Have you ever been in a beautiful natural place and experienced an ecstatic sense of belonging and power beyond your self? Have you ever adored another person, not just qualities about them, but something essential about them? Or interacted with an animal or child in a way that felt vital? In those instances we are experiencing something other than our selves. It is possible to imagine the immensity of the ocean, its waves and spray, or the majestic mountains with the clouds below us, but those are just pale copies in our imagination of the real thing and of communing with the real thing. It is possible to imagine the lover or friend, or dream about them, but the imaginings and dreams can not do justice to the person and the delight we find in witnessing their beauty or intimately conversing with them. These things are possible because we interact with something or someone other than ourselves.
And yet it has become fashionable in some spiritual New Age circles to pretend like we have everything we need within us, in our subconscious (Carl Jung, whom I mostly love, but disagree with here*), in our body as trauma we need to release from childhood (Gabor Mate), or as a lost part of ourselves (Esence or Presence or Source) that has some ontological existence that we can regain by revisiting past events (Almaas) or through mindfulness meditation (Eckart Tolle). Now it is fashionable to pretend that communing with a lover is a pale imitation of accessing some forgotten divine part of ourselves instead of the other way around.
New agey men and women (or masculine and feminine identified people) pretend like they don't need each other, like they are complete in themselves rather than complementary. It has become fashionable to try to fill one's own holes through solipsistic inner work, rather than find other people, or nature, to fill these holes. It's a variation on Pascal's "God-sized hole" theory, except now the claim is that God/Essence/Presence is internal or that there is a confusion of the mother or father with the lover, or there is a confusion of losing the mother's love with losing this essential part of ourselves and only Essence can fill the hole. The partial truth that these theories might be shadows of is that because the limbic part of our brains gets imprinted with our primary caretakers' qualities, and sexual attraction is happening in the limbic part of the brain, we are attracted to people who remind us of our parents in some ways. I emphatically disagree with the claim that a lover can't at least partially "fill our holes", based on many social science experiments showing that married people are healthier and happier on the average, and my own experience, which is that my life is better and I have more motivation for life in a loving, stable relationship. Also a tribe or community can fill some of our holes/needs, just like good work or nature can fill other needs/holes. Children and pets still fill holes for many women, though the new agey ones won't admit it. And women as lovers and wives fill these holes for men. It makes sense that when one is needy rather than joyful or confident one is usually less attractive as a romantic partner. And it also makes sense that one can avoid dealing with one's issues and understanding one's deep motivations by focusing instead on a partner (aka codependence). But it's a leap from here to being complete onto oneself, or being admonished for wanting to fill holes by falling in love with someone. Why can't it be that we love the other because they complement us, because there is something we lack that they have and we want or even need to experience that produces extreme pleasure and joy that we can't produce on our own? Why can't it be that we also love them for unselfish reasons, even if it hurts us to love them (as in the case of unrequited love)? In the New Age view, romantic love is only a tool towards Essence or Presence or spiritual growth. Contrast this with Khalil Gibran's vision of love and pleasure from The Prophet:
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is
the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.
Imagine if the bees or flowers heard of Almaas or Eckart Tolle and the flowers started withholding their nectar, and the bees started staying in their hives to do inner work.
and
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. 18To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
This would be cast as co-dependence or caretaking by our New Age relationship Gurus
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
This would be seen as having loose boundaries. Look, I'm not saying the mystics are wrong and there isn't some Godlike Ground of Being. But what if the way to experience that entity is through lovers and friends, nature and work? I think what makes the mystical view so appealing is that it frees people from having to make choices, except whether to align with God (Presence/Essence/Source) or with the devil (Ego or Personality). Being human is hard because one has to make choices instead of letting instincts make them. But now Source will make choices for us and relieve us of this burden.
The trend towards more individualism is also true in art, where it is no longer important to portray something about the world, but instead the prime directive is to express the self: https://www.ecosophia.net/
We become whole by admitting that we have holes, by filling our holes in a committed relationship with a good matching partner, in a community of inter-dependent people, doing work we love and that is appreciated by our community. Instead of throwing out the whole personality in favor of some elusive Essence, we could pursue characteristics like courage, commitment, responsibility, compassion, love, beauty and joy and integrate the characteristics of hatefulness, insecurity, fear, jealousy, etc so they don't control us. I am freaking out about this like Nietzsche freaked out about the supposed death of God in Christian Europe. It is a death blow to family and community which have already been under attack by global capitalism. We must resist this ideology.
* My disagreement with Jung is partial. Of course in order to really connect with the Other, one must also have some things in common. So an inner understanding of femininity, the Anima, is a reasonable thing to cultivate and integrate in a man if he wants to know a woman weill, and vice versa for women. Still, there will be some qualities in the other that one might only have in minute amounts or not at all, and those can be appreciated and delighted in.
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