Between Eros and the Personal

In the very body of each one of us there is a temple to one of the deepest and greatest cosmic powers— Eros.

Eros is not just a private experience that we have every once in a while. Eros is the power that was here way before us and actually brought us into incarnation. Our parents and their parents and all the generations before them were also appearing in the world as a result of Eros.

Eros brought together the first single-celled organisms that started evolution. Eros is the very ancient force that flows through us today, and yet existed long before us and will be here long after we are gone. In some hundreds of years, when our name will be completely forgotten, and everyone who knew us will have already turned into dust, what may be left of us is only the parts that had passed down the generations, through the power of Eros. All the cells in our body will die, only the DNA in our reproductive cells will, perhaps, replicate and remain in the living world, thanks to the power of Eros. Eros will be the force that will connect them with other people's cells, which thanks to the influence of Eros will desire to mate with us, and with our descendants, and thus continue this wonderful chain of generations.

Eros is not limited only to the biological side of life: As I see it, Eros is the force that caused subatomic particles to join together at the beginning of the universe to form what we know today as matter—atoms and molecules.

Matter itself is the embodiment of Eros.

This is also how the ancient Greeks understood it, who believed that Eros was one of the "protogonoi", that is, one of the primordial forces that created the entire cosmos, long before the Titans, who preceded the Olympian gods. According to Orpheus' version, Eros is the most primordial force that emerged from the egg of existence (the Big Bang?). (See more about it here)

As long as we live, this ancient power exists and works through us. It turns our lives around and activates us to be attracted to everything that attracts us — spouses, lovers, friends, places of living, ways of dressing, and everything that we consciously and unconsciously find "sexy".

If each of us is a small bead on an endless chain of generations that began at the beginning of evolution and will end when the sun goes out (perhaps), then Eros is the connecting thread that runs through us and weaves us all together.

Those who wake up to recognize this understand that our genitals carry within them an age-old and powerful power like no other. That is why I call our genitals a Temple. A temple in the ancient sense - the thrown of the Gods. Our genitalia are the temple of Eros in our bodies.

Most people living today are very far from recognizing the temple of Eros that exists within them. Their autonomous personalities are not yet mature enough to even recognize that they can have sexual autonomy and are sovereign beings. They have not yet awakened to the first stage, which is the recognition that their sexuality does not belong to other people but to themselves. Their sexuality does not belong to their parents, their partners, society, religion, or the country, but to them, and they are allowed to decide with whom, when and how much to share their sex life.

Few have woken up to recognize that their sexuality belongs to them and no one else. That they can feel what is right for them and what is not, and where their boundaries are crossed.

Awakening to sovereignty in the sexual sphere is the first and most important step today.

However, there are those who woke up to this and then woke up even more, to recognize that actually... Their sexuality is not really "theirs". Eros is a transpersonal force that runs through them like a thread that weaves beads into a necklace, and no small bead can truly claim ownership of it.

When you recognize this thread, a deep question arises about the correct relationship between the private self, and between the ancient power that lives within us and through us. What is the correct relationship between the small bead that is the "I", and is but one of the millions upon millions of beads, and the thread that passes through this “I” and connects it to this ancient and holy chain?

When we come to think about the correct relationship between the private personality and those deep and ancient forces, it is good to think of our body and its genitals as a temple, and of our private personality as a priest\ess who is responsible for the proper operation of that temple.

When you think about the right relationship between the temple and the priest\ess, you can think of a wide spectrum of possibilities: On the one hand, there is ignorance, egoism, and exploitation of the temple by the personality, and on the other hand, there is exploitation of the individual by the ancient power of the gods.

There are holy places, like the pyramids in Egypt for example, that the guardians of the place have no real perception of the power of the place they are guarding. You can bribe them and enter rooms that are forbidden to the public. These guards exploit the temple for their own personal gain. It's similar to a person who notices that other people are interested in his or her body, and their ego discovers that they can rip a personal gain out of it.

On the other side of the spectrum there are, or once were, temples where the individual person is not really seen as important or significant compared to the importance of the gods. The individual person and their preferences were sacrificed—by themselves or by society—for the benefit of the gods. Priests and priestesses lived a life of personal sacrifice for the sake of the temples they were in charge of and for the powers inherent in them.

At the midpoint of this spectrum, there is a deep recognition that Eros is indeed a mighty and ancient deep transpersonal force, but as long as I live, it works and pulses through me! And if Eros chose to live through me, that means I'm important enough to exist ("Your birthday is the day the universe decided it can't go on without you"), and to truly exist means to be authentic.

Being authentic means listening to my truest desires and longings on the one hand (and not to the desires of anyone who thinks they have authority over me), and on the other hand, recognizing the limitations I have in being a human and not a god.

My limits as a person are important so that Eros with his ancient and uncompromising power does not annihilate me and my humanity. In my opinion, it is very important for the priestesses and priests of love to pay attention to their authenticity and not to skip over themselves. Don't get carried away doing things that may seem right transpersonally, but may be inconsiderate towards our personal side.

In my years of activity in the field, I have seen this happen several times, and I myself have been burned by it more than once, when I sacrificed myself on the altar of Eros, and did not pay enough attention to my human side.

From a mythological point of view, the place where humanity is today is fascinating: if In the ancient days, the gods were the most important thing and man was a plaything in their hands, modernity came with the wave of secularism and individualism, and placed man as a central point in the field. All the ancient gods have become nothing more than psychological archetypes within the human psyche. True religious devotion is hard to find in the modern world, even in New Age circles. Modern spirituality revolves around the experience of the individual person, and what is perceived as serving him. Humans no longer perceive themselves as the servants of the gods.

And at the same time, it seems to me that the fascinating invitation of the point where we are today is to start having a dialogue of mutual respect between humanity and the great cosmic forces that work through it. In real dialogue there is an encounter and not attempts to control. A real dialogue is a place where we really meet, and look for what power we have together, and not look for how to exert power from one over the other.

These primordial forces of the cosmos can indeed destroy us, as individuals or as a society in a heartbeat, but, they probably won't, because our very fragile existence has some cosmic importance, of which we are not yet aware.

Therefore, let us open up a dialogue about the right relationship between God and man. Between the ancient and eternal Eros that flows through us and between the temporary psyche, between the thread that weaves the chain and between each and every bead of it. Let us find a place where there is great respect for both the trans-personal eternal, and the very personal human. In real dialogue we do not seek to dominate each other. It is clear to us that neither side is meant to serve the other or control the other. I as a person am not only a "servant of the gods", nor are the gods here to serve me and my whims.

*About the complex relationship between Eros as "Amor", or “Cupid”, the son of Venus who is Aphrodite, and between the human as "Psyche" the playwright Apuleius wrote in late antiquity the epic story about "Amor and Psyche". The Jewish-German psychologist Erich Neumann, a distinguished student of Carl Jung, wrote a wonderful psychological analysis of the story, analyzing the it as a metaphor for the awakening of the feminine. I will expand on that in another article, with the help of the gods.…