The phallus, penis, cock, dick, member, pecker, prick, putz, tool, shaft, johnson, schlong, woody, manhood has always stood as a sexual symbol and the symbol of life-force itself. There are many stories and beliefs from ancient human history which say that blood is the carrier of spirit, energy, the soul and when the blood entered into the penis and made it erect, it was incarnating spirit into flesh. This resulted in the union of human life and the holy, of the cosmos and God and was always creative and energizing. With this different perception of life… new forms and new combinations of opportunities and possibilities were born.
How many forms and types of love are out there? The Greeks talked about “agape”, a non-erotic love and what the Bible calls “brotherly love.” The Greek God of Love, Eros, was also talked about in both a limiting sense of a phallic or sexual love and in the more precise modern day definition of an expansive sense of love as the bonding and uniting urge of all things. The Romans also had a God of love, Amor, or Cupid as we know of today, which was defined as the complete union of one body and soul with another. These forms of love, along with others are the living expression of the Lover energy in human life.
The Lover is the archetype of the display of healthy embodiment and being in one’s sensuous pleasure and in one’s own body without shame. The Lover is deeply sensually aware and sensitive to his physical surroundings in all its splendor and is connected to them all, drawn into them through his sensitivity. His sensitivity leads him to feel integrated, compassionately and empathetically with them. For the man accessing the Lover. all things are connected to each other in the most mysterious ways.
A man feeling the impact of the Lover wants to feel everything, physically and emotionally, and wants to be impacted by everything. He recognizes that everything is connected and thrives on the connectedness he feels with the interior world and in the exterior world with his powerful feelings of his relationships with other people. Ultimately, he wants to experience the entire spectrum of sensual experience in everything. Not only should the lover a symbol of the joy of life in his capacity to feel at one with others and the world. He must also feel all of their pain. Others may be able to avoid pain, but the man in touch with his “Lover” must endure it as he feels the pain and suffering of being alive-both for himself and for others.
There is a shadow and dark side of the “Lover”. A man who is caught in the shadows of the lover will be caught in destructive habits and patterns of not putting any limits on his sensual and sexual experiences in this vast universe that we live in. The addicted Lover says, “The universe holds a never-ending supply of pleasures, why should I limit my access to it?”. He becomes a victim to his own sensitivities and becomes enmeshed into the sensations.
We can get caught in the fire of loving, immersed in the misery and the joy of our own cravings that we become unable to step back and act from a distance, unable to come back to ourselves, to detach and observe our feelings from a distance. Many lives and relationships are ruined because people cannot distance themselves from damaging partnerships and relationships. Whenever we feel ourselves caught in an addictive relationship, we had better beware, because the chances are very good that we have become victims of the Shadow Lover. A man possessed by the addicted Lover is really a man possessed by his own personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. He is devastated.
The addict as shadow of the lover is a byproduct from childhood into adulthood. The child became absorbed into the Mother and is still within the Mother, and is struggling to get out. It has become so
painful that in order to break free he must destroy the alluring and enchanting “feminine” beauty that is keeping him from experiencing his manhood. This need to detach from and to contain the power of the “feminine” may also account for our masculine sexual perversions, especially those perversions that show up in unhealthy sexual activity and in the violent sexual humiliation of women.
In the shadow of the lover, men will learn the advantage of boundaries the most difficult way. He will learn that his lack of mature masculine formation, lack of discipline, his resulting infidelities, and his authority issues will surely get him into trouble. He will be fired from his jobs, and the women in his life who loves him dearly will eventually leave him.
What happens when we feel that we are out of touch with the mature masculine Lover in all his fullness? We are then possessed by the powerless lover. We will be living our lives in an asleep kind of way. We will “feel” have a lack of enthusiasm, and be missing the aliveness for life. We may have trouble getting up in the morning and trouble going to sleep at night. We may find ourselves increasingly isolated, alienated from our family, our co-workers, our friends, our lovers and our own desires.
Men who are habitually possessed by the powerless lover are consistently depressed. They feel a lack of connection with others and are cut off from themselves. When we ask what they are feeling, they will have absolutely no idea… He may say, “I don’t know. I just feel I’m in this cloud.” This often happens when the powerless lover is getting so close to really ”hot” material. What happens, is that a shield goes up between the conscious Ego and his feeling.
When we are allowing the fullness of the Lover into our lives, and keeping our Ego structures
in tact, we feel connected, alive, compassionate, empathic, energized. and romantic about ourselves, our intentions, our purpose, and our successes. It is the Lover, properly accessed, that gives us a sense of meaning-a connection to spirit. The Lover is the source of our longings for a better world for ourselves and others. “I have come to bring you a passion for living, that you might access it more generously.”
The Lover maintains his access to feeling the real life situations of our fellow human beings struggling in a difficult world. Our negative self talk, degrading our vitality and our “innate goodness” begins early in our lives. Many of us may have so repressed the Lover in us that it has become very hard for us to feel passionate about anything in our lives. The trouble with most of us is not that we feel too much passion, but that we don’t allow ourselves to feel our passion much at all. We push away our feelings of joy. We don’t feel able to be alive and to live our lives the way we wanted to live them the way we imagined them being from the start. We may even think that “feelings” and, in particular, our feelings, are annoying obstructions and wrong for a man. We CANNOT surrender our lives… we need to live our lives more abundantly and, only then, will we be able to empower others to live fully, perhaps for the first time in their lives.