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Story 14 - Mission Africa.
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84
Sylvia nodded. "And this my friends and lovers, really goes beyond what Bizet was dealing with when he composed that beautiful duet."
"It does," I agreed. "Of course it does. I
would hope that we have moved beyond that entry level stuff," I said and
laughed.
With this said, I asked if anyone wanted tea. "I am going to make tea," I said.
"Tea is appropriate," said Sylvia.
Ross agreed.
"Maybe the rut isn't as deep as we thought," said Ross when the tea was ready. "Maybe we have been moving
forward a
little bit, without knowing, even if the bus that we are on is still stuck in
mud up to its axles. Didn't you say something just now, about Heather kissing you
again? If this isn't something to celebrate; I mean after more than ten years;
I don't know hat is."
"That's precisely what happened," I said, grinning.
" I can barely believe it myself. Still, that's nothing to celebrate yet.
That's one small step forward. Some day we have to amend again what I have just said about us. Then we will have to say about us that we are four beautiful, loving, intelligent, and extraordinary women; and four beautiful, loving, intelligent, and extraordinary men; all in love with one another simultaneously.
If we can say that, then, we can celebrate. Of course, when we get to this point, tea will most likely be appropriate again,
rather than champagne. We won't see this accomplishment as anything
extraordinary when we get there."
"I think I can drink to that now,"
said Ross, raising his tea cup. "Just to hear us talking the way we do,
is a breakthrough."
"The real breakthrough will be a lot simpler," I said to Ross a
while later. "Do you still remember what I told you a long time ago, as a
kind of theory? It keeps coming up again and again when we come to an impasse.
It keeps coming up just like the Christ idea of the divinity of man keeps
coming up throughout history. Whenever there is a great renewal unfolding,
that idea pops up at the center of it. So, I really think there is some
substance to that idea, Ross, I mean, the divinity of mankind. That Christ
idea of the divinity of humanity implies something that we can't get away
from. It implies that each human being is inherently complete, and must be so
understood. It implies that we are also sexually, inherently complete."
Ross nodded. "What are you trying to say,
Pete?"
"I am trying to tell you what I told you a
long time ago," I replied. "I am trying to tell you that humanity is
not sexually divided. I say, no is. No one can be. It is not possible that we
can be divided on the basis of an incompleteness, if we reflect the divine
being which is not divided. This means only one thing, Ross. It means that we
carry both the male and female qualities within us, everyone of us, without
exception. As for myself, I can no longer deny this. I see it as a part of the
reality of my being. If I embrace a woman, I do this out of the riches of my
heart and Soul. If I didn't treasure a woman there, deep within, then facing a
woman in the world wouldn't mean anything to me. But she does. She stirs a
celebration. There is something there, deep inside me, that I treasure, that
this woman represents in life, which I gladly acknowledge; which I acknowledge
with a great joy."
"I think this happens to everyone,"
said Ross.
"Of course it does." I replied. "This tells me that the female
element is as much a part of me as the male element is. This also tells me
that this is happening throughout the whole of humanity as a matter of
principle. And so it should be. I think the physical specialization that sets
us apart from each other as men and women, is but a slight shift in an
otherwise perfect unity and completeness. That unity and completeness defines
our innermost sexual identity, Ross. I think we are damn fools, all of us, to
deny this completeness within by playing those games of sexual division, that
we still play, though less intensively, thank God. I know that we loose too
much in these games, especially you and I."
"But we are both male," Ross replied.
"There is no sexual division between us."
"Oh, isn't there, Ross? Tell me then, why
aren't we as close to one another as we are to women? Isn't the reason for
that, that we are both men?"
Ross nodded silently.
I had to laugh. "Isn't it silly of us that we recognize our inherent
sexual completeness with the joyous embrace of a woman, by cutting right across
all supposed sexual divisions, overturning centuries of false emotions in many
cases, but we can't do the same man to man? We simply can't do it, even though
not the slightest sexual differentiation exist. The only answer that I can up
with to explain what is happening, is, that we are engaged in
self-denial."
"Yes, and that is a denial of the
completeness of the human being," Ross added. "It is a denial of
everything we have been trying to establish, isn't it? It really is! With this
self-denial standing in the way, the principle of the universal marriage of
humanity can never be fully implemented, can't it? It just can't be
done."
"Do you know what this means?" I
asked.
Ross nodded. "I know, I know! But, do you realize that this goes against 5000 years of
a rigidly enforced male to male isolation, imposed with the severest
penalties?" said Ross. "Under ancient Hebrew law, engaging into
any same sex intimacy has been punishable by death. It may still be that way. I
think it is a criminal offense in some countries to the every day. One can
also find the roots for this isolation imbedded in the Mosaic Decalogue."
"In the politicized version of it," I corrected
Ross. "The original version only speaks about honoring the honorable bond that love has
forged. No sex is mentioned there."
"I know that," said Ross. "The point is, the rule for sexual isolation
has been invented for political purposes, for isolating people to maintain power. The isolation has been
imposed by a strictly enforced law for thousands of years. Over this long
period of time, the enforced isolation has caused enormous damage in human relationships. The isolation has become so deep, that love has become a curse
whenever it unfolded outside of the prescribed norm. We have become conditioned
in such a manner that any form of love outside of this norm evokes a sense of revulsion in many people."
