The Heart’s Desire
Every heart desires a mate. For some reason, beyond our comprehension, nature has created us so that we are incomplete in ourselves. Neither man nor woman alone can know the joy of human connections; neither man nor woman singly can create another human being.
In fact, our outward difference of form expressly influences and colors all our lives. The innermost spirit of every person yearns for a sense of union with another soul and the perfecting of oneself, which such union brings.
In all young people, unless they have inherited depraved or diseased faculties, the desire of our race springs up fresh in its primeval beauty.
The dreams and bodily changes of adolescence create in the youth and maiden the strange and powerful impulses of the human instinct. The bodily differences of the two, now accentuated, become mystical, alluring to each other and enchanting in their promise. Their differences unite and hold the man and the woman together. Their bodily union is the solid nucleus of an immense fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the end of the earth. Some are lighter than the filmiest cobweb, or the softest wave of music. These threads are iridescent with the colors of the visible rainbow and all the invisible wavelengths of the soul.
However much you may conceal under assumed cynicism, worldliness, or self-seeking, your heart yearns, with a great longing, for the fulfillment of the beautiful dream of a life-long union with a mate. Your heart knows, instinctively, that it is only a mate who can give full understanding of the potential greatness in your soul. With a committed relationship, you will experience tender laughter of childlike wonder that lingers enchantingly even in the white-haired.
The search for a mate is a quest for an understanding heart clothed in a beautiful body, unlike our own.
In the modern world, those who set out on high endeavors or who consciously separate themselves from the ordinary course of social life are relatively few. It is not to them that I am speaking. The great majority of our citizens – both men and women – after a time of waiting exploring or of moving from one attraction to another,” settle down” and marry.
Very few are so cynical as to marry without the hope of happiness. In the kisses and the hand touch of the betrothed are a zest and exhilaration, which stir the blood like wine. You read poetry; listen entranced to music. The songs echo your pulses. You see reflected in each other’s eyes the beauty of the world. In the midst of this celestial intoxication, you naturally assume that, as you are on the threshold of your lives, you are also at the entrance of your experience of spiritual unity.
The more sensitive, the more romantic and the more idealistic you are, the more your soul craves for some kindred soul with whom your whole being can unite. Everyone has some measure of this desire. There are countless stories, from real life, about stern men of affairs, who have achieved worldly success of every sort. Due to the lack of a mate, they live with a sense that the limbs of their souls are missing. Edward Carpenter has beautifully voiced this longing:
One of the dearest wishes of the soul is that one other person in the world towards whom openness of interchange should establish itself and exist. You should conceal nothing from that person whose body is as dear in every part, as one’s own. You should not feel a sense of thine, or mine in property or possession. Into whose mind one’s thoughts should naturally flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a new illumination. Between the two, there should be spontaneous rebound of sympathy in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life. “Love’s Coming of Age.”
It may happen that this book falls into the hands of someone who declares that he or she has never felt the fundamental yearning to form this perfect expression of humanity. If this is you, it is possible that unconsciously you will be a suffering from a real malady – sex-anesthesia. This is the name given to an inherent coldness, which unconsciously lacks the usual human impulse of tenderness.
If you feel you are one of the people described above, instead of sitting in judgment on the majority, you may understand some new things about yourself by reading books such as The Sexual Question (English translation 1908) by August Forel. You may then discover to which type of our various humanity you belong. You need not read my book, I wrote it about and for, ordinary men and women.
If you yearn for a deeply happy union, the information in this book will give you power to make your life fuller and richer. This book will also place you in a position to use your sacred trust as a creator of lives to come.
It has happened, in human history that individuals have been able to conquer this natural craving for a mate and set celibacy up as a higher ideal. In its most beautiful expression and most sublime manifestations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a worldwide love, in place of the narrower human of home and children. Many saints and sages, reformers and dogmatists have modeled their lives on this ideal. However, you cannot take such individuals as the standard of the race. They are out of its main current: they are branches, which may flower, but never reproduce, in a bodily form.
In this world, your spirit not only permeates matter but also find your only expression through matter. So long as we are human, we must have bodies. Bodies obey chemical and physiological, as well as spiritual laws.
If our race as a whole, set out to pursue an ideal, which ultimately eliminates bodies altogether, we should find the conditions of our environment so different that we could no longer speak of the human race.
In the meantime, we are human. We each live our lives according to laws, some of which we have begun to understand and many, which we haven’t. The most complete person consciously or unconsciously obeys the profound physical laws of our being. In obeying these laws, the spirit receives as much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible.
Your mind and spirit finds its fullest expression blocked by the misuse, neglect or gross abuse of your body, in which it dwells.
The ignorant or self-indulgent breaking of fundamental laws disrupts profound harmonies. The modern, small-minded ascetic endeavors to grow spiritually by destroying his physical instincts instead of using them. I believe we are set in the world to mold matter so that it may express our spirits. It is foolish to fight the immemorial laws of our physical being. You, who do so, unconsciously lose the finest means in which wondrous, new creations arise.
To use a homely simile – one might compare two human beings to two bodies charged with electricity of different potential. Isolated from each other the electric forces within them are invisible, but if they come into the right juxtaposition the force transforms and a spark, a glow of burning light arises between them. Such is love.
From the body of your loved one’s simple, sweet flesh, which ancient creature instincts urge you to desire, springs the wonder of a new bodily life. You experience the larger horizon of human sympathy and the glow of spiritual understanding, which a solitary soul could never have attained.
You may consciously feel that you have had physical union without such spiritual results, perhaps even without attaining ordinary happiness. If that is so, it is because, consciously or unconsciously, you have broken some profound law, which govern the love of a man and woman.
Only by learning to hold a bow correctly, can a performer draw music from a violin: only by obedience to the laws of the lower plane can one-step up to the plane above.
Questions
- Has anyone ever expressed concern about how much I drink, work, eat, gamble or play around sexually? Yes or no, If yes, where does the concern lie?
- Do I have healthy relationships with a circle of friends? Who are they?
- Is having a loving relationship with one person important to me? Why or why not?