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The Other
Loveliness
by Harriet Eisman
Eros brings beauty, meaning and divinity into our lives. It comes to us through a very particular epiphany, a passionate inspiration present in a particular lover, teacher, melody, or landscape. We long to follow it always. But this is not the whole story. For eros also brings us obsessions, cruelty, abandonment, and betrayal. It may come through anguish over my partner's infidelity, or enter my heart as it breaks for a beloved sibling with cancer. At these times, to love seems dangerous, hopeless, or naïve. How, in the midst of sorrow that seems to great to bear, can I see through to the truth that my loving is always right, that love is finally, as the Sufis tell us, "the love of the Creator for the creature in which He creates Himself"?1 And how can I find a path towards my soul's real nature that begins right here where I am shipwrecked, rather than in pious hopes for a perfect life?
The well-known tale of Eros and Psyche offers profound instruction to those of us who find ourselves on the path of love. The sufferings and the tasks of Psyche as she seeks to be reunited with her beloved give precise and penetrating images of the work this path demands. Eros, a daimon or celestial spirit according to the ancients, travels between heaven and earth, bringing not only beauty, love, and inspiration, but also chaos and disruption as he ignites unexpected and irresistible passions. The thread that leads from this disruption to a vision of the soul's pure beauty, and the skills and means for becoming, ourselves, capable of being with that vision as our lover, are what we can uncover in looking at the labors of Psyche.
Psyche's
first vision of Eros is clandestine and overwhelming. She holds a dagger and
a lamp, ready to kill him if he is indeed the monster her sisters say he is.
She can no longer wonder; she has to obtain her own knowledge of his good or
evil nature. And so she steals a glimpse of him in the light:
She gazed
again and again upon the beauty of that divine face and her soul drew joy and
strength. She beheld the glorious hair of his golden head streaming with ambrosia,
and curling locks that strayed over his snow-white neck and crimson cheeks…
and before the lightnings of their exceeding splendor even the light of the
lamp grew weak and faint. From the shoulders of the winged god sprang dewy pinions,
shining like white flowers, and the topmost feathers, so soft and delicate were
they, quivered tremulously in a restless dance, though all the rest were still.2
Filled with this radiance, Psyche picks up one of Eros' golden arrows, is pricked by it and falls in love with Love. Passion overwhelms her, and she covers him with kisses; like her desire, the hot oil from her lamp overflows onto his body. He awakens badly burnt, chastises her, and flees.
These few
moments reveal many of the painful paradoxes of the mystical path. Psyche is
not capable of containing her vision of Eros, and yet this is how it must be.
The love comes first, far ahead of our ability to make sense of it or manage
it. So Rumi says,
There is
no salvation for the Soul
but to fall in Love.
It has to creep and crawl
Among the Lovers first.3
We eagerly desire such a glimpse, bask briefly in its beauty, and then clumsily cause it to flee. Psyche has not the faculties, the subtle senses, to meet and be with this vision. We surely do not know how to look at the gods, but instead fall onto their bodies and burn them. Brunton notes, "The moment you seek to keep the glimpse, it is gone."4 How often have we been in the presence of magic, whether brought on by nature, music, meditation, or another person, and sat dumbly wishing to be able to receive what is truly offered? How many times have we mistaken the literal person or place for the true source of the glimpse, and devoted ourselves to possessing that, rather than following the inspiration itself? Plotinus tells us what love really wants:
Love, thus, is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer; by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing…. Desire attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing immediately above it.5
Most of us, like Psyche, make all the mistakes; her tale helps us to know that, at whatever level we meet Eros, we will be given labors which will make us able finally to recognize it for what it is. But at this moment in the myth, the suffering is great. Psyche is abandoned, sobbing on the ground. At last she knows who her lover is, and he is gone. That she is in love with Love foretells that she will have to penetrate to the essence itself: there is no turning back.
This scene
is not so much about what Psyche should have done to avoid losing Eros. Rather,
it sets up what she really wants and what she will have to do to accomplish
it. She is left in a place of utter hopelessness and despair. The one thing
she must have is gone. Now the light, in revealing itself, also shines into
her darkest places.
