The Sexually Continent Couple, the school for a life fulfilled through transfigurative love
by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
In order to achieve harmony within a couple which practices sexual continence, it is very important to reflect profoundly and as detachedly as possible upon our previous amorous experiences, and by comparing these experiences with the wonderful present situation we become conscious of the great advantages which we notice in the present.
Through lucid analysis we will become liberated from all the aberrant family chains which have limited us in the form of silly prejudices in our amorous past, and as a result of this we will become increasingly conscious of our amorous behavior, enabling us to successfully control the inner mechanisms of psycho-mental protection and idealization, in order to create authentic communion together with our beloved one whom we empathetically feel on all the levels. This will also help us understand, together with our beloved, the predominant differences (the specific masculine and feminine characteristics). The permanent and complete openness towards Tolerance, Transfiguration of the beloved, Communion with the subtle beneficial energies of the Macrocosm, Revelation of the Sacred Dimension of Love, and sublime and Unconditional Love, all of these are the first fruits of this deeply spiritual masterpiece, which trigger a state of overwhelming happiness within us.
Most of us are prisoners within ourselves and that is why the world of the other appears strange and mysterious to us. Typically, every humant improvement of our state of empathetic resonance with others, we can instantaneously enter into the “shell” of the other, and consequently perceive, through this ineffable “tuning”, their predominant inner world, their subjective perception of reality, and their astral conditioning due to their zodiac sign and ascendant. Because of this ineffable empathy, that in the mastery stages may be incredibly deep and complex, we can communicate much better with others, always managing to find the right words to beneficially influence them without hurting them. Only then can we really feel how and how much we are loved, and we can lovingly turn towards others, empathetically merging with them when we accept to amorously open our inner world to the fascinating world of the other being for whom we feel love. To be able to fully open ourselves to love, each one of us must be freed quickly and fully from all these limiting chains, realizing that only in this way can we truly know and enrich ourselves through amorous fusion with a human being. That is why it is so important to learn to see those whom we love without preconceptions and clichés and especially without despotically demanding that they correspond to the phantasmagorical image we have created about them. And this can best be learnt from the couple relationship!
The trap of Phantasmagoric idealization
Being for a long time in a couple, we very quickly face the differences between our points of view. At the beginning of any love relationship, each one idealizes and transfigures the other one as much as possible, often structuring through psycho-mental phantasmagorical projections, illusionary “look-alikes” of the other, which do not correspond to the original objective. Instead of establishing a fully empathetic exchange, a mutual deep communication on all the levels of our being, the amorous feeling (of one of the two or even both) is usually based on the so-called “love at first sight”, an unrestrained passion that blinds and subjugates us. Without intuitively and empathetically knowing the being in front of us, we often phantasmagorically project all our love aspirations and desires onto them. Due to this predominantly phantasmagorical transfiguration, they become the most beautiful, most feminine, most continent, most virile, most intelligent, most tender, in a word, the most extraordinary creature! In fact, objectively speaking, we usually do not see the beloved being in the way they objectively are, but instead as a reflected phantasmagorical image of the human being that we would “ideally” like to meet and want to be loved by. This type of love, which is predominantly passionate, will then throw us into an illusion which will inevitably lead us to disappointment sooner or later.
Such a phantasmagorical start to a long journey together, which is life in a couple, was not and is never a good sign! On the contrary, such a start is a painful and vicious circle, in which the ego may even be amplified, especially in situations in which you know you are loved by someone completely exceptional (it is not by coincidence that many spiritual people have called this lower type of love, “selfishness in two”). Even we ourselves become inflated and then become, in our own eyes, a very unusual character, mainly because we have awakened the intense love of that exceptional being! In this case, the illusion is total because we only use our ego as the basis of transfiguration and awakening to the reality may be painful. The divine aspect that we can then intuit or reveal in ourselves through the other, disappears and is replaced with some egoistic aspects.
In our current society, the state of love is often presented in the media as being synonymous only with happiness. It is usually forgotten that love is strengthened by the perfect amorous-polar communion realized within the vital, mental, spiritual and soul spheres, and for advanced yogis, through respect and constant transfiguration of the other and also by accepting their company, on the background of a state of endless love, which is due to perfect sexual continence (practiced in a couple) and the harmonious sublimation of the huge resulting energies.
The perfectly continent couple, which practices YOGA, discovers, through infinite love, what a wonderful school of life love is and thus they discover more quickly and fully the sublime and authentic values that will open them to Divine Unconditional Love, which we all have within us in a potential state, which is more or less latent depending on our individual level of spiritual evolution.
