95 — THE EYE OF DESIRE
For many of the erotic Hebrew mystics, the symbol of confused desire was Alexander the Great. He conquered almost the entire known world of his day. Yet the cherub mystics of his time insisted that without entering the Garden of Eden and becoming an erotic lover, Alexander would remain empty and desperate.
The ancient Hebrew legend tells of Alexander seeking the Garden of Eden, symbol of erotic fulfillment, on the African continent. Now, the old cherub mystics had a little bit of a soft spot for Alexander. They saw him not only as a confused seeker of desire but also as a seeker of wisdom. So along the way to Eden, Alexander is depicted as growing wiser and slowly divesting the personality of a pure conqueror. He engages in what later erotic Hebrew mystics will call birur, or in English, “the clarification of desire.”
In one of his adventures on the quest for Eden, Alexander is confronted by an army of women warriors — mythological symbols of Eros and Shechinah. They say to him, “It is not worth your while to attack us. For if we kill you, you will be known as ‘the king killed by women,’ and if you kill us, you will be known as ‘the cruel king who killed women.’ ” This is his first lesson in the dance with desire. Neither conquest nor submission will do.
Next, Alexander asks these same women for bread to eat. Instead, they serve him loaves of gold. In response to his astonishment, they reply, “You have enough bread in your own city. You came all the way here because bread would not fill you. You needed gold.” The second lesson: the need for clarification of desire. Be honest about what you truly need to fill you.
At this point, Alexander is ready to encounter the Garden of Eden. He eats some fish and recognizes by its scent that the water was from Eden. Smell is considered by the mystics to be the most erotic of the senses. He follows the fragrance to the gates of paradise. He cries out, “Entry!” but is refused access. He is not yet enlightened. Alexander pleads to receive at least some of Eden’s wisdom. From behind the gate, a gift is extended. It is an eyeball. Sensing its magical quality, Alexander has the eyeball inspected and weighed. It turns out that this small object weighs more than all the masses of gold and silver he has with him.
“How could this be?” he asks his sages in consternation. They reply that it is a human eyeball — representing desire that can never be satisfied. Human desire is so heavy that it weighs man down. Without a doubt, it weighs more than all the gold and silver that Alexander could carry with him. Unconvinced, Alexander asks the sages for proof. They sprinkle some dust over the eyeball so it can no longer see, and it immediately reverts to its natural weight.
On Alexander’s quest for wisdom, he needed to learn the futility of unclear desire. He is empty, as is symbolized in his request for food to fill him. The Shechinah warrior women of Eros teach him to be clear about his desires. Gold and not bread. Do not pretend to be working for your core survival (bread) when it is really gold (honor and glory) that you are after. Know what you want and pursue it.
Finally, know that your desire can never be fully sated, even by all the world’s gold and silver. The human eye of acquisition is a black hole of desire, always demanding more. You need to change your essential relationship to the world. Let go of taking, and embrace the law of yearning. In this law, we deepen our relationship to desire. First we clarify our true desire and seek its fulfillment. As Buddha is reported to have said in the original Pali Canon, “Have few desires but have great ones.” In part, we are able to achieve our desire. In part, it remains beyond our grasp. It is in this second part that we make our more radical move. Instead of needing to fill our desire, we let the desire itself fill us! This is the hidden teaching on the Eros of desire that the warrior women transmitted to Alexander. The biblical mystic lovingly counsels us to be with ourselves and gently watch our desires as they come and go. We are invited not to eradicate them, not to get off the wheel of suffering that they are said to create, but to engage in birur teshuka, the clarification of desire. To love someone is to wait on his or her desire, to watch it stir, to delight in its presence, to help it crystallize and form.
Eros is to be on the inside, including the inside of your desire. Being on the inside invites you to clarify your desires, yet not transcend them. True desire is attained through the deep meditation in which you access the internal witness. This is a place of detachment, from which you survey with penetrating but loving eyes all of your desires. This place of internal witness allows you to move beyond an addictive attachment to any particular desire. At that point the person engaged in birur (clarification) does not abandon desire. Rather, she moves to connect with those desires that are truest to her deepest and most authentic self. It is, as T. S. Eliot once wrote, in the empty space “between the spasm and the desire” that the person is born.
For the biblical mystic, detachment is a strategy, not a goal. In the end, you must not remain a spectator in the drama of your own existence. Rather, you need to become the lead actor on your stage by always living on the inside and never getting lost in the luxury of distance or detachment, so you can fully merge with the part the universe has invited you to play. Longing and desire are good not because we believe that all of our yearning will be fulfilled or realized, but because the yearning itself fulfills us. The desire itself fills the emptiness. When we yearn to grow, when we are alive with desire, we touch fulfillment.
Hasidic lore tells of Hannah who was a walking prayer, constantly calling out to God. People would see her on the streets, carrying her groceries with a light step, all the while with eyes facing upward, a soundless prayer on her lips. Pass by her window, and you would see her by the stove or by the sink, lips lost in prayer, pleading with the heavens for something, for anything, for everything. A neighbor with a jealous eye came to her one day and whispered, “And so why hasn’t God answered all your impassioned prayers? You are just wasting your time.”
Hannah was shaken. What if this neighbor were right? “When will God answer, and why should I wait?” she asked herself. And so Hannah abandoned her beseeching. She gave up on her yearning. And although the groceries seemed heavier, the stove colder, she refused to pray. Until one night, a divine voice called to Hannah in a dream, “Why have you stopped praying to Me?”
Hannah retorted, “Well, you never answered, so I stopped asking.” To which the Divine replied, “Don’t you realize, every call of yours is itself my response? Your great yearning is my greatest gift.” With this, Hannah’s ceaseless prayer came back to her lips. Her burden was again lightened, and her stove was ablaze.
Depression, at its core, is the depression of desire. When we lose touch with our authentic desire, we become listless and apathetic. There is wonderful Eros in desire. It is what connects us most powerfully with our own pulsating aliveness.
— An excerpt from the book “A Return to Eros” by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid
