My friend laments that he is lonely, and that the cause isn’t a lack of a relationship, but romance. His definition of romance can be put in terms of a “strong, usually short-lived attachment or enthusiasm” that includes sex. He loves that initial, exciting stage in a relationship, which, as he says, is eventually shattered the moment you notice that the other person isn’t as sexy anymore, that they are boring, they are smelly sometimes, they look terrible in the morning, they have lousy habits. In other words, they are no longer the ideal that you thought they were. And neither are you.

 

Like my friend, I could be considered a romance junkie. My twenties were a series of short-lived romantic attachments eventually dashed by reality. But there’s nothing more fun than being smitten with new love, or lust—the adventure, the anticipation, the payoff of feeling sexy and loved and even orgasmic. Eighteen years ago, I had a romance with the man who would become my husband. We are still happily together, have always been faithful to each other, and have romance, but it’s different. The intensity has shifted into a more sustained romance brought on by sharing so many experiences.

 

Our long-term romance provides the opportunity to build on what we know about each other, like a book. Chapter by chapter, the story gets deeper and richer. Rather than expecting to live up to an ideal, we help each other accept ourselves and each other (they are closely related). The non-ideal aspects are fodder for the story—those funny, knowing things people share. It’s romantic to be devoted to someone in spite of the emerging lines on our faces and our slowing paces.

 

But the question remains. Is it possible to have the “wheee!” romantic feeling you get with new love at any other time, including in a long-term relationship?

 

What is romance?

 

The word romance comes from the root word roman and first referred to languages derived from Latin, used by the Romans. Later, romance described a genre of literature written in the romance languages that typically involved chivalry or knightly adventures. The genre expanded to include any “extravagant fiction,” and narratives where “the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life.” [1] Romanticism as a cultural movement emphasizes feeling over reason, sentimental connection with others, and the sacredness of nature as opposed to culture. [2]

 

The typical view of romance still includes elements of conquest, adventure, and fiction. It is a kind of escape, a sense of being carried away by feeling, head over heels. We see the objects of our affection as a sacred acts of nature and perfection, and when our view of them becomes realistic, the lust and the fantasy slip away. Short romances are like reading the first chapters of many books without allowing the stories to unfold. We prevent a longer love story to reveal itself, sometimes because we don’t think we’re compatible with the person, but often because after the conquest, we’re afraid to open our own books to someone because we fear they won’t love or accept our non-idealized self, because we don’t.

 

Now, I’m not dissing lust. It’s part of our human experience and has its own important value. Without it we humans would have been extinct a long time ago. I’m suspicious of people who diss lust, because many critics of “lower” sexual impulses do so out of fear or distrust of their own impulses and the power of sex in general.

 

Many, though, know there’s more to it than that, and that humans are complex. Part of the complexity is that human psychology and morality unfold through developmental stages: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, and Kosmoscentric. [3] Each stage transcends and includes the one before as our awareness widens. When we are children, we are completely self-centered, and as we mature we embrace and open to others, to members of our “tribes,” to the world, and to the Kosmos (All That Is). 

 

According to relationship counselor Curtis Lang, lust is a product of the ego, which, again, is an important part of us. But when we as adults can’t get beyond egocentricity, there can be a problem.

 

Lust, being based upon the egoistic personality, has a narcissistic orientation that values the loved one to the extent that the loved one flatters, upholds, and reflects the lover's ego and gratifies the lover's physical desires.

 

Lust sees the lover as object, a trophy to be possessed. The loved one’s positive attributes are added to the laundry list of “that which is mine, that which is me”, by the egoistic mind, and this conquest of the loved one’s desirable qualities contributes to a false sense of enhanced self-worth on the part of the lover. The lustful lover will continuously refer to a mental scorecard when evaluating potential lovers and mates, even during the course of the relationship, and often during the sexual act itself. What am I getting out of this exchange? What’s in it for me?

The mind sets up conditions for loving. I will love you if you will love me. I will love you if you fulfill my fantasies. I will love you if you are lovable. I will love you if you lose weight, get a job, pay more attention to your wardrobe, and make more money. These mental conditions kill love. Pure love is unconditional love, and is free of mental considerations and expectations of all kinds

These mental conditions are a reflection of narcissistic love. Narcissistic [egocentric] love exists not to give but to receive. Narcissistic love exists for the convenience of the ego. The ego wants to be flattered, expanded and put on a pedestal, relative to the loved one and the entire rest of creation. [4]

All love relationships have their share of expectations and conditions, but the healthy ones rely on self-reflection, mutual sensitivity, and honesty, which help us grow as people. This can only occur beyond the egocentric stage.

