The Sufi poet Rumi said, “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing or wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” Where is that field? This photo is on the wall in my office where I work with couples, and I sit facing the field when I work. It reminds me to feel into that field within myself, if I begin to get lost in the story of the couple, or they are far afield and I know they have come to me to bring them to that place, and are doing all in their power not to go there.
Another way of speaking about the field is to speak of Sacred Union. The following is an excerpt from my book, Activating Your Loveseed: Revealing the Blueprint For A Better World:
Sacred Union
Sacred Union is the archetype of Oneness that symbolizes the healing of all the ways we separate from God and one another. Couples who embark on a path of Sacred Union, have the intention of seeing their partner as a manifestation of the Divine, of the Beloved in form. The Beloved is that aspect of your own being that is one with the I AM or Christ consciousness. It is an inexhaustible force of love that is destined to reunite with you in perfect oneness.
In history we catch glimpses of the rapture of Sacred Union. Ancient people covered their temples with images that symbolized the reunion of the masculine and feminine. They knew the story of the feminine aspect of God, Sophia, who painfully chose to leave heaven in order to save her children on earth, and of the fiery longing of the masculine aspect of God, Logos, to find and reunite with his beloved Sophia.
Gnostic and Egyption scriptures, and the exquisite poetry of the Sufis, helps us see the Divine in a whole new way. Rather than the condemning God that most westerners still have deeply etched in their psyches, their God is full of yearning, rapture and the great longing to dance and play with creation. This God is sensual, both masculine and feminine, and comes alive in the act of surrendering to the fullness of life in all its varied expressions. It’s as if eros, agape and cosmic love are all experienced at the same time, catalyzing the expansion of consciousness that cracks open the shell of being human to the bliss of being one with the Creator.
Sacred Union is not about achieving great sex, or gaining cosmic powers. It is an ancient alchemical process that forever alters your existence. When you experience Sacred Union with your partner, the two of you become one in that third place of union with the Divine, which is the same place in both of you. Rumi says, “Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along.” To open the doorway to the Beloved with another person is an exalted way of loving, and is what David Deida alludes to when he speaks of the third level of loving. It is communion, and involves the merging of the wisdom, courage and compassion of the Sacred Heart through consciousness and sexuality.
Barry Long, the Australian spiritual teacher and writer, says this about the longing for the Beloved:
“In every woman's body is this extraordinary unimaginable power of She who is the woman, the divine woman, behind all her daily thoughts and longings. Every woman on earth is endeavoring to manifest her divine feminine qualities. It is the same for man. Deep inside every man's psyche is the divinely noble principle of Man. It too is endeavoring to manifest, to push up through two thousand million years of past into the brain and the senses, and express its divine male qualities.”
The Pistis Sophia is a Gnostic text written between the third and fourth centuries AD, in which Sophia is identified with the Holy Spirit, The Universal Mother, and envisaged as the Psyche of the world, and the female aspect of Logos, which is the Word of God, or masculine principle of Divine Reason and creative order. In this archetypal story of God, it is written that Sophia lost her sight falling to earth, and that she cannot see Logos standing before her. She only knows him by her ability to feel.
This is a clue to a dilemma that many couples face, as the woman yearns to feel and be felt by her masculine partner, and he stands on his reason. The choice: conflict or communion? Finding the common ground of the third is a powerful tool that lifts you out of conflict and toward a higher form of loving. That place of communion is the field beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing. When you meet your partner there, you are in the presence of the Beloved. Imagine what that can do for the world!
