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When sexual partners see into their True Nature and are consciously faceless together, their loving can come to them as a revelation, an opening out upon new and unsuspected dimensions of existence. At the same time it remains as human (and certainly as physical) as ever – except that it is remarkably steady and unanxious and free from the usual self-concern and grasping. More surprising, perhaps, is the discovery that it can promote the seeing of both partners.
Surely the reason is that this love, though too rare, is in fact only natural. All true lovers are, however unconsciously, face-to-no-face and, conversely, all the consciously faceless are, at least in the profoundest sense, true lovers. This is how our love-life is lived when we stop pretending: really we are built this way and have no choice – even more built for loving above the belt than below. Here at the top which is always topless, each always fits the other like a skin-tight glove, each is a perfect receptacle ready for and needing to be filled out with the other, absolutely female to the other's maleness, unreservedly given and self-abandoned and overcome and penetrated. Here is an ideally asymmetrical union, a unique fusion, not of body with body (which is impossible, since each body fills only its own volume) nor of spirit with spirit (which superfluous if not absurd, since spirit is indivisible) but of body with spirit, so that each is the other. Here indeed, in the upper region of love's embrace, form is Void and Void is form, and lovers achieve their otherwise unattainable goal: they vanish in favour of, they actually become, each other. No wonder the face – provided there's only one present – and the eyes in particular – provided there are only two – can for such lovers be the best aphrodisiac of all! Vive la différence – the absolute difference between the 1st person as the faceless lover and the 2nd person as the loved face – especially since it gives birth to the whole world! Whereas living together face-to-face (surely living in sin, the sin of imagined symmetry, divorcing body and spirit) means mutual impenetrability – leading to rejection, fear of union, life at loggerheads, lovelessness, sterility – so living together face-to-no-face (in the true union of body and spirit) means their cure. Whether or not it includes sex, the face-to-no-face relationship means the enjoyment of that ultimate intimacy which knows no hang-ups or hang-overs and is incapable of perversion or surfeit or disillusion; and if up here at eye-level occurs such a marvellous interpenetration that each wholly replaces the other, such penetration as may be occurring lower down could hardly fail to be enriched. If the higher level is lacking, what hope for the lower? Can any lover know what love is who prudishly refuses entry to the loved one's face (as if it were possible!) by always thrusting his or her own in the way? Can any lover fail to know what love is who submits to this invasion so delightedly, when to look at is to die for the loved one?
In short, so far from ruling out physical love, Self-realisation can usefully employ it; and, so far from ruling out Self-realisation, physical love positively demands it. To neglect our hypothesis is to thwart and curtail our earthly human love as well as the diviner sort, by separating them. Ultimately sex doesn't come into its own till it is revealed as an aspect of the One's own joy in discovering and reuniting with Itself, disguised as the not-self or other – as one very special other.
For, however faceless it may be, a diffused love – a general embracing of all beings – is by itself rather facile and vague and diluted, and likely to lack in depth what it gains in breadth. Fortunate is the one who also enjoys a faceless concentrated love – a singular adoration for one person, normally but by no means necessarily expressed in sexual union – a unique interfusion in which the loved one nevertheless stands for everyone, so that (in a way hard to describe) each is specially loved in and through that special loved one. Can anybody who has thrilled to this particular love doubt that it is an essential clue to what the world is all about?
Of course the sexual implementing of this particular love is necessarily restricted in practice and, more often than not, ruled out altogether. But such limitations, however painful they may sometimes prove, are eventually acceptable by the faceless who (as such) enjoy complete union in any case. Intercourse is a poignant but optional or dispensable extra for them, because there is always to hand this supreme Interfusion, this Identity which, in the last resort, lacks nothing.
At the physical level, no such perfection is to be expected. A couple who, besides seeing – intermittently – how one they are in the One, have come to express this union sexually, aren't necessarily and immediately without sexual difficulties. But they should know what to do about them. "Whatever the problem, its solution is never to lose sight of the Self in any circumstances." What, not even in bed? Not even when the problem is a sexual one? Not even in orgasm? Specially not then! What kind of Resource is it, that can cope with ordinary difficulties but not with ones like this? If our hypothesis is valid, if Self-seeing works, it works here too; and if it doesn't it is indeed dubious. And in fact the evidence so far is that it works no less well in this delicate and important field than in any other.
Take, for instance, a common trouble – self-consciousness interfering with sexual performance or responsiveness. This is, after all, only a particular case of morbid self-consciousness in general, and its treatment is the same. Of course one tries to forget oneself, to lose oneself in one's partner, but the attempt is doomed from the start – the harder one tries the more self-occupied one gets. The only real cure isn't less self-consciousness but more – more of that true Self-consciousness which is seeing one's Absence, instead of that self-consciousness which is trying to overlook one's presence. (And, remember, this Absence can never be partially or dimly seen; nor should the seeing of It be too hard to maintain here, since It is the indispensable Canvas on which that loved face is painted.)
