a sense of attachment and belonging, throwing all other goals by the wayside. 

This, my conscience will not allow.  Conscience is literally defined as, “the inner sense of what is right or wrong in one's conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action,” or, “the complex of ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the actions or thoughts of an individual.”  I assert, as a working hypothesis in this reality, that morals, ethics, values, dynamics of right-and-wrong, are relative by definition in a relative world, each specific convention depending, in content, entirely on context, and yet always developing and evolving, in this relative spectrum, toward greater complexity, possibility, and perfection, and thus toward a greater embodiment of that which is ultimate, non-relative, and non-dual; that infinite, intimate love which is not one, nor many, nor both, nor neither.  Our perceptions and perspectives are relative, yes, but all of their uniqueness and diversity explores and enlightens a greater sense of the radically universal.  Thus, I believe, one’s conscience is the voice of one’s highest, emerging self, evolving, explicitly, specifically into staggering new brilliance. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote in his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” that “imitation is suicide.”  I didn’t know exactly what to make of this statement when I first came across it, but I now believe I have found a rich, new meaning in its sharp, decisive contours.  In a relative context where imitation is necessary for communication, where we must conform to social contracts and cultural trends to be adequately understood, the extent to which we thus imitate must give us pause, for while we wish to conform in order to be comprehended, respected, loved, we would do well to remember that the extent to which we do not conform will be our only lasting contribution to the human condition and to the condition of all beings.  The extent to which we refuse to imitate is the extent to which we offer newness, uniqueness, and creativity to our fellow human beings.  All that conforms will die.  All that is unique will live, and the only true uniqueness lies at the source of all reality; the conscience, the Over-soul, the universal Self which resides in all smaller selves, in a word, our God.  When I speak from my conscience, my highest, most evolved sense of Self, I speak for the Over-soul, I speak for God.  I thus speak for God in saying that I am not interested in merely reiterating the results of human relationship attributed to eras gone by.  I seek to embody something wholly new, and because all human newness must be qualified in contemporary tongue, I make this my declaration:

I reject rejection.  I divide division by the sum of its parts.  Let seperation be separate from our lives and our goals, from our living, breathing process.  For the sake of expediency, the following conditions are what I accept.  I accept that we are sexual, existential beings who wish to kiss and taste infinity, to make love and be love.  Our love cannot be divided into ontologically pre-given categories, and is not subject to the whims of current hegemony.  Romantic and Platonic are rejected as unuseful.  Homosexual and Heterosexual, along with the wide spectrum of variation and diversity in between, are accepted as somewhat useful.  Man and Woman are heralded as very useful, provided that we recognize that these terms are merely representations of a fantastically varied and ever-shifting process of difference, polarity, and perspective-taking, in all life on this planet and in how we define ourselves as human beings.  It is my belief that if we are truly to love each other in bold new ways, we must truly understand each other in bold new ways.  This, in my view, requires anew sacrament of marriage, a marriage not based on the stereotypes and preconceptions of the past, but on a rigorous exploration and inquiry into that one true Self behind all of our eyes.  This marriage cannot be limited to a single impermanent act.  It must be given degrees of gradation in depth and in span to match the great variety of ways in which we are all connected in human relationship.  It must, first and foremost, be an investigation of our sense of universal Self, the commonality-through-diversity we find embodied in the life of every sentient being.  We must, in short, create an institution whose sole purpose is to discover the ways in which all of our deepest desires and attractions connect in the expression of a larger, more integrated whole.  As Stuart Davis sings, “If a message from a distant sun can reach us,/ There is a magic that is waiting and is willing to teach us/ How to suture every soul/ Into one concentric whole./ The Earth will find the perfect union/ in a Universe Communion.”  This is what the new conscience speaks.  This is the new marriage.

Michael Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality that the division of behavior between “sexual” and “non-sexual” is defined entirely by culture, and controlled by structures of power within a society, and I believe there is a core insight here that must be recognized if we are to move forward into new modes of being, and that is this: We are the creators of our own sexuality, and of our own methods of searching for love.  Of course, we are still men and women, driven by biological, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual attraction to make love together, but our desires and our bliss are never as simple as they may seem.  No single authority, save our own higher conscience, can decide for us the best way to uncover to the deeply rooted meanings secreted away within the mysterious silhouettes of the ways in which we love.  It thus follows that we must organize and decide for ourselves, or else we will forever delegate to others a responsibility which is truly our own.  It would be easy simply to walk the paths which have already been laid out for us, but I declare now that I will not; that I will engage in the tortuous dénouement of constructing my own path, my own method, my own creative process… because I choose to.  In doing so, perhaps ironically, I am reminded of the words Emerson once wrote, long ago:

‘There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

I invite everyone reading this to try, with me, to envision a brand new day of being in love.