Theos-Talk Archives (October 1996 Message tl00460)

Keith:

>I think there are seven levels of deep human connection.  The highest and most
>difficult to achieve is a true spiritual connection without barriers are
>preconditions. ... Desire, manipulation and power plays come
>still lower and you guessed it our old debil ssssssssssex, the snake coiled
>ready to rise to higher and higher levels of mischief all around us and through
>us.

>I personally love men, women and children everywhere, but that doesn't have
>anything necessarily to do with sex.  In sex we become cojoined as bisexual
>beings and have these ciruitires are we couldn't link.

>Some people are straight north and gay northwest of desire.  I say take a street
>called past desire, to surrender, transfer to acceptance and get off in heaven.
>Any takers?

I think the key here is altruism, which is far more important than asceticism.
The road to perfection is in forgetting oneself and in becoming an expressive
instrument of one's inner divinity. The outer personality provides a window to
one's inner light. It's far more important to get that light a blazing, than to
be concerned if this pane of glass or that pane is soiled.

The reason that we're taught to overcome personal desires is not necessarily
so that everyone can become ascetics. Rather, I think, it's so that our minds
and hearts aren't preoccupied with the pursuit of desire and can become freed
to dwell on and become expressive of high intelligence, love, and wisdom.

There's certainly a correlation between a refinement of desires, over time,
and spiritual progress, but the spiritual progress didn't come from the killing
out of lower desires. Rather, the lower desires faded due to being starved for
attention, as we dwell on other things that can be equally captivating.

The emphasis I would put is on increasing the "inner flow of light" rather than
making sure one's hands are always clean in life. And the way to do that is to
forget one's self, to fill one's attention with doing good things in the world,
to be too busy to have the thought "I want this!" to cross one's mind.


-- Eldon