Once our state of illusion is fully shattered, all that remains is to lucidly and objectively accept and see the reality and to “confront” our image with discernment, which is now reflected in the mirror of our beloved. Before we rush to accuse our beloved one, who is not in fact the way we phantasmagorically thought, we must first develop in ourselves enough tolerance, love, power of objective transfiguration and profound respect for them. All that often enrages us about our beloved is merely the reflection of one of our own faults. Being together for a long time, day by day the other will show us, often unconsciously, but still very accurately just like a mirror, all our past or present fears. For this reason we will eventually realize that what we fear the most we will not escape.
Our parents’ relationship patterns condition us
In a yogic couple in which both lovers are sexually continent, once this phantasmagoric and superficial idealization (which generally predominates) has been removed, there is one more aspect that needs to be taken care of before we are able to establish the foundation for a truly profound, happy and long lasting couple relationship. Before we started to practice yoga, we all had a particular childhood which, to a greater or lesser extent, was imprinted in our being through the fane of us was at that time, lived the archetypal couple of our parents. For a long time this couple was our only reference, our only criteria. This is why they are the primordial couple to us, the couple of Adam and Eve, which represents our parental couple, and which is present in the subconscious of our being.
The life of our parents puts an insidious mark on us and influences us very strongly, in both good and bad ways. As long as we are not lucidly and detachedly aware about their negative impact upon our past and future love life, we will not be able to become free from this negative conditioning, in order to be truly free to love intensely, completely and harmoniously, as we would actually want to, in order to be happy.
The receptive child that we once were has crystallized his basic conclusions about love by himself, without even knowing it. He did this by watching his parents with curiosity, experiencing together with them many significant situations in their life as a couple, or hearing them speak about love.
Even a lonely abandoned child, missing one or both parents, will eventually crystallize his own philosophy, which will replace or represent for him, in a more or less twisted way, the love story of his parents. The result of this accumulation of information and storage of outer events, which are significant from this point of view, is that he will reach certain conclusions inside himself, e.g. men leave women or women abandon their child, the husband must always dominate his wife, or the wife must necessarily dominate her husband.
His existence and his experience will be strongly influenced by the example of his own parental couple. For example, he will grow to feel a great and constant fear towards marriage or he will tend to feel a strange fear of being abandoned (especially if he was abandoned by one or both of his parents during childhood). In all these traumatizing situations, he will be conditioned by what he saw, felt or perceived intuitively in his parents as a couple. Moreover, he will be deeply modeled, even by everything he imagined or interpreted himself (good or bad), by the baby witness of his mother’s and father’s lives. By knowing all these aspects (which are unsuspected by other people), it is urgent and necessary to go back, with attention, lucidity and detachment, to the state and time of the little child we once were when we looked at our parents with innocence, and to remember, in order to become aware of the programming that gradually crystallized inside of us during the interferences with the archetypal parental couple. Through such an objective awareness, we can see that all our fears and rejections, our isolation and suspicions, our huge need for love, the aspiration to ceaselessly offer love, the desire to be almost always supported, recognized, made happy, and comforted, all these and many others often come, unsuspected, from the child we were. He was afraid, he became mistrustful, he did not want to be rejected or abandoned, or he saw his father abandoned by his wife, or his mother abandoned by her husband. At the same time, it is very important to find and identify how our parents’ attitude towards each other is reflected even now in us. If we show ourselves to be unjust, cruel, violent, ironic, jealous, despiteful, proud, selfish, or authoritarian, it is most probable that one of our parents acted often in this way in his/her couple relationship.
All of this also stems from the fact that we often completely lack or we do not make use of the creative imagination when making love in our couple relationship. In such situations, maintained continuously, we unconsciously chose the obsessive repetition of the parental pattern (programmed when we were a child), without analyzing it at all and, especially, without asking ourselves: “Do I really want to live the same kind of love relationship – unhappy and isolated – which my parents had while I was a child?”
This strong, beneficial, and controlled creative imagination in fact means to always believe, firmly and completely, in yourself and in the subtle, beneficial power that you capture from the Macrocosm by resonance and with the help of which you can gradually control your destiny, thereby choosing the most harmonious and happiness-generating way of life. Positive creative imagination means to always have great self-confidence, to trust your sublime latent aspects which must be awakened and dynamized to the maximum, and to mirror in your own inner universe, which is infinitely enriched through lovemaking with continence, the objective reality of God’s manifestation.
