93 — ECHOES OF EMPTINESS: THE EROTIC AND THE ETHICAL

The arena where emptiness — nonerotic living— is most destructive is in the ethical. Every ethical failure comes from the absence of Eros. It is the inability to stay in the experience of emptiness that moves people to violate their ethics. All crimes are in some sense crimes of passion. But this is actually a misnomer. What we mean is that all crimes are rooted in the fear of passion’s loss! We cannot imagine what life would be like without the Eros that we stand to lose.

For example, Joel finds out that his wife is having an affair. The betrayal opens up the void within. Afraid that she will leave if he confronts her, he slowly becomes a workaholic to dull the pain. Work for Joel has become pseudo Eros.

Or take Susan, who was verbally and physically abused by her mother. Never able to claim the dignity of her anger, she became gradually disempowered as a person. As an adult, she is constantly furious at her children, often lashing out brutally at them. She seeks to assure herself that she is still alive and powerful. For Susan, her displaced anger at her children is pseudo Eros.

Here are some more mundane examples. We cheat on income taxes because we think that the extra money will paper over some of the fear of life. Money becomes pseudo Eros. Or we exaggerate our accomplishments because we are afraid that our real story is insufficient to fill the void. Self-aggrandizement is pseudo Eros.

All of our inappropriate behaviors that violate our values are really us crying out, “Pay attention to me — I exist!” All forms of acting out are pseudo Eros. All forms of sexual harassment and abuse have their source in pseudo Eros. When the fullness of presence is violated and the other person becomes an object, not to meet our yearning but to cover over our emptiness, then sex is de-eroticized. Eros devolves into pseudo Eros. Desire is degraded to grasping. When sexual stories are told in ways that they did not happen — false complaints — and the normal hurt in human relationship is weaponized or manipulated as an instrument of malice, then the Eros descends into pseudo Eros. It is only the return to Eros that can move us out of a society that some call a rape culture in which women are violated, and others call a false-complaint culture in which men are socially murdered. Both abuse the sexual. All sexual abuse is pseudo Eros. Pseudo Eros will only be healed when we truly begin living the Erotic life.

Life is about walking through the void. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger. Every time we are seduced by pseudo Eros, ethical breakdown is around the corner. There is no ethics without Eros.

The biblical text describes the pit into which Joseph was thrown by his jealous brothers: “The pit was empty; it had not water,” reads the story. “But isn’t this redundant?” ask the students. “If it had no water, don’t we know that it was empty?” The master replies, “This was an emptiness that bred evil. Water it did not have, snakes and scorpions it did!” Emptiness always breeds ethical collapse in its wake.

Of course, the real pit at play in the story is not a pit in the earth. The pit is in Joseph’s brothers’ ground of being. Their own gaping sense of emptiness makes them envy Joseph so. Their inability to walk through their own pit (void) moves them to project a pit into the world, in which they would cast their brother. The snakes and scorpions come from the unacknowledged emptiness of the brothers.

When we respond to a person viscerally, it virtually always tells us more about ourselves than about the other person. The brothers’ own felt emptiness — their pit — moved them to the murderous rage of attempted fratricide. You see, up until this point in the book of Genesis, one son had always been chosen as the inheritor of blessing. Abel was chosen over Cain, Shem over Ham and Yefet, Isaac over Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau. The brothers were convinced that Jacob, their father, was likewise going to choose Joseph over them. Joseph’s existence called into question the integrity of the stories they told themselves, and they brushed up against the emptiness. When our old stories are called into question, we are challenged to walk through the void and re-story our lives at our higher level of consciousness. The inability to walk through the inevitable emptiness to the more evolved, deeper fullness on the other side is the source of all ethical collapse.

Ethics without Eros is doomed. Only from a place of fullness of being can we reach out in love to others. The first step to love is always self-love. If you don’t fill yourself up with love, then you have precious little to dole out. But as long as your love is not rooted in your erotic matrix, the inside of your fullness, it is doomed to fail. You will have to rely on an ethical source outside yourself, which will always make you view yourself as a sinner. No one is ever able to consistently follow external rules that seem to violate their inner desires.

However, if ethics well up from the inside, if you are at the center, then sin is not disobedience but the violation of human well-being. In the end, all ethical failure is a violation of Eros — your own or someone else’s.

— An excerpt from the book “A Return to Eros” by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid