Another interesting passage:
It's curious and amusing, isn't it? You feel attracted to someone, you woo and pursue, you win this person over, you make love, and maybe you finally marry. But somehow none of that puts an end to your longing. Your passion still wants something more. So then you may try having kids -- maybe that's the fulfillment that will satisfy your yearning. Or you try to perform a makeover on your partner, so that he or she will finally do it for you. But that creates more problems, so then you might try couples therapy or take up workshops on Tantric sex. Yet no matter how much things may improve, your longing for something more never entirely disappears.This is good advice for me, and perfect timing for receiving it. That longing has been awakened in me, more powerfully than I have ever known, and it's tempting to see it as only a manifestation in relative space. While that is true, it's only partial, and the bigger reality is that it is pointing me to what is already infinite within me.
But this is not a problem! It's not a sign that something is wrong with you for wanting more or with your beloved for failing to satisfy all your desires. We can only make peace with the endlessness of our passion through recognizing the true object of our desire.
Desire focused on a person can never be totally satisfied. That's because the one we love stirs our passion for something that lies beyond this finite person. Kierkegaard called this "infinite passion," or "passion for the infinite."
Other animals, being totally rooted in the finite, are satisfied with immediate gratification of basic needs. But since human consciousness has roots in the infinite, we can discover in the beauty of finite things a much larger beauty shining through them. Our longing for more arises from what is infinite within us, and it aims for the infinite -- boundless openness and love. It's never just this woman that I love. It's also the way she suggests and reveals a larger beauty beyond herself, sparking an expansive opening in me that lets me touch the beauty right here within myself. No theory of human love can ever be complete without this understanding.
Your longing is holy because it wants to link you up with the infinite source of all, as it lives within you. That is why, if you can open yourself to the energy of longing itself, it will take you beyond gross craving and attachment. Through your longing -- the feeling that you cannot live if living is without true love -- you turn toward love at its living source.
~ John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships
A blogger friend warned me that following my recent experience there might be some "dark night" shadow stuff that comes up. She was all too correct. Some parts of my mind want to confuse the experience with the situation in which it arose -- and certainly the situation was crucial to it happening. However, in linking the two and seeing them as inseparable, I despair of ever being gifted with that experience again.
That experience was a potential already living in my shadow, and as it came forth it dragged along with it an opposite fear -- that I am unworthy of the gift, that I will never again experience it in either relative space or infinite space.
The reality is that through the tangible, fleshy reality of that experience I was pointed toward the infinite within me. If I can follow that "holy longing" that Welwood describes, and see it as a path to my own possibilities, then I need not fear of clinging to that first taste of something bigger than myself.
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