The power of creative imagination
What is creative imagination for each one of us? Though unsuspected, it represents our main subtle “motion” aspect, and the mind controlled by intelligence is the command instrument of this gigantic force. In fact, creative imagination is our ability to visualize for hours, at will, and as clearly as possible, images, ideas and aspects that put us in resonance with certain subtle energies in the Macrocosm and to anticipate coming events through firm and beneficial mental projection. Creative imagination transforms us gradually into human beings with beneficial thoughts, who are open, always ready to love and to evolve. It awakens and amplifies our art of lovemaking and it diversifies our power to create, giving us the possibility to escape instantly from the individual reality through controlled mental visualization. The subtle energy of creative imagination dynamizes our ability to conceive amazing scientific theories or to reveal the hidden symbolism inherent to God’s reality and force ideas.
Through the perfectly controlled creative imagination, we can further genius discoveries and conceive daring projects which we can later on visualize clearly. Without creative imagination, which facilitates the resonance with much more subtle, beneficial, creative energies from the Macrocosm, people would live only guided by their desires and primal impulses. We always start by imagining, in a creative and beneficial way, a certain transformation and then, dynamized inside by the subtle energies from the Macrocosm with which we enter into resonance, we aim to perform creative imagination with the help of our ability to think and of our intelligence, and then, at a certain moment, in the case of success, we notice that everything transforms according to what we previously imagined. The beneficial creative imagination becomes a huge power of accomplishment, especially for those who are perfectly sexually continent and it allows us to easily create profoundly dynamic images and new genius ideas. Without creative imagination, which is amplified extraordinarily much through perfect sexual continence within the couple, we would be definitively stuck in prejudices, inertia, bad habits, intolerance, jealousy, meanness, racism and we would indulge in certain rigid, dogmatic and sectarian attitudes, which unselectively and unwisely perpetuate past traditions, refusing evolution and harmonious adaptation.
Creative beneficial imagination coupled with the activation of perfect couple sexual continence and added to the harmonious sublimation of the resulting energies, will eventually help us to gradually transcend all evil programming which was installed in us during childhood. Through the creative beneficial imagination coupled with the activation of perfect couple sexual continence, we will discover – while intuiting how to adequately achieve this – a greatly enriched state of oceanic happiness, and we will perceive within ourselves a growing desire to offer infinite love to those who deserve it. Through the grace of this leap, which is made possible because of perfect couple sexual continence, we will free ourselves from all the fears associated with loving or being loved. We will therefore believe again, with all our being, in the preordained love games and in perfect happiness and love. We will then aim with love and spontaneity towards divine freedom and we will enthrone independence full of intelligence and cognitive common sense, shattering prejudices once and for all. We will then be able to question once again, because of our pure and greatly expanded consciousness (due to the harmoniously sublimated sexual energies), all that was accepted blindly, assimilated unselectively or learned before. This enormous mental energy, awakened in us through couple sexual continence, helps us to easily and profoundly reflect on all that we often consider as being thought onto us, and it also helps us focus attentively and lucidly on all that has been imposed on us to believe.
For the couple mastering sexual continence, due to the enormous mental force present through the sublimation of sexual energies in the superior spheres of the human being, we can now select and decide new, greatly larger and fuller conceptions of wisdom and faith (resonances) about happiness and success in love life.
By considering the archetypal couple (parental) and analyzing it lucidly and detachedly, we can become aware of all that has remained in us from that couple, taking care not to idealize it or to reject it with hatred (as this will only generate a new trauma). Therefore, all we have to do is look objectively and detachedly, while aiming to reveal what exactly from this couple has influenced and still influences our intimate behavior.
We must therefore realize exactly what has scared us and, especially, what part we have integrated within us, the part that has evolved within us as the standard. Moreover, we must also realize that we always carry within us a child, who is promptly and impulsively reacting when feeling sufficiently hurt by prejudices and convictions. This strange child is often the one who wants to irrationally run away when our love relationship crystallizes. He is also the one who, bluntly or not, sabotages a loving relationship, clinging with a peculiar desperation to the human being who is constantly rejecting, or the one who paradoxically makes us unable to see that lovely human being is capable of offering us happiness. It is up to us to find and eliminate for good the true reasons for our failures in love, in order to free ourselves from illusions and to live, finally and with plenary awareness, the happy couple relationship and the amorous fusion in which perfect sexual continence is achieved. The loving relationship in which perfect sexual continence is achieved helps us to easily and profoundly penetrate into the core of the problem. At the same time it allows us to resolve quickly, even in this life time, all that has been and still is disturbing or perturbing in our relationships with human beings of the opposite sex.
