untangling the web

Everything starts to unravel once you get past the initial gnarly knots. We are told to follow the right hand masculine path which strives for reason and logic, with asceticism and purity worthy goals, all free from the siren call of the female. She will shipwreck and take you away from achieving your personal greatness. Check out the ancient Greek Homeric story of Odysseus for further elucidation on this patriarchal trope. The left hand path is the forbidden path. It’s the sensuous path of Tantra. The path of caring and cultivating relationships. The feminine path contains chaos, pleasure, and desire. Hinduism and Buddhism proscribe ideals of non-attachment. Free yourself from desire they say; but wait, love is ultimately from desire. The woman is where the erotic and exotic principle comes from and all masculine spiritual paths are either ascetic or frown on the sex thing. Even Jesus, who hung out with Mary Magdalene, eventually says to disown your family in order to walk with him.

Luke 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

Wanting to stay pure and on the straight and narrow? To become desireless is so hard; well, actually it is impossible, so we create a straw man to blame who tempts us away from our path. He’s the adversary, the tempter Satan. All our fucked up erotic fantasies and desires for all forms of guilty pleasures and selfishness are because of Satan. He tempts us. He did it. What a crock. The real Satan is us and it is the masculine part of us who engenders the no desire, uncaring, unfeeling race to the top so we can glorify ourselves, and then fingers Eros as the devil so that the real greedy scoundrel can remain unmasked. This gives the Satan within free reign to run around the world promoting division in the name of economic progress. Satan has branched out as the world system of greed and everyone out for themselves, engendered by man, which is the direct result of a lack of love and compassion for our fellow human travellers. We enable the god of war, but we are loathe to admit it or try to change it earnestly.