Intimate Relationships

by

Murshid Samuel L. Lewis

(Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti)

Toward the One, the Perfection of Love, Harmony, and Beauty,
the Only Being, United with All the Illuminated Souls
Who Form the Embodiment of the Master, the Spirit of Guidance.

Page 1 is missing—Ed.

From this point on we may formulate certain principles which may at some future date be accepted as laws. These are not contrary to any of the known laws of natural science but apply in fields little studied, yet the purport of which is very great.

1. Human beings, according to their evolution, find satisfaction in short periods of “intercourse” with very close spatial contact, or longer periods with less close spatial contact. That is to say, they vary from those who want to unite their bodies completely regardless of the other aspects of union and communion, but cannot maintain it long, to those whose satisfaction depends less and less upon spatial unity but remain longer in time.

2. The greater the spatial attraction, the greater also the spatial repulsion; the less the spatial attraction, the less the repulsion on any plane. Thus magnets and electrified bodies follow their law of attraction and repulsion, but gases commingle in the same space, another law operating in the rarefied state. One may say therefor that gases are harmonious in certain aspects. Indeed we may find in the chemical and physical worlds all the co-relatives of the metaphysical relations.

Thus the animal marriage is short, definite, complete, followed by repulsion. During intercourse, there may be one psyche, so to speak, drawing the bodies together, but this psyche, unsupported by thought-force and feeling does not remain. The action is instinctive, indirect. So, too, human beings who are dominated by animality, follow principles of attraction and repulsion often without much feeling. And we find the same thing in young children and in certain childlike races.

Animal marriage helps to promote the race, preserve the species, reinvigorate the bodies of the indulgent, and thus endow them with new life. This phenomenon, observed in the paramecium, is more or less general throughout the animal world, and has led to a concept of “free love” which emphasizes in particular this bio-psychophysic stimulation. But unless the principle of rhythm is followed, the act deprives one of the life force and its repetition only consumes the vital spark of those who engage in it.

Moses and Zarathustra have given us the laws, and in nature itself we can recognize the solar and lunar forces and rhythms. But man, acting under his own impulse, allowing passion to dominate over instinct, not considering the uterine ebb and flow, and using love as a sort of debased pleasure, has not broken the law so much as himself. The Kabbalists, even to this day, practice sexual intercourse according to the sacred, ancient traditions and claim it renews, revivifies and stimulates the complete personality.

The human relationship has been the one most studied, many books written upon it and many institutions established therefore. But excepting in India it has been assumed that a human body and a human will have produced a human desire-nature and human character. Only in India has there been a recognition of differences of degrees of evolution covered by caste, guna, metaphysical and astrological differences. And there, the debasing of the application of the Kama Shastras and Tantra

Yoga have made it appear to the rest of the world that instead of there being wisdom in India, there is only the grossest immorality and perversion, an opinion which finds some corroboration in the actual appearance
of the bodies of people and their practices even to this day. Although it is a delicate thing to judge, unfortunately some of worst judgments have had a basis on fact.

The Jewish and Roman legal codes and those which have been derived from them, all more or less assume biological “democracy” and “equality before the law.” No doubt a norm is necessary, but the tests given by psychologists and psychiatrists prove that in fact we are not so equal. And so by “human” relationship here we mean those which are based upon either the quality, or the reciprocal and complementary exchange between man and woman, especially between husband and wife.

Thus man and woman meet each other physically, psychically, mentally, socially and morally, in marriage. So far as the educational system is concerned it is only beginning to consider the physical aspects of marriage, and too much is learned either in the gutter or else in specialized schools which few can afford to attend. Social aspects of marriage have been taught in many places and are guided by customs. Moral relationships, in theory at least, depend also upon custom and the dominating religion. But the psychic laws have hardly been understood and there is as yet no technique to harmonize emotions.

Besides that, in the revulsion against marriages arranged by go-betweens, the tendency has been for lovers, in a state of intoxication, to become wed. In some parts of the world trial marriage is required (mostly not called such), and in other places the husband and wife may walk into the bedroom as practical or total strangers. “Free love” is being practiced more and more by the young who are not so ignorant, although the methods they use are traditionally “immoral.” And until there is a more complete system of instruction upon all aspects of love and marriage it is an easy matter to condemn, a difficult one to correct.

However, in the human stage people do not meet on the plane of the gross physical body alone. The ideal is to adapt oneself to rhythms, for husband and wife to have due consideration of each other’s bodies, emotions and psychic state, to say the least, to bring children into the world and so perpetuate the race and to advance in love through their marital and parental relationships.

But the advance of civilization seems to have drawn into the world, or led through evolution, more and more people who can be known as geniuses. The genius is a true type, falling into several definite classifications according to temperaments and outlook, but all more or less “in the clouds.” Their glandular structure and functions are not the same as those of the human type, and there seem to be definite processes wherein the hormones created in the sexual glands manifest elsewhere and lead to the accentuation of characteristics. The result is that the genius is not always so faithful to his corporeal partner, in some respects reverting to the condition of early youth.

The subject of sublimation has not been given consideration. But it was a genius, Havelock Ellis, himself married to another genius, Edith Ellis, and in love with still another genius, Olive Shreiner, who dared to study many aspects of sex relationships and complications considered too “awful” by the world in his time. He himself did not feel strongly any pelvic urge although he never lost the attraction for the opposite sex, or at least one or two members of it.

It would seem that the body of the genius is in many respects finer than the purely “human” body and of course much more so then the animal body. The light striking the earth plane careens and is reflected back towards its course. The psychic and mental faculties are much more refined, but all of them do not develop; some abort, others are accentuated. So the genius seems unbalanced and he is unbalanced from the strictly “human” view. But it is only an “unbalanced” person who can work day and night, whether in the laboratory or studio, to turn out something which the world will delight in, while condemning the author thereof.

Artists and actors in particular seem unstable in their marital relationships. If they knew better, they would not always live in the same house, of if in the same house, not always in the same room. Their attraction is usually longer and deeper if not indulged in too much. It is like rare food and wine, which the gourmet delights in, but does not ever overindulge in, in order to maintain his delight.

Too often the very proximity of the other sex, whatever be the motives and factors, leads to a kind of revulsion which terminates in homosexuality. This subject is rather complex, from the healthy aspect found in young children who play with their own, to the “wolf-and-lamb” of the gutter. But regarding this as abnormal and unusual (and it may be neither), we can say that the genius types can only remain in each other’s company as their love is great. Besides they love solitude and when they do not have it, they tend to turn away from their mates.

As the world has not given room for relaxation, solitude and peace, and as everyone is more or less agitated, we can see most of all in Hollywood, where so many geniuses have congregated, a sort of “dance of life” in which the tendency is to change partners. Perhaps if one were to look directly into the world of the geniuses one would see the same things; one does see it in adolescents, and the genius is not so different from the adolescent outside, perhaps, the one or two fields in which he has specialized.

The answer to this situation can only come in providing a complete, all around education for the genius-type and for all human beings, or for the correction of our laws to make it easier for them to live in this world. Such changes would on the one hand diminish suicides and perhaps murders, but on the other hand might disturb the equilibrium in other groups. So what is needed most is a recognition of types of human beings, a serious study of some of the traditional metaphysics and psychology of India, and nowhere more than in that country itself by the inhabitants thereof.

Then there is the angelic type of whom Jesus Christ has said, “Unless ye be like little children, yours is not the kingdom of heaven.” The angelic souls always try to satisfy their loved ones unless a spirit of agitation be aroused in them, when like Satan, they turn into veritable demons. For the angelic souls are not animals, or genius or humans, and have been recognized more or less as “thymus gland” types, although this is not a complete description of them. In them the heart dominates over the whole glandular system.