PSYCHE
BECOMES APHRODITE'S HOSTAGE, and, in a deeper way, her student. Beaten and spat
upon by the Goddess of Love and Beauty, her state resembles Evelyn Underhill's
description of the mystic death:
In the
Dark Night the starved and tortured spirit learns through an anguish which is
itself an orison to accept lovelessness for the sake of Love, Nothingness for
the sake of the All; dies without any promise of life, loses when it hardly
hopes to find.6
This gives us an inkling that the path of love and beauty is not what we might expect it to be. The tasks given by Aphrodite seem to be impossible obstacles placed by a cruel and obstructing mother-in-law. In fact, they are purifications and are precisely aimed at uncovering the soul's truth. The tale moves on the path Psyche must walk between two great goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, between she who knows the miracle of how to embody beauty and she who knows the miracle of unembodying it. To know the mystery of being with Eros, psyche must be capable of learning what the goddesses have to teach, and from the very beginning these lessons render worthless all that she knows.
This is
the secret of Psyche's innocence, foolishness, and helplessness, which many
find annoying and frustrating. She does not appropriate her strengths or accomplishments
as she moves through the tasks given to her by Aphrodite. She does not grow
in confidence, but rather approaches every task with panic and suicidal despair.
This portrayal of the quest recognizes the complete irrelevance of the ego's
skills to a genuine penetration of the mysteries of the soul. The powers that
help Psyche are not "hers": it is a simple fact that our true inner
guide does not and cannot use our ego's storehouse of knowledge, because it
is taking us to places beyond our ego's present functioning. Rumi puts it this
way:
Be quiet
in your confusion, and bewildered
When your completely empty within
that silence, you'll be saying,
Lead me
When you
became that helpless,
God's kindness will act through you.7
It is important that she is able to hear the voices of her inner helpers-ants, a reed, an eagle, a tower. Once a task is accomplished a new faculty may be added to her: in the second labor she is able to use her hands, in the third, a crystal urn and in the last, Aphrodite's box. But she is still a helpless girl seeking only her Beloved, or death.
The path that leads back to Eros begins with the first task: sorting a huge mountain of seeds, which is done by hundreds of helpful ants. The skill of the ants expresses the deep wisdom of the body, which at every moment must be sorting out in order to keep us alive and recognizable. Healing is perhaps the most wonderful example of this kind of intelligence: the busy, microscopic work that goes on so that a cut on the hand will be gone in a week, the tissue rebuilt as if by magic. Even the most powerful medical life-support systems do not heal but only keep us in life with the hope that the ants will come and do their work.
Appreciation
of and reverence for the wisdom of the body are essential parts of the search
for the higher self, yet there is a tendency to mistreat the body when we are
absorbed passionately in "higher things." We don't sleep, we don't
eat, we insist on intensity alone. There is a real danger of burning out the
body, of disdaining it as a lump of clay. This worthless mess is how the pile
of seeds first appears to Psyche; without the ants she would be stuck in seeing
her body this way. Paul Brunton is clear on the importance of caring for it
as a living being:
The body
is our physical home. Therefore it should be well treated and well cared for,
kept healthy as far as we can. This is not only a personal need but also a spiritual
duty for its condition may obstruct or assist the inner work.8
By morning, the seeds are sorted, and Psyche has learned that the body listens and responds to her, and that she can hear it as well.
Psyche's second labor, collecting golden fleece from the rams under a sweltering sun, contains profound lessons about channeling vitality and harvesting the essence of feeling. The danger increases with this task, as the rams of untamed emotion are destructive and violent. A path that follows the heat of dangerous inspiration brings us face to face with our own erotic wildness. We kill for love, we die for love, we go off the deep end. We want to be alive and open, yet through this open door, more often than not, pass the angry beasts we locked up years ago.
The reed which advises Psyche is called "nurse of sweet music, breathed on by some breath divine." The reed by her very nature shows us how we can be a beautiful vehicle for feeling, as all kinds of music breath through her, unobstructed. The reed's advice to Psyche-to wait under a tree until the sun sinks and then to harvest the fleece from the brambles-begins her instruction in being still. The space that stillness brings is the container that can allow us to hold powerful energies without being destroyed by them. As for the rams, with "sharp horns...foreheads hard as stone...and venomous bites," it is no secret that anger and love often contain each other, and that each holds great danger in its wild, uncontrolled form, but tremendous vitality and beauty when approached mindfully.
