Woman: the dream of God
While you are awake, a dream cannot influence you, but reality, the so-called reality around, does. An awakened person, an enlightened person, has become so alert that your reality also cannot influence him. If a woman passes, a beautiful woman, you are suddenly carried away. Desire has arisen, the desire to possess. If you are alert, the woman will pass by, but the desire will not arise — you have not been influenced, you have not been taken over. When this happens for the first time, when things move around you and you are not influenced, you will feel a subtle joy of being. For the first time really you feel that you are; nothing can drag you out of you. If you want to follow, that is another thing. That is your decision. But don’t deceive yourself. You can deceive. You can say, “Yes. The woman is not powerful, but I want to follow her, I want to possess her.” You can deceive. Many people go on deceiving. But you are deceiving nobody except yourself — then it is futile. Just take a close look: you will know the desire is there. The desire comes first, and then you start rationalizing it.
Intimacy with one woman or one man is better than having many superficial relationships. Love is not a seasonal flower, it takes years to grow. And only when it grows does it go beyond biology, and start having something of the spiritual in it. Just being with many women or many men will keep you superficial — entertained maybe, but superficial; occupied certainly, but that occupation is not going to help in inward growth. But a one-to-one relationship, a sustained relationship so that you can understand each other more closely, is tremendously beneficial.
If you are having many relationships you will not be able to dive deep into the psyche of the woman. And that is the only thing that is needed: to know your own inner feminine part. Relationship becomes a mirror. The woman starts looking into you and starts finding her own masculine part; the man looks into the woman and starts discovering his own femininity. And the more you become aware of your feminine — the other pole — the more whole you can be, the more integrated you can be. When your inner man and your inner woman have disappeared into each other, have become dissolved into each other, when they are no longer separate, when they have become one integrated whole, you have become an individual.
That’s what happens in every relationship. Rather than giving you contentment, it gives you a tremendous discontentment. Each relationship fails in this world — and it is good that it fails; it would have been a curse if it was not so. It is a blessing that it fails. Because each relationship fails, that’s why you start searching for the ultimate relationship with God, with existence, with the cosmos. You see the futility again and again, that it is not going to be satisfied by any man, by any woman; that each experience ends in tremendous frustration, begins in great hope and leaves you in great hopelessness. It is always so, it comes with great romance and ends in a bitter taste. When it happens again and again, one has to learn something — that each relationship is only an experimentation to prepare you for the ultimate relationship, for the ultimate love affair.
Whenever you are sexually related you are afraid, because sex is really not a relationship, it is an exploitation. If you are attached to a woman or man sexually, you are always afraid that this woman may go to somebody else, this man may move to somebody else. There is no relationship really, it is just mutual exploitation. You are exploiting each other, but you don’t love and you know it, so you are afraid.
Have a sexual relationship only when you have a loving relationship, so love and sex become associated. And love is a greater centre, a higher centre. Once sex is hitched to love, it starts moving upwards. Once you feel that you are loving, then never go to pray in a temple or in a mosque or in a church — that is foolish. Then again do the same as you did in the first place: your first prayer has to happen with your beloved or with your lover. Either before you make love, let there be prayer; or, after you have made love, let there be prayer; or — and the third is the best — while you are making love, let there be prayer.
Walk in the marketplace like a Buddha. Live in the world… the world is very enriching, because relationship mirrors. All relationships are mirrorlike. You see your face in the mirror of the other’s being. It is very difficult to see your own face directly — you will need the other, the mirror, to see your own face. And where can you find a better mirror than the eyes of the other?
Relationship is a mirror. Wherever you are related with a person — a wife, a husband, a friend, a lover, an enemy — a mirror is there. The wife mirrors the husband. You can see yourself there, and if you see an ugly husband, don’t try to leave your wife — the ugliness is in you. Drop that ugliness! This mirror is beautiful, and be thankful to this mirror. But stupid and cowardly people always escape and renounce; brave and wise people always live in relationship, and use it as a mirror. Living with someone is a constant mirroring around you. Every moment the other reveals you, exposes you. The closer the relationship, the clearer is the mirror: the more distant the relationship, the mirror is not so clear.
Relationship is needed only because you can’t be alone, because you are not yet capable of meditation. Hence, meditation is a MUST before you can really love. One should be capable of being alone, utterly alone, and yet tremendously blissful. Then you can love. Then your love is no more a need but a sharing, no more a necessity. You will not become dependent on the people you love. You will share — and sharing is beautiful, so woman become your God a dream that become reality.
His Holiness Patriarch Elijah of Jerusalem
Secular name Prof. Giuseppe Savazzi