 

Does romance exist in every stage of life?

 

To know for sure, we must redefine romance and identify where these new kinds of romance might be found. The modern view doesn’t cut it—the view that our love partners need to be “you complete me” kinds of people, like we are a matched set. Most of us have learned that we can’t realistically expect that because people are just too complex. Are we asking too much of our love partners to meet all of our romantic needs, or can we find it in other places while maintaining our fidelity and trust? This question has to do with whether or not romance necessarily includes sex.

 

When we think about romance as expression of love, we can give it the context and latitude it deserves, and include sex or not. Using this definition, we can even include lust, and importantly so. Because we humans are so confused by sexual roles and outdated cultural mores, and so frequently confuse love and sex, it’s often hard to know what we’re feeling and expressing or what is driving it. According to Seth, similar to how we often separate intellect and intuition,

 

…in the same way you have attempted to force the expression of love into a purely—or exclusively—sexual orientation. An affectionate caress or kiss between members of the same sex is generally not considered proper. The taboos include most aspects of the sense of touch in connection with the human body.

 

Touching is considered so basically sexual that the most innocuous touching of any portion of the body by another person is considered potentially dangerous. On the one hand you are too specific in your use of the term “sexuality”; yet in another way and in that context, you feel that any kind of affection must naturally lead to sexual expression, if given its way. Your beliefs make this sexual eventuality appear as a fact of experience.

 

This also forces you to guard your emotional life very closely. As a result, any show of love is to some extent inhibited unless it can legitimately find expression sexually. In many instances love itself seems wrong because it must imply sexual expression at times when such expression is not possible, or even desired. Some people have a great capacity for love, devotion, and loyalty which would naturally seek expression in many diverse ways—through strong enduring friendships, devotion to causes in which they believe, through vocations in which they help others. They may not be particularly sexually oriented. This need not mean that they are inhibiting their sexuality. It is pathetic and ludicrous for them to believe that they must have intercourse frequently in their youth, or to set up standards of normality against which they must measure their sexual experience.

 

In fact, Western society has attempted to force all expression of love and devotion into sexual activity, or otherwise ban it entirely. Sexual performance is considered the one safe way of using the great potential of human emotions. When it seems to you that society is becoming licentious, in many ways it is most restrained and inhibited.

 

It means that all options except sexual freedom have been denied. The great force of love and devotion is withdrawn from personal areas of individual creativity through purposeful work. It is being withdrawn from expression through government or law. It is being denied expression through meaningful personal relationships, and forced into a narrow expression through a sexuality that then will indeed become meaningless. [5]

 

We have constant, natural impulses to express love, and many of us need to relearn how to do it.

 

How do we expand our ability to express our love more freely?

 

It’s tricky business to effect changes in ourselves and the world in response to the call for personal growth, what Seth calls “facing up to the abilities of consciousness.” [6] There are no guidebooks for how people are supposed to go about widening their expressions of love and devotion and not get arrested. Certainly communication and attention to our own comfort levels, those of the people to whom we wish to open ourselves, and our love partners, is required to navigate through this new territory. After all, we are people who wish to evolve into worldcentric lifestyles, and beyond into Kosmoscentric, as many of us often consider what our non-physical selves will be like. We are collectively trying to feel out (or feel up, as the case may be) this next stage of development for ourselves and for the world.

 

I recently struck up a friendship with a man I knew in grade school, on whom I had a major crush. I was surprised to learn that we have a lot in common, although I’d never really gotten to know him before—after all, I’d reduced him to an idealized projection of my 12-year-old ego. I soon surmised that it was only my friendship he wanted (isn’t it odd how we relegate friendship to terms like “just friends” when that is almost always the better portion of any relationship?). And the friendship has been very valuable for a number of reasons. 

 

For one, I’ve appreciated the ability to communicate and “grow through” this with my partner. I have great appreciation for being married to someone who is secure and generous enough to share me as long as it doesn’t intrude on what we have together, time-wise or on our level of intimacy. Because my spouse is my most intimate friend and support system and I am his, I can be a friend to my friend because of my marriage, not in spite of it.

 

My husband and I agree I’m going through a “regression in the service of the ego,” a process where normal ego functions are bypassed to allow a return to a “lower” state to repair some portion of ourselves. I think of my childhood self—how I was ignored by my dad, how unloved and ugly I felt, and how I believed that if only this—this!—person would find me beautiful, that I would be worthy of being on the planet. Of course, that never happened, at least in the way I thought I wanted it to.

