Full moon rises as I write this, adding its cooling reflected light to create an ambiance only observed at such times in the cycle of events. The full moon is a time of harvest, a time to reap the results of the past month since the last full moon and particularly since the last new moon a fortnight ago. How has your past month been? Do you have anything of value to show for the past month? For me a rekindled friendship is the one valuable item I have managed to salvage this past week so I celebrate tonight because friendship is one of the priceless treasures of the world that act as a valuable asset in any challenging situation.
Friendship and allies who are there to assist you in times of trouble, may well be the unrecognised gift for anyone on the way. Actually there are five primary positive relationships to be shared among us, according to the ancient Vedic literature of India. They are as follows:
Neutrality
Servitude
Parental
Friendship
Love
Neutrality alludes to the relationship you may have with an inanimate object of any sort. There is little more one can do to deepen our relationship with our objects which surround us, but the relationship still exists, and is usually purely functional. There is no reciprocation from the objects in any conscious way, as much as we may like to anthropomorphise them. Even the Moon appears close tonight but I will never have any more than a functional relationship with it. Sometimes we like to give our car a name but the car will never come when you call it. It is neutral.
Slightly above that is the relationship of servitude that we have either with our boss or employer on the one hand, or with our staff on the other. You may have a purely functional relationship with them, and care little about what they do after working hours. This relationship may be based on respect, or a purely functional affair based on work traded for money or some other asset. Servitude is a relationship of awe and reverence at best, and this creates a divide between the two people involved because there is some sort of hierarchy, where one party is of a greater status, and there is an exchange of service for reward. Even the president of your country may command respect and you may be in a relationship of service to your leaders out of patriotism or simply respect for the position, for example. Of course the types of relationships can overlap but this is the pure simple beakdown.
The next relationship we may have is parental, where we are a child or a parent to someone and naturally this relationship level now becomes deeper and more intimate. We love our parents and our children, and as they saying goes “blood is thicker than water”. Sometimes these relationships become tarnished and we struggle with our relatives, but in the purest sense the parental mood of exchange is much sweeter and more intimate than the prior two. Some say that the greatest love is that of a parent for their child, since it is instinctual and there from birth. We share so much with our relatives that it is hard to top this kind of loving exchange.
Yet there is a higher platonic love and that is our friendship with our peers. You may shift these types of relationships about as far as which is more important to you or deeper, since we are all individual and have our preferred tastes but friendship allows a type of depth that one can’t really experience with a parent or child, again because there is a slight tinge of awe and reverence, or a hierarchy gap once again between the related parties. We respect our parents and look up to them, while we feel protective over our children and so there is a division. But this division is absent among peers. Here we enter the more intimate connection that may occur between equals, where one may feel no awe or even respect since we are equals. The relationship is one of mutual voluntary appreciation but we are still open to playing rough with them, so to speak, whether in words or actions, in play or seriousness, and then to get over it and make up or carry on. The fact that we are equals allows us to choose, so when we do actually choose to be a friend, then it is from the heart.
Now we come to the topmost relationship, namely the lover, or the marriage partner. Here we have the highest relationship and the one with the most intimacy and sharing. The lover is the one for whom we feel the most intense emotion not felt for any of the other four relationships, so it is considered the top. We can, of course, find an overlap of some of these relationships, as I said, and this adds a richness and uniqueness to how we engage with the significant other. Yet these are the basic five exchanges in their purest form.
Other relationships exist, which may be unfavorable, like the one between enemies for example but they are not considered as primary, like the five mentioned here. And there is the relationship of student to teacher, though that could fall under servant mixed with parental perhaps. Even friendship can be tinged with a parental mood when one is protective over the other, or parental exchange can be tinged with friendship, and that is just fine. However, when we break them down into their purest forms, then these five are the primary categories.
Now the point of this discussion is to conclude that there may be one relationship which still remains to be mentioned, at least for some. And that is the one we have with the divine, or with our god, our maker, or our deity, and this may come in various guises, depending on the individual or the culture. However, generally the relationship that we have with the divine is one of servitude you may say. And that is fine but it may also manifest to some as one of a parental mood, with us as the child of the divinity. Sometimes we project our parental relationship onto our deity, seeing them as the father, or in some older cultures also as the divine mother. This is quite normal.
But did you know that there is also the cultural reference to having a relationship with ones deity or god as a friend? And this may shock you but there are references in ancient cultures like the Sufis and even older, the Vedic Sanskrit texts of India, where there is talk or one having a relationship with the deity as a lover. The beloved is referred to in these cultures. And although quite esoteric now, and not for everyone, this is simply because the affair of the lover and the beloved is seen as the most intimate relationship of all. This is where one feels oneself to be female in relation to the deity who is the original male. In fact it is described that in relation to the deity, we are all female. And the god is the only male, so to speak.
In this kind of affair, the spirit soul is the female who sometimes feels intense separation from her beloved deity much like the romantic separation felt when we are apart from our lover. I’m sure most of you have felt romantic love and the feelings of euphoria and separation that arise. These are of course hormonal and based on chemicals but the analogy is used to describe the yearning or longing of the soul in separation from source, from divinity, and so this mood of lover and beloved is adopted by the more esoteric and mystical schools of thought, as seen in their poetry and songs of love and separation going back a few hundred years. Poets like Jayadeva and Rumi in the different cultures have referred to this theme extensively, among others.
So on this full moon night, I write to reveal this esoteric mystery to you, even though some may see it as taboo or scandalous or may be misunderstood, but there it is nevertheless, based on authentic cultural references from the Sufi Middle Eastern as well as Vedic Indian cultural and sacred texts. I hope that this has shed some light on the matter, like the cooling rays of the Moon on a full Moon night where lovers may meet under in secret, to experience the highest love of all.
(image pixabay)