Time: Afternoon.
Place: Laundry Room.
Date: A year ago.
Me: An intellectual.
She: A witchy woman.
Context: I don’t remember.
“Love cannot coexist with lust,” said I.
“That can’t be true,” said she, “defend.”
We put a pin in the conversation so that I could collect my thoughts. I remember scribbling furiously in a notebook as though I were preparing for a televised debate… and nothing came of it.
I ‘knew’ it to be true because I had felt in my body that the two states were mutually exclusive, but I lacked the self-knowledge/mastery to do much more than flail my limbs and point at a chalkboard as though I were unhinged.
Last night I was reminded of the conversation, as, moving my sexual energy around with breath work, I noticed the polarity within my body, between my heart and my genitals.
Between contentment and sexual desire.
As one expanded, the other contracted, like a stretchy bladder held in two, alternatively squeezing, hands.
Up. Down. Hard. Soft. Hot. Cold. Need. Have. Sexual-centered. Heart-centered.
If you are wondering what this has to do with love and lust, one of the primary ways I experience the ‘higher’ forms of love is contentment.
Now, I’m not interested in the semantics of healthy desire vs. lust or in discussing whether or not you can love from a place of need. How you relate to your sexuality/sexual partners is up to you. All sex is ultimately a complex circulation of multiple energies.
I am an alchemist, and what interests me here is the Hermetic Principle of Polarity and how its application can make inner alchemy – transmuting one energy or state into another – effortless.
Principle of Polarity
According to “The Kybalion,” the Principle of Polarity is that, “Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”
Now, if you’ve escaped Duality, this all probably sounds very cute.
And if your primary experience is some flavor of human we’ve got the mystery meat we need to get an alchemical stew going.
Whatever you are experiencing at any given moment has its opposite.
Opposites are identical in nature – even “universally reconcilable.”
If the inference isn’t clear, it is explicitly stated that the proper knowledge and application of this principle can allow you to “change your polarity.”
Further, a Master “can polarize himself at the point at which he desires to rest” and stay there, avoiding the roller coaster of emotions most of us are subject to. (The Principle of Rhythm, ensures that the ‘pendulum’ is a feature and not a bug of human existence.)
It is even said that with the proper gnosis of this principle, one can “control reality.”
If you’re like me, none of this sounds inherently new.
If it’s esoteric, I’ve read it, did nothing with it, and have forgotten it, ten times over.
“Knowledge without use and expression is a vain thing, bringing no good to its possessor or to the [human] race.” ~ The Kybalion
Everyday Alchemy
I have been using my understanding of the Principle of Polarity religiously since I discovered it.
The story is not important; suffice it to say I discovered the Principle in a time of supreme heartache and stress and I absolutely refused to process it like a human being.
I refuse to feel my feelings, and I resent the implication that I need to!
Stories are just stories after all, and what is a shattered nervous system? Illusory bullshit! Just like the four months of chronic illness that came with it! If I keep working out for three hours every day, I’ll be too tired to feel anything!
… You should feel your feelings.
… Is something that I feel I should say. What we resist persists.
Know when to feel your feelings, feels more true to me. For ought else, there’s alchemy.
Close your eyes.
Think of the last time you felt love. Can you conjure that feeling into the present?
Can you do the same when you’re feeling apathy, hate, or fear?
Now you can try gratitude. There is always something to be grateful for; if you cannot think of something, make it up! How would you feel if you had what you think you lack?
Carry that gratitude with you and you’ll have transitioned from lack to having.
What are the stories you tell yourself?
Do you find the negative when you could look at the positive?
I have been feeling resentment towards broader institutions that are present in my life. When such resentments arises I tell myself, “I am the change I wish to see around me.”
Now I feel empowered, and by embodying the sentiment my boundaries are stronger. It is easier for me to let the old story fade.
Some weeks ago, I found myself overwhelmed with anxiety. The opposite of anxiety is excitement. I tried to stimulate excitement within me and it wasn’t working.
That was a time when I surrendered to the emotion, though I did not surrender to the story behind the emotion.
It passed quickly.
