If an encounter with the terrible mother, the maternal abyss, surfaces when required in one’s evolution, then I could be in danger of regaining my humanity. What is needed when one almost hates their own species is a broken heart. Not the sexual romance variety but ‘sisterly/brotherly love’. It is a lesson that much of Western civilisation needs right now and I believe one we are just starting to get. The intense sorrow that I have been feeling in response to the suffering of my Indigenous friends in this latest spate of teenage girl suicides has been just that.
When I first read the highly romantic poetry of Rabindranath Tagore it melted my heart. As a young person I thought at first that he was writing about ‘earthly love’, through the voice of a young woman and her unrequited longing for her lover. It bathed me in an erotic glow, a gentle volcanic ooze of hot yet passive surrender that almost made me faint. It broke my heart with longing. Several years later I realised that the sonnets were written for ‘God’. They had resonated with my own intense longing and validated the erotic relationship I had with my own ‘God’.
Knowing my unwavering commitment to integrity, a wise old Rosicrucian friend once told me that there was only one thing more important than truth – and that was compassion. I didn’t even need to think about it to know it was true.
Eros
