Sipping tea with a dear friend yesterday, we put the world to rights speaking about all things Eros. This mysterious force of the wild comes through us like a wildfire, makes up part of the inherent matrix of our life force and weaves us into the web of vibrating life all around us. 

To think of Eros as a personal force is to do disservice to the wild gods. Eros is more than human; and yet to be fully alive is to allow the otherworldly force to make us human. 

We don’t control Eros, Eros comes to us to show us the deeper mysteries of our lives. We have to learn how to wield such a force. We have to cultivate a healthy and whole enough ego to be able to do service to it. 

Eros is an awakener. It wants to bring us to the core of who we truly are. Our task is to listen and respond, but if we simply let Eros have its way with us, then this force will run amok with our lives and the world around us. To really do service to Eros, we have to cultivate an initiated ego.

I think Eros evokes a lot of repulsion (and, subsequently, repression) because in the world at large, this otherworldly beast is being worked by the uninitiated ego. This is the ego that wants what it wants because it wants, and will do anything it can to feed the hungry beast within. 

An initiated ego is an ego that does not think for itself but thinks for the larger whole. Its own personal gains are not considered as primary and the initiated ego will sacrifice its own needs in order to serve the greater whole. In my humble opinion, it’s from here that we must wield Eros. 

The journey from an uninitiated ego to an initiated ego is our human-making. To embed ourselves within and cultivate a consciousness that plants us into the web of connection far larger than our own personal drama is to awaken to the inherent part of the ecological web in which we are embedded. 

When we are embedded in that way, our Eros is a vehicle by which we serve the greater whole. Desire can show up in all sorts of unfettered ways. From the stance of our initiated ego we have the responsibility to wield that force in service of the larger web. 

This means we do not get to act on our godly desires, but we listen to what they are telling us and wield them into the shape of our lives as an opener to another way of living (and loving). 

When we do this, the sense of who we are expands to embrace the repressed aspects that have been perhaps relegated to the dungeon. We are often not on board with our innermost desires because they require for us to grow into a version of ourselves yet undiscovered. But when we dare lift the lid, the world that awaits us there is the world of our longing. And that’s the world that we must create.