Not surrendering to the story can look like editing it in real-time.
I am safe. No one is treating me maliciously.
It can look like changing the story after the fact.
Perhaps someone close to you has hurt you.
How dare they keep treating me like this after all I’ve done?
Is it not more easeful to alter your perspective?
They are hurting and there is no malice. I’ve co-created our dynamic with lax boundaries.
We often feel a certain way and tell ourselves stories that justify the feeling. The story gets repeated, as it is a human tendency to live in the past (anxiety) or the future. (Fear.)
This becomes more troublesome when we find ourselves reliving negativity.
In the past I’ve ‘ignored’ the stories, recognizing that they were just shadows. This only served to defer the reckoning that needed to be had, no matter how ‘enlightened’ I saw myself to be.
Take care of the parts of you that are an animal, reacting to stimuli.
Something must be felt in the moment.
Launching forward, choose what you wish to feel, hand-in-hand with new stories. Make one up if you have to!
In my experience, the imaginary colors will bleed into what we call physical reality.
We attract the energies we embody, unwitting or not.
Closing Thoughts
Using the Hermetic Principle of Polarity I have been able to maintain a steady emotional state regardless of my external circumstances, and the benefits have compounded over time both in how I feel and in the reality that I experience.
Of course, I still feel negative emotions from time to time; it’s a part of life. And, the negative poles of experience need not shake us too brusquely.
What of love and lust?
My certainty was not misplaced. Lust is an unchecked desire that subsumes all else. Love has no appetite. Intellectually, as in my body, they are mutually exclusive states of being.
And, polarity does not demand opposition.
Lust is just one end of a scale that may be flipped to contentment, virtue, or focus at any time.
Practically speaking, lust is just an issue of misplaced focus.
In Daoist sexuality, it is taught that men project from their sexual centers, while women project from the heart. The master first attains balance between these two centers within himself. The act of love-making fuses these two centers into a greater whole.
In this sense, something akin to lust, removed by a matter of degree, can coexist with love.
I still stand by what I said, and all truths are half-truths.
Addendum
When I first wrote this, I knew it was missing something.
Lao Tzu said, “Recognize beauty and ugliness is born; recognize good and evil is born.”
In Buddhism, the sentiment is often expressed more directly – be as comfortable in hell as you are in heaven.
The Law of Polarity holds this truth within it, and there is a world of difference between understanding something intellectually and knowing it because you’ve lived it.
When I wrote this, there were still things I felt I needed to avoid or alchemize (with endurance being the worst case scenario) in order to “get to the good stuff.” But the more I’ve lived practicing this principle the less detestable those “bad” things have become. They are beautiful precisely because they are necessary for the good stuff to exist at all.
At a recent event I attended, (5 Rythms Meets Tantra) I recognized that I am as equally a being of hate as I am of love. I learned to love my hatred. I could be in the hate, without identifying with it too deeply, with out needing to always transmute it.
Those who’ve wrestled consciously with hate know this: love is always there. And hate, as energy, needs to be expressed and moved like anything else so long as we are living in this world. Why do we, as humans, keep repeating these destructive – and often stupid – cycles of hate? Because we must. Because that’s where we are right now.
That certainly doesn’t appear to jive with the end that all masters point to: this is all an illusion. We’re all love and light, or something.
I am not defending the behavior of humanity writ large; I am not saying you should go assault your neighbor or start picking sides in foreign wars. And even Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek” – not to have you submit, but to have your enemy face you as a man (or woman) rather then as a slave.
“Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them.
Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered, how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.
He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?
He enters a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.” ~ Lao Tzu
Choose good and learn to be in what is “less good.” The less you feel the need to skip, bypass, or rise above, the less you will suffer. Even if, on the outside, it looks like you’re in hell.
I could have always written this, but it wouldn’t have been a truth I could authentically claim to grasp until now.
I still cannot say, as so many masters did, that one should have no preferences. Even the Principle of Polarity ultimately implies this. At this time, I am here to have preferences – to at times, love conditionally – and for that I will not apologize.
It is where I am at.
Meet you at the top of the mountain.