In a disharmonious couple relationship, our major faults, which sustain and grow the problems of this affair, are gradually exacerbated. In such a relationship, whether you want it or not, you discover yourself the most, and the other one, who is harmonious and lucid, sees your reaction through intense negative emotional states. Thus, he gets to know all your weaknesses and becomes progressively aware of all your sublime forces or hidden sufferings. Moreover, he can vibrate in unison with your unaccomplished dreams. It is very easy to SEEM HAPPY, detached, and problem-free in the company of good friends at a party, with your work colleagues or with relatives during the weekend. Within a continent yogic couple, the loving relationship becomes increasingly more profound and plenary, so that certain human beings get to gradually know their lover better than they know themselves. If it is more difficult for you to reflect on your own self, the other – due to COMPLMENTARY OPPOSING POLAR ENERGIES – is almost always present to awaken within you emotions, states, sensibilities and complex experiences which you empathetically and telepathically feel due to a perfect couple sexual relationship. Within a loving relationship, the one who is always inclined to dominate, or to possess a person who finds it difficult to affirm herself or assume responsibilities, will continuously manifest these inclinations which are amplified through evil resonances within the couple. In disharmonious couple relationships, the couple will predominantly function according to a precise structure, like the one of the domineering father and timid, child-like, weak woman, or the protective, overly jealous female with the unfaithful, unstable man, or the motherly female and eternally childish man, etc.
As long as the two lovers fail to detachedly and profoundly analyze the intimate behavioral structures, they will not be able to creatively and evidently realize their major fault or faults, and will continue to live in the illusion that they are a perfect, problem-free couple. They risk to one day be confronted with an apparently bizarre break up, or to develop the tendency to attribute all the responsibility for their eventual conjugal failure to their lover.
A profound loving relationship is always experienced between two people and that is why the responsibility for happiness and complete harmony belongs to both. What is the couple that I am in telling me about myself? If we often have the tendency to despotically impose our point of view, if we hinder the free expression of the other, or if we refuse our loved one the essential right to see the world from another point of view which is different from ours, then the main effort in our couple relationship has to be urgently directed towards affectionate respect for the other. We must aim to EMPATHISE with the other one, and to understand them in order to understand what is beneficially happening within ourselves; for this it is essential that we allow the other to be him/herself, especially in the act of loving, for them to be able to plenarily and freely express him/herself. In doing so, we will allow the other to choose his/her own lifestyle without imposing a particular direction on them, and in doing so we will transform the other for the better through the power of example. This undoubtedly implies that our inner force must be greater in that specific direction, as it is greatly known that if you want to transform and revolutionize others, you must first transform and revolutionize yourself. If, on the contrary, we are a person who is undecided, fragile, lacking initiative and constantly preferring to let others decide our options and responsibilities, we will have to tenaciously fight against ourselves and to succeed in radically transforming ourselves from this perspective by amplifying within a sense of initiative, before getting involved in a parental love relationship (in which we are the child) with the loved one with whom we unite our lives. However, if we involve ourselves in such a relationship without radically transforming ourselves first, we will sooner or later complain that we are being dominated and will be able to realize–by analyzing with honesty and detachment- that we arm the other one with all the reasons to dominate us. As yogis in a continent couple, it is good to know that the best loving relationship is the one in which the man is perceived as SHIVA and the woman as SHAKTI. In such a relationship (SHIVA-SHAKTI) we are with him (or her) to learn how to affirm all that is better, lovely and divine within ourselves, and he (or she) is with us to learn to respect us for the sublime aspects that are transfigured (objectively residing within us) and, when needed, to affectionately advise us by transmitting authority yet without dominating despotically.
There are, of course, other behavioral structures which often confront the majority of couples. In order to detachedly and lucidly become aware of the behavioral structure of our loving relationship, each one of us must profoundly analyze the manner in which our couple functions. One of the best means for detachedly looking within the couple relationship and its conflicts, which often risk to eventually be revealed, and at disharmonies in the sphere of trust and communication between the two lovers, is to lucidly become aware of the negative daily events, detaching ourselves from the negative emotions we have felt, and analyzing profoundly and objectively the reasons for these conflicts.
yogaesoteric
January, 2010
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