The difficulty
of sitting quietly should not be underestimated, for the power of the rams in
us is very great, built up by long habit. To let the sun of our attention set
on them when they are so frightening, brilliant, and fascinating requires great
discipline. We want to go out of them, as we want to leap on beautiful Eros.
But this task teaches the skill of using the heart to see, of using love's heat
to burn out an inner chamber where feeling's essence can be known. James Hillman
describes this place where we learn to behold the golden fleece:
The heart's
characteristic action is not feeling, but sight. Love is of the spirit, quickening
the soul to its images in the heart....One turns to the heart because here is
where the essences of reality are presented by the imaginal to the imagination....Not
held; beheld, and we beholden to powers, we in their luminosity, watched by
them, guarded, remembered; visible presences, enlightening our darkness by their
beauty.9
Psyche
must be able to gaze again at Eros' astounding beauty with her intense arousal
channeled and contained. Mary Campbell advises that looking at the beloved requires
us to know how and when to turn away.
Ending
the gaze is a rupture:
You look away, you abandon the beloved.
You travel inwardly. This is freedom
and the hardest part.10
Psyche
brings the golden fleece back to Aphrodite, and is called upon to "travel
inwardly" even further.
THE NEXT TASK TAKES PSYCHE to the freezing, implacable Styx whose water she is to place in Aphrodite's crystal urn. In a way, the urn is the product of the second task, its glass formed both by the heat of the midday rams and by Psyche's own ability to contain herself until the sun goes down. Now she is called upon to contain love's coldness and cruelty, which includes the implacability of the traditional marriage vow, since the gods themselves swear on the river Styx. This urn must have the strength to contain something extremely dangerous, poisonous, and powerful. The freezing up of feeling, the cold shoulder, is also love, and we can count on it. Not only do we have to be able to survive this coldness, we also have to take it into ourselves as a strength: the cold truth, the cold eye of reason.
This is
the forbidding realm of what Joseph Campbell calls the sublime, of immense forces
and powers that determine events without concern for individuals. Now Psyche
sees the awesomeness of the divine, not just its accessible beauty and loving
warmth. The ego shudders at the vision of vastness of the Real, even as Arjuna
begged Krishna to take away the overwhelming cosmic vision he had asked for.
Yet, in order to attain to a love that does not change, to a continuous conscious
relation to the Divine in us, we must be able to bear the approach of the immutable.
Thomas Taylor describes the Styx as
that cause
by which the divine natures retain an immutable sameness as essence. The immutability
therefore of divine energy is signified by the Gods swearing by the Styx.11
Though the words "eternal" and "unchanging" are often used conventionally to comfort us, the actual effect of sensing their import is chilling. How could we tolerate a complete lack of motion? How could we survive the loss of the ever-changing flow of images that fill our waking and dreaming lives? When these experiences approach us in meditation, our first reaction is often fear. The heart pounds, we sweat, we long to flee, and only a fierce concentration can keep us still enough to receive what is offered.
For Psyche
to accomplish her task, she must become as still as a stone, lacking "even
the solace of tears." It is Zeus' eagle that comes to Psyche's aid with
his penetrating eye, his unfailing concentration, his skillful wings, his claws
that never lose their grip. He embodies a kind of thinking that has the ruthlessness
to tear apart our alibis and excuses, seeing through to the vow that has been
made and must not be broken. With this reasoning power, a bit of the Styx's
unforgiving water is carried into ourselves.
PSYCHE'S LAST LABOR, the descent to the underworld in search of Persephone's beauty, takes us to the deep mystery of incorporating our sleep into our wakefulness, and our death into our life. For Psyche, it requires a relentless shedding of many qualities normally associated with being a good and beautiful person. She is called upon to abandon her compassion for a lame man, to ignore the pleas of the corpse floating in the Styx, to refuse help to the weaving women. She would be trapped by these appeals to her virtue. As Sogyal Rinpoche reminds us, "the watchword of the Tibetan Book of the Dead ... is 'Do not be distracted.'"12
The eagle's focus, the Styx's implacable chill, the clear firmness of the crystal urn-all have to be within Psyche for her to survive her journey to Hades. The way through the underworld of shadow, depression, and decay is difficult for a living being. Its protean depths undermine our habitual perspective. Paradoxically, the greatest danger may come from the ego's craving to assert its usual ways of judging, controlling and making itself look good. Psyche's journey to the underworld is clearly not a civilizing mission, or an effort to overcome, as Hercules did, the denizens of Hades. She is not bringing light, but seeking the essence of this darkness. She enters receptively and honors the laws of the place.
