In the awakening traditions of Asia, students are generally encouraged to renounce the life of romantic partnership, family, and career for the path of the renunciate—the monk, yogi, sannyasin, or sadhu who eschews the preoccupation with sensation and attachment in favor of reflection, introspection, inquiry, and illumination. Perhaps the most famous exemplar of this path was Ramana Maharshi, who spent his entire life at his ashram in southern India teaching primarily through his silent and radiant presence.
But ultimately this trajectory leads to disengagement from the world and may foster an inherent dualism--between sacred and profane, absolute and relative, spirit and matter. You’re enjoined to wake up and out of the wheel of samsara, but no instructions are provided for reentering the world and living a life of relationship and service from an awakened perspective. Where would Ramana go next, if he felt moved to leave the ashram and find a partner? And what would his life in the world look like?
Now that these awakening traditions have met and merged with the psychological traditions of the West, many contemporary teachers are recommending a more integrated and embodied approach that embraces the fullness, complexity, and paradox of life in the world. Eros—narrowly defined as sensual, passionate love, or more broadly as the vital current of life itself—is an essential element of this incarnation (that is, life in the flesh). Without its full expression, after all, we would not exist at all.
But eros can also blind and beguile us, and seduce us from our devotion to the deeper truth of our being into a preoccupation with the object of our desire. For the ancient Greeks, in fact, erotic love was considered a kind of madness visited upon us by the gods. For the Buddha, sexual desire was the greatest temptation and obstacle to spiritual realization. Hence his famous Fire Sermon, in which he taught that all the senses are burning, “with the fire of passion, hatred, and delusion—and more broadly with the fire of birth, decay, death, grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow, and despair.” When we allow the movement of eros, in other words, we are literally playing with fire, and as a result he required that his monks and nuns be celibate so they could focus all their energy on the pursuit of enlightenment.
The path of renunciation is a noble one that has always had its adherents But where does that leave the rest of us? What is the middle way between indulgence and renunciation? How do we fall in love, partner, raise a family, pursue a career—all of which require eros, life energy, passion for what we deem good and true—without getting lost in the forest of attachment and aversion, gain and loss, pleasure and pain?
The key, of course, is to wake up to our essential nature beyond the mind and the personality and know once and for all who we really are—Consciousness, awakened awareness, Being itself expressing in a myriad of forms. Once we’re rooted in this deeper ground, we no longer wander far from home and know how to return once we do, even in the midst of the beguilements and attractions of the sensual, material life. And once we realize that there is no separation between form and emptiness, Consciousness and its manifestations, Shiva and Shakti—the truly nondual perspective—we can allow ourselves to be a vessel for Being to work through us in all its mysterious ways, including romantic love, sexual expression, and healthy attachment to family and friends.
The process of waking up in this way often calls on us to retreat from the world, at least for limited periods of time, to focus on and resolve once and for all the seminal questions of life and death: What has ultimate meaning and importance? What is true and real? Who or what am I? But after we awaken—or more often, while we are awakening--eros draws us back down and in to a life of connectedness and interbeing. As Sri Nisargadatta, a passionate counterpart to Ramana’s boundless tranquility, says, “Love tells me I am everything, wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Between these two my life flows.” Healthy attachment to partner and children is crucial and instinctive to our species and can’t be ignored in a natural, well-balanced human life.
In practice, this means being in the world but not of it; to “care and not to care,” as TS Eliot puts it in his “Four Quartets”; to follow the guidance our heart provides but to be unattached to the results of our actions; to dance to the inscrutable rhythms of being without being identified with the dance. In Zen this is called leaving no trace—giving ourselves fully but not forging a narrative with a me at the center.
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?” writes Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Or, as Rumi puts it, “Do you think that I know what I’m doing? That for one breath or half breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it’s writing, or a ball can tell where it’s bouncing next.” In the broadest sense, eros is the dynamic intelligence that guides the pen and bounces the ball of our body and mind. Moment to moment we are being lived by the Mystery, we just need to attune to the unfolding and let it guide us.