94 — THE THIRD FACE: YEARNING AND DESIRE

When I am on the inside, when I am fully present, I am able to access the third face of the erotic experience — yearning. Yearning, or desire, is an essential expression of love and Eros. As long as I am on the outside, I can ignore my deepest desires and stifle my longing. But longing is a vital strand in the textured fabric of Eros. It is of the essence of the Holy of Holies. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it so beautifully:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall And the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.
But what you love to see are faces
That do work and feel thirst.

THE SEXUAL MODELS THE EROTIC: YEARNING AND DESIRE

The yearning for contact is the essence of the sexual. Indeed, the yearning is often thought by poets and psychologists to be more pleasurable and intense than the fulfillment itself. Another word for yearning or longing is desire. Sex and desire are so inextricably bound that the very word desire evokes the sexual.

Intense desire means that I yearn for something that I do not have. In many systems of spirit, desire was thought to be the enemy of the sacred. For the cherub mystics, however, the sexual models the erotic and the erotic and the holy are one. It is in the sexual that we access the poignant and potent power of desire.

The sexual models the erotic. Yearning models the desire of reality itself to evolve toward more and more creativity, love, complexity, and consciousness. Yearning is the interior feeling of evolution.

Sex models Eros because in great sex you experience the yearning force of being. Sex models Eros because the same desire that drives us to make sexual contact drives all of reality to make erotic contact. It is precisely this erotic contact at every level of reality — from electromagnetic to cellular to cultural — that drives all of reality.

In living the Erotic life you feel the yearning — the radical desire — for more and more complexity, consciousness, creativity, love, and uniqueness. Thus, at the most essential level, reality is desire. It is in the sexual that we are meant to access both the dignity and demand of desire.

It was perhaps D. H. Lawrence who, more than any other modern writer, captured both desire’s demand and its dignity:

And down his mouth comes to my mouth! and down
His bright dark eyes come over me, like a hood
Upon my mind! his lips meet mine, and a flood
Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown
Against him, die, and find death good.31

THE EROS OF YEARNING AND DESIRE

We are filled with desires. Everyone has chocolate-covered raisins in their lives. How should we relate to them — as ally or enemy, teachers or tempters? Here again the cherubs hint the way. This is the place to introduce another set of cherubs that appear in biblical myth. The first, of course, are the cherubs above the Ark. The second pair make a dramatic earlier appearance in the biblical book of Genesis as the two cherubs that guard the way to the Garden of Eden. They stand with “a fiery revolving sword, guarding the path to the Tree of Life.” The Zohar speaks for much of the mystical tradition when it suggests that the cherubs above the Ark are one and the same as those in the Garden of Eden. The temple in biblical myth is called the Garden of God. The mystics reveal that the Garden of Eden and the temple are in mythical terms on the same plane of consciousness.*

In the Garden of Eden story, Eve, overcome by desire, eats from the forbidden tree and gives Adam a taste of the fruit as well. When confronted by God, Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. According to the mystic Isaac Luria, had they but waited three more hours, the Tree of Life would have been theirs. Full erotic fulfillment in all the senses of spirit, soul, and body would have been realized. But they could not wait. Unable to stay in the emptiness, they required an immediate hit of pseudo Eros. For their failure to take personal responsibility and for their inability to resist the blandishments of pseudo desire, they are exiled from the garden.

The goal of personal and cosmic history is to return to the garden. The cherubs, however, stand at the entrance to the garden with swirling swords of flame. Anyone who attempts to return to paradise through the drugs of pseudo Eros is burned by the cherubic sword. The same cherubs stand above the Ark in the Holy of Holies. They give instruction in the path of Hebrew Tantra. If we are willing to do the work, the temple cherubs will ultimately lead us back to Eden. Pseudo Eros will give way to true Eros. Pseudo desire will give way to true desire. For to be in the garden, which is the temple, is to live in quivering desire in every facet of our lives.

* The mystics were brilliant exegetic readers of sacred text. They pointed to a series of textual structures that suggest the Garden of Eden is identical with the temple.

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