How an appropriate sexual relationship between the sexes can lead to more peace on earth
Author: Dieter Duhm, Sabine Lichtenfels
As long-time activists and founders of the community Tamera, Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels are committed to the healing of love as well as sexuality and to the abolition of the separation of Eros and religion to establish peace. A few years ago they wrote the book “Und sie erkannten sich. The End of Sexual Violence.” This contribution is an excerpt from it.
We, the authors of this contribution, have now lived together for 40 years. We met 40 years ago in southern Germany and instinctively connected. Even more deeply than we knew at the time. It wasn’t even love at first sight, but rather a slow and steady fidelity that eventually passed even the most difficult tests. What is it that brings two people together forever? The closer we got, the more we felt that we were dealing with a theme of the whole world. What happens between two lovers happens in one form or another all over the earth. For nothing torments us more than despair in love. And nothing is more beautiful than a love that comes to fulfillment.
We went through both. But there were some things that brought us ever more firmly together: That was our shared joy in sensual love – even with others, and the experience that no jealousy came from it. Then our joint commitment to the peace movement, and finally our absolute faith in each other. Because of this unusual combination we decided together to initiate a project for the healing of love. Somewhere the beautiful sentence is written:
“Heaven and earth emerged from an original bridal night.”
Wouldn’t that be a beautiful basis for a new creation account?
It would not begin with the Fall of Adam and Eve, but with their love.
How a proper sexual relationship between the sexes can lead to more peace on earth
Regardless of all the gender issues of our time, regardless of our current sexual identity, at the core of human society is always the coexistence of the sexes. Their attraction or repulsion, their sexual signals and wiring. Their hopes and disappointments run like a secret nervous system throughout human society. Man and woman – the two halves of humans long for each other, miss each other, fight each other. And they search for each other until they find each other. They must find each other, not just as a couple, but globally. Because only then can the deepest of wounds heal, the wound in love.
EROS AND RELIGION
A healing movement will go through the whole evolution as soon as the first people and communities are able to harmoniously combine the sexual and the spiritual core forces of life. In the previous cultural tradition, the forces of religion and spirituality stood outside the bodily forces of sex and Eros. Immensely deep went the split between spirit and body in almost all religious currents. The turning away from the body in the name of God and turning to the spirit alone is the historical reaction to the difficulties with sensual love.
Church father Augustin thoroughly described this process in his “Confessions”. He was so persecuted by the demon of sexus that he could only stand against it by a total prohibition. Here lies the true origin of the contempt for sexuality: it was simply too powerful. Against this psychological background, the cruel punishments of female sexuality, the stonings, witch burnings and many other things imposed by all major religions appear in a new light.
To the new matrix belongs definitely and forever a new relation of Eros and religion. By religion I do not mean what has been handed down to us, but I mean a form of reunited life.
Religion and Eros both come from the same original source of life.
There, heavenly love and erotic love unite forever. Here is a quote from Walter Schubart from his book “Religion and Eros”: “The religious and the sexual are the two strongest powers of life. Whoever considers them to be original adversaries teaches the eternal dichotomy of the soul. Who makes them irreconcilable enemies tears the human heart. And it has been torn! Whoever reflects on religion and Eros must put his finger on one of the most painful wounds bleeding in the depth of man.”
THE UR-LOVE
Eros is the origin, the deep source from which new creation always happens. Man and woman are expressions of the polar force of the world that gives birth to all life.
At its deepest, the entire process of creation is an erotic act of love.
The earth came into being from a procreative process of the male and female aspects of the world – God and Goddess, if we will. Life is the child of their love.
The male aspect wants to penetrate ever deeper into the body, into matter, and the female wants to be lovingly recognized and penetrated.
In the center they are one.
The woman – the feminine in us – is directly connected with the physical, the matter. She lets her body speak – for her it is the temple of the spirit – in the way she moves, the way she lingers with a plant and suddenly understands its essence. It is indeed a high state of presence. The woman, by her very nature, simply wants to love. She always wants to communicate, her whole being orients towards cooperation. In this space there is no violence and no enmity, no fear and no need to protect oneself. There is only contact.
The man however – the masculine in us – wants to grasp thinkingly, to grasp actively and to comprehend. The man has his anchor in the spiritual and metaphysical realm. From there he turns to matter, to the flesh, to the feminine. If this process runs undisturbed, then there is peace, then religio arises: recollection of our sources, religion of connectedness.
How a proper sexual relationship between the sexes can lead to more peace on earth
Will there still be religions in a new culture? One thing is certain: in the temples, cathedrals and altars of the future, the elemental forces of Eros and sexuality will no longer be suppressed, but the sacredness of Eros will be at the center of humane cultures, celebrated and respected.
Thus the eternal feminine speaks in me:
Eros and religion are the two basic forces that must come together for healing to occur. For I not only HAVE a soul – I AM soul. I am a soul that wants to offer a residence to the divine power. In Kabbalah, I am called Sheshina – the soul or house of God.
As a soul, I have made my home in a body. This is what is mean with the words: the Word became flesh. At this tension between logos and eros – word and corporeality – something is decided, at which the whole mankind either rises or perishes. The sexual world and the divine world want to show themselves in me as unity. Further, this miracle wants to be recognized and seen in everything earthly, corporeal, human. In my flesh lies the secret of the sexus. At the moment when the man perceives this in me, when he can grasp my soul bodily, my great glow begins. In these moments both bodies are penetrated by the miracle of sexual love. And they recognized each other: In this moment I have arrived!
About the authors
Sabine Lichtenfels and Dr. Dieter Duhm have been a free love couple for over 40 years. And they are more than that: they are partners in building a project that has also been working on the model of a culture of peace for 40 years: Tamera, the project of global healing biotopes. In the environment of their partnership, a large network has emerged, including communities, peace initiatives, and ecological, spiritual and social research projects; through their example and help, hundreds, even thousands of people have been inspired to seek alternatives to the capitalist system, to question their path in love, and to decide for more truth and trust. Through them, countless people opened their eyes in the first place to the fact that another world, another life are not only possible, but already exist.
Websites: Tamera.org, sabine-lichtenfels.com.
This article appeared originally on the German Homepage of Tattva Viveka: Und sie erkannten sich