 

My friend expects authenticity from me because values me, not a fantasy of me that relies on physical sex appeal. It is liberating to take sex appeal out of the equation, not just because it allows for a more authentic relationship, but because it frees me to explore my sexuality in the wider sense—to expand my notions of who I am, to widen my awareness. I’m beginning to experience my sexuality the way Elias describes, which is broader than being just about sex or sex appeal, and incorporates the way we perceive and interact with everything.

 

“… sexuality…. involves much more than merely your identification of physical sexuality, but involves all of your perception. Therefore, it is affecting of every area of your focus.

 

“This belief system intertwines itself with all other belief systems. It is quite entangled with all of your belief systems, and it addresses to how you view yourself, how you view other individuals, and how you view your world ... and how you interact with all of these elements of your reality. The belief system of sexuality involves all of your reality, not merely that one very small aspect of physical, sexual interactions.” [7]

 

Elias implies that aside from physical sexuality there is also subtle sexuality and causal sexuality. As multidimensional beings, there are three energy fields or realms that we exist in simultaneously—physical, subtle, causal. The subtle realm is connected through energy centers (or chakras), dreaming states, and our essence (soul). The causal realm is connected through energy centers, deep dreamless sleep states, and nondual formless Emptiness. We experience these fields as states every twenty-four hours.

 

Because subtle energy is connected with essence, there is a connection between subtle sexuality and our deepest passions and intent in life.

 

Discovering and expressing our deepest passion is key

 

Passion is defined as “an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction; love; a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept.” Getting perspective on egocentric passion can allow us to explore our deeper passions. This is what Seth referred to when he said, “capacity for love, devotion, and loyalty which would naturally seek expression in many diverse ways—through strong enduring friendships, devotion to causes in which they believe, through vocations in which they help others” and “individual creativity and purposeful work.”

 

Identifying activities, vocations, and causes that we are passionate about is something that we often need to figure out later in life, as “finding one’s purpose” is unfortunately not something we’re typically raised to do. [8] Yet how many mid-life crises and infidelities are the result of deep passion left undiscovered? How many of our romantic notions of what we project onto others and onto the world are the result of unsatisfying, impassionate lives? According to Kris, the most important message he has to give us is for us to express ourselves passionately!

 

Your physical existence in itself is a thing of great passion. It is a MASTERFUL work of art unmatched even by the most passionate of artists. And they do not read words, or listen to others and then claim they have done the works of art.

 

Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and all of the great masters got their fingers dirty, their hands dirty. They were, most of them, intent on a passionate expression of their inner visions and they often lived life to the extremes, and were able to convey their passion in a manner that has touched the world since. That is why they are highly regarded, and their works are prized often beyond compare.

 

And most of you great artists of consciousness turn around, look at yourselves, look at your bodies, look at your lives, and often spit on it, thinking it is inadequate, thinking it is less than desirable; and something else, something better, must come along to uplift your supposed drab experiences and lives. And you have forgotten that the echoes of time and the stars, the bones buried in your planet—they are all part of your precious experience. And no other individual can so masterfully, and beautifully, and lovingly express their passions the way that each of you can.

 

(Forcefully and intently) And then you often turn around and believe that, instead of being filled with a great joy and a great love, that you are filled with iniquity and you are flawed. So we come along and try to point out that there are times in your lives when you CAN see the beauty and the joy that exists in your passion for life. And if we can remind only one of you of that life and passion that lives within your very bones, then we consider OUR purpose fulfilled. [9]

 

Our passions, too, may express the stage of development we’re at, or earlier stages we need to repair. For example, if we’ve always focused on the needs of others, perhaps we need to take up a passion that requires us to be selfish. There are an infinite number of things we can be passionate about, from taking up painting to devotion to causes like feeding the hungry.

 

The saying is true that sometimes the problem isn’t that our problems are too big, but that they are too small. While it’s true that people create their own realities, and trying to help others actually hinders them more than it helps, only the most egocentric people categorically believe that other people’s problems are not their problem, too. They just haven’t developed the sense of empathy required to do so.

 

Must romance, or passion, include other people?

 

Not if we stop trying to “force all expression of love and devotion into sexual activity” and move beyond the limited view of sexuality to what Seth and Elias describe. Romantic relationships might very well include inanimate objects, or non-objects. In fact, maybe that’s the whole point—to move beyond objectification of who or what we consider our romantic partners.

 

An author recently described Jimi Hendrix’s “romance with rock.” Once Jimi picked up a guitar “he never put it down; he wore it on his back to school and slept with it at night.” [10] Anyone who’s seen him play knows we were witnessing romance—some ecstatic, subtle energy swirl—you could see it on his face.

