99 — THE FOURTH FACE - WHOLENESS AND INTERCONNECTIVITY: ON THE INTIMATE UNIVERSE, REALITY AS ALLUREMENT
Longing, desire, and tears remind us of the fourth strand in the erotic weave. They whisper to us that we are all interconnected within a greater wholeness. No life stands alone. The feeling of standing alone is experienced as a violation of the very nature of reality. Reality is a larger whole in which all is interconnected. Everything is connected to everything else. Everything yearns for ever-deeper contact. We are all parts of a larger whole.
THE SEXUAL MODELS THE EROTIC:WHOLENESS AND INTERCONNECTIVITY
Wholeness and interconnectivity are nowhere more clearly manifested than in the sexual drive. We are born with an urge to merge. We do not feel whole unto ourselves. We feel like we are part of a larger whole. It is the sexual drive that never lets us forget that we are not whole merely unto ourselves. The sexual reminds us constantly that we yearn for connection and wholeness beyond our separate selves. In great sex you feel the urge to connect, to make the deepest possible contact, to be the most intimate that you can possibly be. In that contact, in that connection, in that intimacy, you become more whole. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is direct in his understated declaration of this drive for connection that animates all of reality:
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.32
Musician Bruce Springsteen, in his Jersey-shore kind of way, is even more unvarnished in singing about the erotic drive for any sliver of intimate connection, as his song “Human Touch” attests:
Baby, in a world without pity
Do you think what I’m askin’s too much
A world without pity is a world which feels random, haphazard, and fundamentally disconnected. Everything is apart from everything else. The yearning is for wholeness, for connection. One doesn’t require metaphysics to move from loneliness to loving and from alienation to connection. All that is required is the erotic mystical magic of human touch.
I just want to feel you in my arms
Share a little of that human touch
Sex models Eros because the drive for connection, for great wholeness, that moves the sexual is the same drive for wholeness and connectivity that motivates all of our social, cultural, and creative endeavors. But the sexual model of the erotic in this face of interconnectivity and wholeness is even more fundamental than that. For classical mystics like Plato, sex models Eros because in the sexual we are drawn to merge with the prior unity, the original wholeness, that inexorably calls us home. For the evolutionary cherub mystics, sex models Eros because the experience of wholeness promised by the sexual is the strange attractor that moves the entire evolutionary process forward.
THE EROS OF WHOLENESS AND INTERCONNECTIVITY
In the movie Castaway, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is a FedEx employee who survives a cargo plane crash, only to be stranded on an isolated island. He somehow learns to survive but is overcome with loneliness. One of the FedEx cargo packages that has washed up contains a Wilson volleyball. Using his blood, Chuck paints a face on the volleyball and names it “Wilson.” Wilson becomes his companion, and he talks to the ball as if it were a person. After several years, however, although his survival seems assured, he cannot stay on the island. He risks his life to leave. There is something far more elemental than survival that pulls him to set out on the ocean in a handmade raft. When we cannot make contact with the interior of another person, life becomes not worth living. Chuck Noland desperately needs contact with another human being — not just with one of the animals on the island or even the majestic beauty of nature. He needs a person who shares not only a parallel exterior but also an interior that is similar to his own inner form.
The drive for contact is the essential nature of existence, not some fringe level of reality. Contact is, literally, a survival need — so fundamental that it overrides everything else. Chuck Noland prefers to take the precarious raft and cast himself into the open sea with only a small chance of physically surviving rather than remain isolated on the island without interior contact with another similar being.
This is what the ancient mystics meant when they said in the book of Genesis, “It is not good for the human to be alone.” The word good is the key refrain in chapter one of Genesis. After every stage of the world’s emergence, the text reads, “God saw that it was good.” Then in chapter two, the text suddenly exclaims, “Lo tov heyot ha’adam levado” (“It is not good for the human to be alone” — or better translated from the Hebrew, “to be lonely”). All of the good of creation is “not good” if we are lonely. To be lonely is not merely a human neurotic condition — it is in violation of the essential nature of life, which is interconnected and whole. To be lonely is to be cut off from the interior of another, isolated in surface existence. Living on the outside, by yourself, is nonerotic, no matter how successful you are or how many people you are surrounded by.