"I certainly can see why," I said to Ross. "Today's scene of homosexual or lesbian
love is not focused on accepting and embracing the inherent completeness of a
human being as a necessary manifest of the divinity of mankind. To the
contrary. What I see appears to be built on a deeply rooted sense of
incompleteness that reflects those ancient lies."
Ross nodded. "I see it as a scene of cries in a wilderness," said
Ross, "in a wilderness of distorted images and repressed feelings overloaded with guilt,
with persecutions, or with soured relationships all carefully hidden behind cover-up marriages, as in the case of Tchaikovsky so long ago.
I also see it all too often a scene of protestation, rather than as a scene for the development of a wider universal unity.
Yes Pete, you are right, it is a scene of a deeply cutting sexual isolation
that's of a different color perhaps, but that is built on the same lies that underlie all forms of isolation, whatever they may
be."
"I think this may be the reason why there has been no real movement on
this front, ever," I interrupted Ross.
"But where does one start?" said
Ross.
I raised my hand to object to this question.
"I know, one starts by being honest with
oneself," Ross said to me. "You referred to an honest bond that would likely have existed before all this vast isolation began. I know we need to get back
again to this honest bond, as fast as possible, and on as wide a basis as possible, before we destroy one another in a nuclear war, or with poverty and diseases. But it is no small
matter to turn back the clock of history 5000 years, to a time before the isolation
of human beings was invented."
"That can't be done," I interjected.
"We can't expect the accrued damage to simply
disappear over night, and it won't disappear unless we move forward."
"Yes," Ross agreed, "the damage has become too deeply rooted in the way we think and feel and react."
"Pete is right, we must move forward,"
I heard Sylvia say to Ross from the kitchen. "We must consciously re-think everything, and honestly
embrace the wider horizons of love. I don't think there ever was a paradise in
history. The paradise begins here. So let's not
react to old traditions that some priests had imposed out of their own sense
of incompleteness. Nor can we afford to bow to falsely educated emotions that
are built on the same sense of incompleteness. We must move forwards according to
universal principles that represent the truth. The history of accepted
incompleteness is a history of poverty. It is water down the creek."
Sylvia brought a plate of cookies to the
balcony as she said this. She put the plate on the table and sat down. "I
don't think we have really heard what Pete has been saying for all these
years," she said as she poured herself a cup of tea, "and that is
true for Pete himself. Pete spoke of the Christ idea of the divinity of
mankind, which kept popping up throughout history, which defines us as
inherently complete, which literally demands us to acknowledge our
completeness. Pete had applied this Christ principle to the male and female
aspect of our humanity. I agree, that brought us a whole lot closer to the
truth, but not far enough by any means. The male and female aspect that we all
incorporate, is but a small part of our larger completeness that defines the
human character, that reflects our universal Soul. One of these is generosity.
How highly do we value this inherent aspect of ourselves? Also, there are
countless other such elements, such as gentleness, honor, sublimity, and so
on. How highly do we value these? How highly do we value our intellect, our
integrity, and our truthfulness in all things, and of course our creativity,
our industry, even our immortality as we raise the status of civilization in
an enduring manner with the riches of our Life?"
"There we have our answer," said Ross
to me, "the real reason why there is a gap between us, is our poverty
resulting from a vastly larger self-denial than we ever thought
possible."
He began to laugh as he took one of the cookies and
dipped it in his tea. "We have been calling ourselves sexual beings
without realizing that the Christ is our sex, which alone defines our completeness..."
"...and our riches in that completeness,"
interrupted Sylvia, "provided we care to discover the larger dimension of
it. I think we have been focusing too much on the little things, and not
enough on the big things that the little things should represent."
Ross dunked his cookie once more. "When we
begin to pull ourselves up to this higher level, this Christ level, my scientific sense tells me, we will
leave all the problems behind that pertain to a sense of incompleteness.
Living will then become as natural as the rain that refreshes the earth."
"It's always been like that," I
added. "Whenever we addressed a problem from a higher level perception,
whatever it was, all the problems were left behind that were defined at those
lower levels that we stepped away from. They suddenly no longer applied."
"That, my friends," said Sylvia,
"is the only way in which society can cure itself of its fascination with
fascism that has already deeply infected the once most moral nation on the
planet which now threatens everything in the world. Fascism is more than just
a sense of incompleteness, don't you think? It is utter poverty. It's total
bankruptcy. It's a complete emptiness! This also means, that the process for
ending this problem is the same."
"This is no small task," Ross replied.
"I never said that it was," I said to him firmly. "I only suggested, that when we
accomplish the task, which we will accomplish, I am sure of it, we won't see the accomplishment
as a victory. We will most likely look upon the present era, which is still an era of
isolation for us and the whole world, and look at it with a sense of shame. We won't feel like celebrating
when we find our way out of it, so as not to be reminded of the darkness that
was, except perhaps to celebrate life itself."
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