 

Clearly it wasn’t about another person, or even about sex, as he wasn’t really having sex with his guitar. It was an expression of sexuality and emotion, which in Elias’s view are the primary reasons for becoming physical.

 

The reason you are manifest within this dimension—your purpose, your mission, your reason—is to experience. You are NOT manifest within this dimension in a school. You are NOT manifest in this dimension to be accomplishing of great deeds, although you may be choosing to be experiencing this. You ARE manifest within this dimension, and ANY physical dimension, merely to experience the purity and qualities of physical action.

 

Within this particular dimension, you have created this reality based upon the exploration of two basic elements of physical focus; sexuality and emotion. You experience both of these elements intensely. All of your creations within this particular dimension reflect these basic elements. You may even look to a rock, and this stone shall invoke within you a feeling of male or female and an emotion if you are so tuning into it, for ALL of your reality reflects these elements in this particular dimension. [11]

 

Using Elias’s definitions, we can begin to see how expanding our view of sexuality can expand our view of romance beyond sexual partnership, or even beyond other people or things, because it has to do with our perceptions of ourselves and everything we do.

 

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious. – Walt Whitman

 

After all, even the most exciting trysts aren’t really about the other person, they’re always about how we feel in the process. They’re always about us in relation to other. We create our own realties in mutual exchange with “other,” the definition of which changes as we widen to include other as self.

 

Does romance happen outside of us?

 

Believing that romance happens anywhere else but within us seems to be part of the belief structure of egocentricity. This is relief to me personally. Like many people in our extremely youth-focused culture, I’ve been so self-conscious about how I look, worrying about being pleasing, that I’d barely thought about how I’ve objectified men or myself in the process. I’ve known all along, of course, that my own insecurities have driven that. Without that insecurity and that investment, I’m free to think I’m sexy without an end goal, to “dance as if no one is watching,” because after all, what difference does it make? I think, “If you want to look, fine. If not, fine too.”

 

It is also becoming abundantly clear to me that, in time, my dwindling hormones will eventually choke my supply of physical sex appeal, which is kind of a pity because I spent the first dozen years or so of my life denying that I was supposed to have any—there are those social mores for you. So, assuming my old body will make it to the dance floor to shake my old booty, people might be begging me to sit down. And I hope I will still stay and say, “If you want to look, fine. If not, fine too.”

 

This is all leaving me to my sense of subtle sexuality, or internalized lusciousness, as it were. I am romancing myself. I’ve begun taking note of some of the more common sensual events—tastes, the feel of my muscles in my body, the resonance of my voice in my throat, the words I speak. Recently, walking on the beach where sandpipers had just left their tracks in the surf, I felt a rush go through my body. It was a moment of union that I expect I will know more fully and frequently as I open myself to the knowledge that this really is all about experience and not about doing, but just being in the present moment and opening to my multidimensional self.

 

In other words, it may be that romance can only happen inside of us, and if it’s not happening, then rather than looking externally for it, we need to widen our view of ourselves, to stoke our passions and go beyond egocentric or ethnocentric views to include “other”—people, the world, the Kosmos. That is what allows us to invest ourselves in causes that help others. As we become worldcentric, we begin to understand they are us.

 

You are the other and the other is you. This is a significant expression, and your physical lives as we have described recently when you enter physical experience in this life, you alter the terrain of time and space and history in unimaginable ways because you are Earth Gods and Goddesses. You give new definitions to reality and to others because the others are you. [12] – Kris

 

Must romance be limited to physical reality?

 

When I no longer have my beloved partner, or even my body, and I depart this physical plane, then what? Who or what will I have to romantically cavort? It will be my ever-widening Self, the remembrance of my Source through my sense of subtle sexuality. After all, according to Elias, Love is a truth, a constant across All That Is. This means that wherever we go, Love is there. And my afterdeath environment will provide a view of my many aspects and focuses—a soulful, poetic wave throughout time and space and all of the people I’ve been and known—so that I may continue to expand my sense of Oneness.

 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.) – Walt Whitman

 

This is the remembrance of essence that Elias talks about—not actual memories, but the widening and accepting of our multidimensional selves.

Throughout your history within this dimension, you have attached more and more to your reality of your belief systems and you have moved farther and farther away from the remembrance of essence, and in creating this separation, you also are creating of a mistrust, for you are not remembering self and the gloriousness of your abilities within self, and you reinforce all of this–what you term to be negativity–in a lack of acceptance of self, for what shall you trust if you are not understanding and viewing unknown? But it is not unknown. It is merely forgotten, and in this lack of remembrance, as you create more and more of this separation, you create this rift, so to speak, between yourself and yourself, and in this, you create your expression of what I have expressed previously in your oubliette. You isolate yourselves into believing that you are singular and that you are alone, and that you are unworthy and that you do not create well enough, and that all outside of you is better or that you may aspire to be better, and I express to you that all you need be aspiring to, in physical terms, is the remembrance of yourself. [13]

 

While remembrance is usually presented by Elias as happening with respect to the Shift in consciousness in process, it is not limited to that. When asked if the Buddha’s experience during the moment of enlightenment was the same state of remembrance that we are experiencing during this shift in consciousness, he said, with some qualification, “yes.”