The wonderfully strange and happy fact is that this Self-seeing (which is perfect anyway) IS self-forgetting: with the result that (for example) the once painfully-self-occupied public speaker, now wholly occupied with the audience, talks fluently and spontaneously and unanxiously; and the once painfully-self-occupied lover, now wholly occupied with the beloved, loves similarly well. In falsely self-conscious loving, which begins by being inefficient and ends by being impossible, each is using the other for personal satisfaction; each is attempting to enjoy his or her own body instead of the other's – so the enjoyment dwindles. In truly Self-conscious loving, on the contrary, each is the disembodied enjoyer of the other's body; each consciously makes way for and is occupied by the other, feels the other, knows (in the biblical sense) the other – and the by-product or bonus is that physical enjoyment flourishes, perhaps as never before.
The pattern (the form-is-Void pattern) is displayed at all levels. Starting at the top, where it manifests visually as face-to-no-face, it manifests non-visually lower down as body-to-no-body and genitals-to-no-genitals. For provided one attends to what's actually given, the known abolishes the knower and the object ousts the organ that senses it: so that one smells a rose and not a nose, hears drums and not eardrums, touches this page and not fingertips. Genuine love-making is equally simple, equally non-dual and self-effacing, when the lover ceases playing Peeping Tom at his own bedroom keyhole, and becomes an Absentee in respect of all his senses. Imagined symmetry is just as damaging – because as fictitious – below the belt as above. But when it is corrected up there (how easy to disappear for that face!) it is at least well on the way to being corrected below, where symmetry may not be so easy.
The trouble – this illusion of symmetry – getting off to a slow start in early childhood and rapidly coming to a head in early youth, is the all-too-human knack of going out from oneself and there turning in upon oneself, so as to treat oneself as a mere object, a thing to handle among things to handle, a 2nd or 3rd person, a body, a face, genitals – with all the guilt and anxiety this manoeuvre is apt to entail. (Unlike more primitive animals, and notably unlike the neckless and limbless fish, the shape and flexibility of man's body invite him thus to work on himself and build himself up, to body himself forth from his native Emptiness.) The development of this self-thinging-knack up to and into adult life takes the form of playing simultaneously two master-games – the Face Game and the Genitals Game (strictly, the My-face-here Game and the My-genitals-here Game), both of them starting as simple hand-games but going on to great subtlety and complexity. Both involve handling, caressing, manipulating, concentrating on, enjoying, loathing one's own body – in one case the upper part of it, in the other the lower. The first – working up a face for oneself – is a sort of public masturbation; the second – working up a sex-organ for oneself – is the private kind; but the endeavour, and even the means, are strikingly similar, and the tragic consequences are the same – inability to love, since things (faces, bodies, genitals) as such are loveless. Learned at the same time and inextricably linked throughout one's early years, it would be fitting and natural if these twin master-games could be unlearned together, if they could simultaneously yield to the same basic therapy – which is none other than our hypothesis itself put into practice. Here, un-thinged in consciously asymmetrical loving, one may lose (a double operation, how suitably celebrated!) "all the shame of having a face" and all the shame of having genitals. The teenager does indeed have reason to be shamefaced: it is shameful to have and to be such things here. It makes bad sense, and consequently bad love.
Who after all, is here? Who is this Present-absent One, this No-thing, this 1st Person Singular, present tense? Haven't we decided that He is the one eyeless Seer, the one earless Hearer, the one tongueless Taster? He is also the one bodiless Lover! And just as the lover sees the beloved's face through a conceptual fog while he thinks he sees it with his eyes, and muffles the sound of her voice while he thinks he hears it with his ears, so he hardly begins to love her body while he thinks he loves it with his body. Only when he submits to being the One he really is – and she really is – does he know how to love that body, and know what sex is really about. In order to love it is necessary to be God, for God is love –and, not least, physical love. In order to be truly one with another it is necessary to be the One who is that other.
All the same, the practical testing and implementing of our hypothesis – in particular, seeing the Infinite Basis of loving – isn't going to perfect Its finite instruments overnight, or completely. To live is to be in difficulties. But our necessarily limited human nature will have its knots progressively untwisted till it becomes truly human and natural – and acceptable just as it happens to be, out there where it belongs. What sexual 'problems' remain will no longer appear problematical and distressing, now that they are viewed from their problem-free Centre and Origin. The homosexual, for instance, may still have to live with his difference, but he can more cheerfully do so when, seeing that intrinsically he is the Source of all the varieties of sex, he finds in that Source the one essential 'Normality' which unites him absolutely with all creatures whatsoever, independent of the local and temporary accidents of sex and biological evolution. And so with every sexual difficulty – whether it is lack of a sexual outlet (on account of social prohibition or personal inhibition), or impotence or frigidity, or any sort of abnormality or malfunctioning, our hypothesis implies that seeing-Who-has-the-difficulty is the only radical treatment. Surely, if anything will work, this will. The evidence, which is only beginning to come in, is indeed encouraging. But each lover, or loving couple (again: the decisive tests are 2-person), has to discover whether this seeing is as practical in bed as out of it.
(From The Toolkit for Testing the Incredible Hypothesis [out of print] by Douglas Harding, quoted in Seeing Who You Really Are by Richard Lang)
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