FUCKIN-A, MAN: THE FIFTH AND HIGHEST FORM OF LOVE

Man, I've been burned by the passion of love more than I care to tell you, specially in the sense that the troubadours sing of it, when the real fuck blends into the spiritual maelstrom, and a man destroys his "sacred" and "lawful" marriage and risks everything just to get a little strange on the side.

"Among the troubadours...," says Campbell, "the beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, "that" woman. The love was for "her". And the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth." (MTLB, p. 163)

By way of further illumination, the following rumination is from Campbell's lectures in MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 156-157:

[Open quote.]
And so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, “O my Lord,” one can say, “now reveal thyself!” and he will have to respond.

There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands’ beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.

The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason. Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of reason on one hand, and passionate love on the other, have been a source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the “Spirit,” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”
[Close quote.]

Speaking of "Radha", Krishna's passion, his "mortal married mistress"—in Spokane, over in Brown's Addition, sits a nice house with a view on the edge of the Spokane River. And in the nicely appointed garage of that house is taught and practiced Radha Yoga, a practice I took two lessons in a very short time ago, but as in all things where "divine" things are spoken of or a "divine light" summoned, Radha Yoga didn't work for me.

I can't get out of my body to spiritual things. Perhaps that's why for me sex was so spiritual and so fraught with the delicate delights of suffering and risk taking. The troubadours must have had the same spiritual problem.

"Hey, out there, I'm trapped," I shout/think.

"O, yeah, guess you'll have to accept it," another, rational voice replies.
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"Is sex better than drugs? That depends on the pusher." —unknown author