IT’S TIME WE ASK OURSELVES a disturbing, all-too-timely question: Is there any redeeming, divinely-inspired purpose to this media-hyped, lust-a-thon so ruthlessly yanking everybody around? Clearly, it’s not just about the idealization of romance or selling stuff. Even before the media-manipulators got hold of it, this was a morality-massacring, culture-devouring force and it’s naive to think we can now monastically repress or STD ourselves into some kind of exhausted transcendence. It’s time we got a handle on what, exactly, lust is. Here’s an Astrodharmic perspective:
Sex is ruled by Scorpio — the part of us that wakes up in the midst of slathering itself in the depravity and divinity of the human condition. Scorpio craves intense, uncompromising confrontations with the full spectrum of messy, mortal experience — sex, death, rebirth and everything in between. Sex in particular fascinates Scorpio because compressed into the drama of sexual tension, foreplay, consummation and the post-coital siesta (and/or disappointment) is the entire drama of incarnation. Equipped with such a profound existential metaphor, reasons Scorpio, who needs a Bible?
Scorpio has the uncommon guts to admit that we’re all born haunted by a creepy question:
How consciously and benevolently are you wielding your instinctual power to influence and control others?
Notice I didn’t say anything about “letting go” of control. To Scorpio, that’s foolish denial. It’s about conscientiously wielding one’s psychic power, and only in matters as raunchy, risky and primal as sex does Scorpio sense it can fully confront, transform and purify its unholy, dictatorial powers into a mutually therapeutic, if not outright spiritual, art.
Needless to say, the stakes are high in this kind of interpersonal poker and “winning” means hovering holy above the smoky scene even as you bet the house. To do this, one must understand what a “bad hand” looks like and when to “fold.” Here’s a few hints:
The lustful self is a narcissistic self. It desires the experience of itself desiring. Lust, by itself, is inherently addictive because it is based on the vague, forever just-out-of-reach ideal of an “I” that just might get lucky enough to experience oneness, the ultimate intimacy: the orgasm of no-self. Could there be anything more self-contradictory and doomed to failure? Ah, but there’s hope.
Being the archetype of change and transformation, Scorpio has three developmental stages (and corresponding critters) assigned to it: the scorpion, the eagle and the dove. People strong in Scorpio move constantly and vividly through these critter-states. The rest of us are on the same transformational merry-go-round, but we circle more subtly and, thus, with less accountability. An entire book could be written (and has) about each of these three critter-states but here they are distilled so you can get a feel for them:
Scorpion: Physical penetration. Self-preservation. Cunning. Kill or be killed. Psycho-sexual manipulation. Heartless power-grabs.
Eagle: Psychological penetration. Shadow work. Wise counsel. The compassionate, street-hardened counselor.
Dove: Spiritual Penetration. Ego death ally. Initiate of sacred mysteries. The spiritual teacher and/or psychic.
Here are some other ways of articulating this progression:
1) Funeral Pyre, Burnt Bones, Ascension
2) The Fall, Forgiveness, Redemption
3) The ego, The Witness, Pure Awareness
Finally, here’s an Astrodharmic interpretation:
Scorpion: Seeing personality
Eagle: Seeing positive intention
Dove: Seeing divinity-in-action
(Note: It is precisely this evolutionary progression that the Styles of Awakening Training is designed to facilitate).
How do we keep moving toward Dovehood? Step number one: Awaken as compassionate witness to the short-sighted lust of the scorpion.
Like drugs, lust delivers an addictive glimpse of the mind-killing simplicity and silence of who we are. It conjures a desire-drunk doer, a spat of undefended being, then dumps us back into the achingly insufficient, pre-aroused banality that made the lust-ticket so impossible not to purchase. How much for the ticket? Who made the purchase? Never mind. In the absence of spasm-surviving Eagle love and the soul-tethering devotion of the Dove, lust could be the most cynicism-inducing force in the world.
Love-infused lust, on the other hand, makes love to the entire human condition; carnal desire mixes with a full-spectrum embrace of our partner’s humiliating sense of inadequacy and their interminably gnawing karma. In short, love moves closer to- and finds humble beauty in- what lust considers “a turn off.” Thank God for our poker-savvy heart, who gladly lays down a few intoxicating-but-unsustainable Scorpion cards for a chance at a royal flush: the unbroken communion of the dove.
The ultimate purpose of this lust-a-thon? Simple. To hit bottom. To make the outlines of “wanting mind” so stark and depressing that there’s nothing left to do but start aiming our lust at the One Being. To back us all into communion-rich “recovery” communities that skillfully arouse that steadier taste of oneness that lust so famously fails to deliver.
And how might one speed up their soul’s journey toward “hitting bottom?” By learning to recognize and feel the luminous, positive intention so often eclipsed behind the attention-grabbing lower octave expressions of the Scorpio archetype; by prayerfully applauding- even as others scorn- this divinely-ordained style of awakening.
As we learn to lucidly encounter our own and other’s bullet-proof prejudice against death-stinky Scorpio, we come to see that what we are demonizing is not the person, but the entire heartbreaking cycle of death and rebirth, itself. When we witness the witheringly extreme, all-or-nothing movements of the lower octave scorpion, we are catching a rare, panoramic glimpse of the traumatizing perfection of our own incarnational saga — a vista so sobering and unintelligible it is meant only for the eyes of God — in us.
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