Her teacher, the far-seeing tower, does not do the task for her but prepares her perfectly. The ego's biggest weapons-the hands and the mouth-are stilled, as Psyche's mouth holds two coins for Charon and her hands honeycakes for Cerberus. Charon's filthy fingers in her mouth relieve her of any attachment she might have to the perfection of her earthly beauty, while the terrifying three-headed Cerberus confronts her with her own darkness.
The labors
are ended when Psyche disobeys the tower's last instruction, releases Persephone's
beauty, and falls into a "hellish and truly Stygian sleep." Even the
cautions of the perfect teacher must finally be disobeyed in the surrender to
love. What Persephone puts in the box is not simply the essence of bodily death,
for the Hades that Psyche has traversed is already peopled with disembodied
souls. It is the much more profound state that Plutarch describes as mind separated
from both body and animating soul, a second death we experience at the hands
of Persephone after her mother, Demeter, has released us from body. This death
is to the shadow world of Hades as sleep is to dream, as deep trance is to meditative
vision. Anthony Damiani has descibed the encounter with this unembodied beauty
as
An inscrutable
abyss, a blinding darkness to the intellect, a radiance and joy that can suffocate
the unprepared, but illuminate and permanently enlighten the adept.13
It is, in fact, a most exquisite awakening, a state vast enough and still enough to allow Eros to return at last.
It is not only Psyche who is transformed. Eros, the fiery, flighty spirit who came and went secretly and refused to be seen in the light, has acquired at least the substance of a healed wound. The Eros she knows now is, Plotinus tells us, produced by the Soul's contemplation of the Divine Mind; It is the medium through which she can finally be present to "that other loveliness." He is the carrier of divine beauty which must, to become united with psyche and soma, be touched by the pain of earthly life.
Though they go to live among the immortals, this union does not suggest escape from our human existence. Rather, it shows the widest and deepest portrayal of the kind of human we can become on the path of love. This is real commitment and hints at the full extent of what Rumi meant when he wrote: "The price of kissing is your life."14
The men
and women who have seen these things are changed. Plotinus describes the effects
of beholding "the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being":
And one
that shall know this vision-with what passion of love shall he not be seized,
with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what
wondering delight! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for it as
for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very
Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutory terror;
he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire....15
In pursuing
it, we pursue our greatest desire. Yet, after all, we live in ignorance of how
it will approach. We can only listen, and pray, for the sound of Eros' soft,
quivering wings.
NOTES
1. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 149.
2. Erich Neumann, Armor and Psyche: The psychic Development of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), p.26.
3. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Magnificent One, Nevit Orguz Ergin, tr. (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1993), p. 16, No. 8.
4. Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. 14 (Burdett, NY. Larson Publications, 1988), p. 160.
5. Plotinus, Enneads, Stephen MacKenna, tr. (Burdett Larson Publications, 1992), III.5.2, p. 217.
6. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961), p. 397.
7. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, One-handed Basket Weaving, versions by Coleman Barks (Georgia: Maypop, 1991), p. 78.
8. Brunton op.cit. vol. 4, part 2, p. 24.
9. James Hillman, Thought of the Heart (Eranos Lecture 2), (Dallas:Spring Publications, 1981), pp. 18, 24.
10. Mary Campbell, The World, the Flesh, and Angels (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
11. Thomas Taylor, Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans, (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972), pp. 170-171.
12. Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1992), p. 294.
13. Anthony Damiani, Astronoesis, ms. to bepublished by Larson Publications in 1996.
14. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A.J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson, trs. (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancosco, 1995).
15. Plotinus, op.cit. I.6.7, p. 70.
Reprinted
from PARABOLA, The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Vol. XX, No. 4. (Winter,
1995)