 |
 |
|
 |
 |
| |
|
|
| |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
 Divine Homesickness: “What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget”
Posted: Wednesday April 20, 2005 11:33 PM EST
 The author's self portrait
Typically, homesickness plagues teenagers away on their first summer camp or soldiers far from family and safety. But what I propose is that we all suffer a deep homesickness for the Divine- to re-experience that ultimate peace and clarity, acceptance and indubitably- ecstasy. Can you remember a time the Sufis refer to as “the sweetness that was before honey or bee”; recognizing a time when your soul was together with God, the space and time between lifetimes, that brief taste of wholeness? Was leaving paradise to be placed in a suit of flesh and blood so painful, bombarded with fears and frustrations that you chose to forget? We project that insatiable longing in our obsession with romance novels and torrid Hollywood sex scandals we call entertainment. We see the desperateness of this fever in the proliferation of phone sex, on-line dating and pornography. Not that this plague of Divine desire has only touched modern man but it is modern man who has dismissed its importance. Courtly love, the 12th century western ideal of romantic love idealized a spiritual relationship between men and women. “It taught a rough knight to worship the universal feminine symbolized by the fair lady whom he served and adored.” (1) The passions of courtly love were lived inwardly. It is modern man who has prioritized externalization- louder, faster, shinier and fails to honor the curves and cadence of nature. We have lost our way back in our megalomaniac efforts to move forward. We have become scorned lovers taking our toys and tools to play in small cliques. Our collective feminine voice grows faint as we enlist love and relatedness in the service of power and profit. It is little wonder why 19 million American adults are living with major depression and about 5 percent of children and adolescents in the general population suffer from depression at any given point in time according to a report from the National Institutes of Mental Health. We divorce ourselves from the idea of God and Evolution denying that ever choice was made to return to this earth school. Mirrored in the marriage race that over 50% of western couples fail to finish; we yearn for a coupling a connection that makes us feel whole. Our modern day icons speak of this universal theme. Actress and singer Barbara Streisand spins our woeful tale in her song the Way We Were:
It is only in the deepest cellar of the subconscious mind that we discover the scattered pictures of this perfect love affair, our first love. And what we discover is that all successive loves pale in comparison. We in our self-imposed states of amnesia don’t understand the chronic disappointment in our mortal partners and hence the resentments begin to form bringing us further out to sea. Underneath the shiny surface of the day to day there are ancient voices hinting at what was; we begin to feel separation anxiety. He comes home late and doesn’t call. She spends more time confiding in her friends than in you. The veneer of trust wears thin. Along comes a mighty wind called Life and we are thrown overboard. Wet and bitter we rail against our fate. Ironically we turn back to God at the climax of crisis- WHY ME! The broken heart not only experiences the failure of the current relationship but also grieves the original loss all over again. Without a spiritual context in which to process the avalanche of emotion, we feel alone, powerless, unacceptable, overwhelmed and unworthy. Psychologist and author Robert Johnson explains in his book WE how man seeks his soul neither in religion nor in spiritual experience nor in his inner life; but he looks for that transcendence, the mystery, that revelation in woman. Johnson tells us “passion is the one lane into the lost world of the gods.” Not only is this ill begotten attention distracting us from a life of contemplation and spiritual connection but also it becomes a destructive force by campaigning an ideal of woman based on romantic fantasy (a uniquely western epidemic), which is beyond the reach of the female majority. This in turn becomes a disappointment for the men and a lifetime sentence of dieting, plastic surgery and low self esteem for women who fail to achieve this lofty goal. High-end packaging trumps inner content and development. Modern Day pill poppers and charlatans peddle sex as the cure-all in their appeal to the ego but isolating the physical properties diminishes the elixir’s potency. “The soul grows bigger as it holds more thoughts, instead of shrinking them all down to the size of a single solution.” (2) A more holistic approach can be found in the Kama Sutra the infamous Sanskrit treatise on love and sexual technique. The Kama Sutra -written between the first and sixth centuries- instructs its reader in the mastery of his/her senses. It is not to be used merely as a manual for satisfying our desires. A person acquainted with the true principles of this science, preserves his Dharma (virtue or religious merit), his Artha (worldly wealth) and his Kama (pleasure or sensual gratification). Important to note that women are instructed to study the arts (a repertoire of over 60 forms ranging from writing and drawing, binding of turbans to knowledge about gold and silver coins, jewels and gems, Chemistry and mineralogy) in combination with the sixty-four practices. The ancient Indian tradition of Tantra also included sexuality as a spiritual act as part of a larger spiritual practice. Today we have smaller sects practicing what they call Sacred Sexuality, which sees sex as a means of experiencing or communing with the Divine. Sacred sexuality is based on the philosophy of sensualism: the idea that enlightenment is reached not by retreating from the world, but by participating in it fully which differs from hedonism, which does not recognize the Divine. Hedonism is a philosophy of consumerism in which the individual is encouraged to indulge in material pleasure simply for the sake of indulgence. We have become a herd of prodigal children (Luke 15:11-32). In our self-indulgence, we have not only wasted the material possessions of our inheritance- our natural resources- but also through rebellion and foolishness, we have compromised or in some cases completely denied our precious relationship with the Divine.
Adrift on the ocean of love it would serve one to dive beneath the waters surface to discover treasures that still inspire followers hundreds of years later. Born in Afghanistan in 1207, and active in what is modern-day Turkey, Rumi’s poetry of mystical love has made him the best-selling poet in America — some 700 years after his death. This Persian poet is said to epitomize the Sufi Path of Love. Sufism established fifteen centuries ago in Arabia is the mystical branch of Islam and is a path of love and devotion.
|
Africa
Asia
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Middle East
North America
South America
|
|||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
About Us | Advertise | Donation | Help | Resources
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Copyright Policy Copyright © 2003-2005 SpiritHit.com, All Rights Reserved
Powered by ExpressionEngine | Hosted by Dyntex
|
||||||||||||||