To be lonely is to be apart and not a part of. The truth is that everything is part of the great whole. The world is not in a natural state of war but in a natural state of Eros. Everything is fundamentally interconnected. No part is apart from the larger wholeness. All parts are an inextricable part of the whole. Indeed, the very fabric of reality is parts and wholes. Every part is both a whole unto itself and part of a larger reality. This is the nature of existence all the way up and all the way down the chain of being. Nothing stands apart. All is interconnected as part of the great whole of the universe.
As evidence, we need only look at the building blocks of nature. A quark is a subatomic particle. From one limited perspective, it stands alone as a whole unto itself. From a wider perspective, it’s imminently clear that the quark is interconnected with other quarks. It is part of a larger subatomic whole. The subatomic particles then come together to form a new emergent, a new deeper whole called an atom. An atom is a new whole that has depth. It has both subatomic and atomic particles. The atom, however, is not separate from other atoms. Rather, it has myriad lines of interconnectivity with the surrounding atomic structures. So an atom (like a quark) is both a part unto itself and part of a larger whole. The atoms then form molecules, which then evolve into complex molecules, which at some point awaken as cells, which much later evolve into multicellular creatures, and so on. Each level is a new, unique emergent that transcends and includes all the previous levels. This is the nature of evolution on every level of and in every facet of existence. We are all wholes unto ourselves and parts of larger wholes at the same time. In this sense, the entire world is interconnected. Interconnection is everything and everywhere.
As we mentioned earlier, the word religion traces its source to the Latin root ligare, which, similar to “ligament,” is about connectivity. Religion’s goal is to re-ligare — to reconnect us. Religion’s original intention was to take us to that inside place where we could indeed experience the essential interconnectivity of all reality. All of existence is one great quilt of being, and we are all patches in its magnificent multifaceted pattern.
Eros is what allows us to move past the feeling of isolation and separation and experience ourselves as part of the quilt. To sunder our connection to Eros is therefore to sin. Not only would we lose the source of life’s greatest pleasure, but we would also undermine the building blocks of connection without which the world would ultimately collapse.
At this point, then, it should not surprise us that in the temple myth, the Holy of Holies is the place of the Even Shetiya, the foundation stone of the world. It is that stone, a symbol of Eros, that holds the world together. Eros is the interconnectivity of reality. Eros, wrote the great poet Emerson, is “an ascendancy of the soul.” Its place could be nowhere other than the Holy of Holies.
In the Kabbalistic myth, the great sin that caused what is called “the shattering of the vessels” was the sin of separation. Each divine force — sefira — held itself apart, autonomous and independent, free of any dependency on the other sefirot (plural of sefira). The result was that each independent sefira was unable to hold its light and ultimately shattered, causing great cosmic disarray. The tikkun — the fixing of the shattering — is experiencing every point of existence in connection, as part of the quilt of being.
In this sense, mystics were often also magicians. Ecstasy and magic are in the end inextricably bound up. Both seek to access the myriad lines of connection that undergird the wondrous web of existence. A child intuitively understands this magic. Psychology dismissively refers to childlike intuition as “magical thinking” and sees maturity as the triumph of the rational mind over the imagination. Yet the mystic insists that the child is at least partially right. It is not for naught that the magical Harry Potter books swept the world with such speed. Children who had never read before were suddenly reading hundreds of pages — volume after volume. Children felt that they were finally given something that was true to their spirit. The sacred child in us understands that the world is filled with magic. The world is filled with invisible lines of connection.
Eros is another word for magic and enchantment, the knowledge that everything is alive and intertextured — interwoven and filled with meaning. The experience of sin is the feeling that things, and you, are not holding together, that you are falling apart. Eros is the drive to wholeness and thus to healing and health.
— An excerpt from the book “A Return to Eros” by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid
