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Old 08-06-2018, 05:14 PM
7luminaries 7luminaries is offline
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Jyotir -- this is an important and beautiful insight.

Quote:
In the Gita,, God says that He will appear in whatever form is the preference of the seeker, including the feminine. That is the important thing for aspirants - not the abstract speculation - but your urgent necessity.

This explains my connection to the guides, who are absent the obstructions of human consciousness that are so off-putting, wounding, and oppressive to my soul.

It also gets around the eternal disappointment of revering another human consciousness who is living, and for most, even those who are no longer living. Jesus is fairly easy to revere without disappointment, but he's not living here now. The great disappointment for me is that there is no great master of the way of authentic love in interpersonal mixed-gender non-familial partner relationships.

Unfortunately, I cannot think of one person across all recorded humanity who stands as a living example of manifest authentic love in partnership that transcends culture and time and particulars of religious and cultural mandates around "marriage" and "traditional gender roles", which is not the same at all as authentic love in partnership when stripped of all these rigid structures.

Something tells me Jesus was such a man and the non-mainstream canon says he did marry. Unfortunately, this aspect of the story is not well-known. I know very little of Siddharta's relationship post-awakening, other than his wife became one of his students and the relationship was chaste (so they say)...so no longer an intimate life partnership and thus it does not provide an awakened model for this relationship. Additionally, the huge overlay of caste and oppressive gender roles and the cultural biases make his personal story hugely unrelatable to many. It's hard to say he threw them off totally if he had to remain celibate to stay enlightened. Jesus integrated the body and spirit more fully and yet the woman life partner aspect was again cut from the story.

This ultimately says more about where humanity is at than anything else. We have no role models (or very few), particularly if we cannot look to those who have not come to grace and authentic love through the heavy constraint of restrictive cultural and gender norms, and through traditional religion.

On the other hand, when removing these biases and the pejorative, judgmental overlays and restrictions that come with them...many today have fallen to their lowest levels of humanity, opening using and degrading others as long as it more or less falls within the bounds of civil law and "mutual consent", a vague term of absolute meaninglessness if unbounded by clear and transparent integrity, ownership, and authentic love for others equally to the self.

I feel the best we can and should do (aside from walking our path earnestly) is to honour/hold high regard and admiration for those who continually strive to and actually at least partially succeed in manifesting the way of the heart-led consciousness in authentic love (lovingkindness from a place of equanimity) for all. And the more, the better.

But I also feel that we need to strive to be the guides we are looking for in our lives regarding interpersonal relationships. So far...pretty poor results when stepping outside the traditions of the past. Yet this is clearly at the core of humanity's challenges, along with general treatment of others and along with our treatment of Gaia. Clearly, we also cannot do without commitment to a code of ethics and morality, and without commitment to our spiritual paths. This is humanity's other, concurrent challenge.

Peace & blessings
7L
__________________
Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy.

Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult.

For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way

and become themselves despite all opposition.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke
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