 

ELIAS: I may express to you an identification of what may be translated into what you know within this physical dimension. The experience is an actual allowance of BEING the remembrance, a moment of incorporating the state of being of remembrance of consciousness and essence, not in association with this shift in consciousness.

This is the reason that there is much attention offered to this experience. For in this time framework, you all throughout your globe are moving into that experience of remembrance but in association with your choice to be creating this shift in consciousness, and in this, the individual has allowed that experience NOT in association with the shift in consciousness. Are you understanding?

JULIE: He was not involved with it, with the shift, but we will be able to incorporate something similar within the shift?

ELIAS: Yes. This is a state of being, of knowing the remembrance of essence [subtle] and of consciousness [causal]—the knowing, the dropping of the veil of separation and the recognition of what you are as consciousness [causal] and essence [subtle].

JULIE: I know I shouldn’t ask this, but is that possible for me too?

ELIAS: Yes, my friend! Quite! You also are participating in this shift in consciousness, and you are not excluded from the action of it. Ha ha! [14]

 

Romance is Remembrance

 

Romance is perhaps what it has always been and always will be—our recognition of physical, subtle, and causal expressions of love translated into whatever form of remembrance we choose. Ken Wilber describes the causal kind of romance as the ecstatic communion of Emptiness and Form.

 

The crucial point of kundalini yoga and the seven chakras is: all seven, without exception, are radiant forms of Shakti, the energy of the Goddess, in an eternal embrace with Shiva, the pure formless Witness. All Forms are one with Emptiness: Shakti and Shiva are eternally making love, bound to each other with a fierce devotion that time, turmoil, death and destiny cannot even begin to touch.

 

In Dzogchen Buddhism, the same idea is expressed in the thangka of the Adi-Buddha Samantabhadra (the very highest Buddha) and his consort, Samantabhadri. Samantabhadra is depicted as a deep blue/black figure, naked, seated in the lotus posture. On his lap, facing him in sexual congress, is Samantabhadri, also naked, but a luminous bright white.

 

Samantabhadra represents the dharmakaya or radical Emptiness, which is completely formless and therefore “black” (as in deep dreamless sleep). Samantabhadri represents the rupakaya, the entire world of Form, which is a brilliant white luminous display. Emptiness and form, consciousness and matter, spirit and the world. But the point is, they are making love; they are one in the ecstatic embrace of each other; they are united through all eternity by the unbreakable bond of a Love that is invincible. They are, to each other, One Taste [causal, Kosmos, All That Is].

 

This depiction of Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri (Purusha and Prakriti, Shiva and Shakti, emptiness and form, wisdom and compassion, Eros and Agape, ascending and descending) is not merely a symbol. It is a depiction of a direct realization. When you settle back as I-I [descended self-ascended Self], and rest as the formless Witness, you literally are Samantabhadra; you are the great Unborn, the radically unqualifiable Godhead. You are a great black Emptiness of infinite release. And yet, in the space of that Emptiness that you are, the entire universe is arising moment to moment: the clouds are floating through your awareness, those trees are arising in your awareness, those singing birds are one with you.

 

You, as formless Witness (Samantabhadra), are one with the entire World of Form (Samantabhadri), and it is forever an erotic union. You are literally making love to the entire world as it arises. The brutal, torturous gap between subject and object has collapsed, and you and the world have entered an intimate, sexual, ecstatic union, edged with bliss, radiant in release, the thunder and lightning of only One Taste.

 

It has always been so. [15]

 

Within each of us is an Ultimate Lover, whom we glimpse in our fantasies, who loves us without condition and with whom we seek union. Whether it is the first surge of adolescence in looking for physical connection with “other,” to our journey beyond this physical form, there is always a play between our having and our desiring. It is about other and it is not. It is about ourselves and it is not. It is always old and It is always new. Life, in order to be the Grand Love Story that it is, must involve the elements of any love story—overcoming perceived impediments to love.

 

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.

You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones. —Rumi

 

Romance, then, is an eternal, lusty, Divine ride that only needs to be remembered.

 

That is why the Buddha smiles that way.

 

Endnotes: