Previous pages have mused about the nature of a perfect Creator.  And concept 5 suggests that an implicit motivation exists within each of us that constantly attracts us towards spiritual completeness. 

But let me abandon the spiritual angle for a moment and focus on the real life issue of: beauty, sex, and the desire to merge with anything that exhibits these!  Anthropologists have long surmised that there must be a basic desire built into the programming of the species to pro-create.  And that somehow beauty and handsomeness are good indicators for how good we are at making and raising babies.  Well, it doesn't quite fly with me.  Sure, we see animals exhibit these behaviors via elaborate mating rituals, and it is easy to assume that our human motivations are similar to theirs.  We have after all shared the same ecological incubator for the last hundred million years or so.

But suppose, for us, there is also another angle?  Suppose that the feeling of spirit and our sense of beauty are the same thing and that we were given an implicit attraction toward natural beauty and a desire for it to surround us?  Perhaps this would better explain the many motivations and actions of humans.

Consider this.  A perfect creator builds in a mechanism that motivates us to learn about our relationship with the creator.  We find our selves filled with desire to know perfect order, perfect love, perfect pleasure, perfect beauty, and we constantly strive to learn more, experience more, and become one with this perfection.  But then, in the usual free-will tradition, not only do we get to experiment with it, but many of us (shall we say) "choose" to become totally confused about this fundamental desire and its goal.  As we loose sight of, or are steered away from, this natural destiny we still feel the built in motivations and desires but instead we act them out with the nearest or most similar substitute.

Barring the occasional awe inspiring vista over a featuresque landscape, cute furry animal, or delicate specimen of flora, other humans and the things we have created are the most inspiring things in the real world that mimic spiritual qualities.  Thus we find ourselves on a constant search for the most beautiful, the most sensual, the most inspiring, the most enlightening, or the most creative human we can find.  Notice that when we are in full rapture with such a human we often call them an "angel", or a god or goddess, or place them on a pedestal and sometimes declare that we "cannot go on living without them"; because if they leave us it is as if our very reason for life goes with them.  I do not believe this feeling is unwarranted, only misunderstood.

In reality no human can ever be there or produce for us all the time every time, yet this is what we want, ask for, and even give in promise to each other.  No human can love us perfectly, yet the craving for this remains.  No human can provide us with perfect happiness or pleasure, yet this too we seek.  I suspect that when we live without a healthy sense of spiritual awareness or direction, we use each other to fulfill these desires which were meant to lead us to greater understanding of ourselves and our spiritual nature.

Romantic Love and Sexual Seduction

I think both romantic love and sexual seduction play a prominent role in this confusion.  Romantic love can provide us with dreams of being totally accepted, perfectly understood, and tremendously needed and/or supported by another.  And sexual seduction can provide us with experiences of anticipation and excitement, hopefulness, feelings of acceptance and recognition, great self esteem, and often an intense experience of oneness and connection.  Both of these avenues can provide us with a "drug"-like experience to which we can become addicted.  Without a more profound goal, it can be easy to get caught up in the use of these experiences to keep us going when there seems like there is nothing else to live for.

But our desires for beauty, security, to feel appreciated by others, to feel accepted by others, to feel desired by others, and to feel good about ourselves are feelings that others should not be expected to provide.  These particular desires need to motivate us to improve our own lives instead of re-visit our same old avenues.  Sex is great when it is motivated by physical desire, and romance is great when it is motivated by a desire for connection, but these are not things that complete our lives - they only create momentary goals.