The Evolution And The Spiritual Meaning Of Marriage -- New Age Marriage

By The Pathwork Guide

Blessed are your lives, blessed are your thoughts, blessed are your strivings, and blessed are your endeavors, my dearly beloved friends. Without your deep commitment to live up to your innate potential to be a God-person, then we could never fulfill our tasks. So we depend on your truth and on your love, just as you depend on ours. We depend on your giving yourselves to the Creator, just as you depend on our giving to Him. Let this beautiful mutual work always be blessed anew, in the Name of the Lord, Jesus Christ.

His Name would never elicit so much ambivalence -- and often even negativity -- if divine truth had not been so distorted in all areas, thus also as far as His life on earth and in heaven is concerned. All great divine influxes lend themselves more to distortion than milder forms of negative manifestation. With the knowledge that you have gained, you can easily observe this in your life. The great spiritual forces contained in dynamic love are more feared, more resisted, and more maligned than lukewarm currents. This is the deepest reason why such stringent taboos existed regarding sexual love, and why releasing the spiritual forces seems to be the most threatening and the most dangerous experience of all. For these powers are by no means merely ethereal. They encompass all of the personality, and they certainly include the body. This is also why the Christ Force, the Christ Consciousness, the Christ Reality has undergone so much misunderstanding, and therefore so much strife.

These forces are so strong that an unpurified personality cannot bear them. To the degree that negativity and distortion exist in the mind -- in the consciousness -- of an individual, to that degree these powerful currents manifest as crisis, as pain, and even as danger. But being receptive to these forces and then being part of them is the deep longing of every soul. This longing can be either conscious or unconscious.

The development of the institution of marriage is very significant from this point of view. A deeper insight is now needed so that you can widen and deepen your understanding of marriage and then use this knowledge to articulate your longing. This -- to articulate your longing -- is always the first step toward bringing what you long for into actuality.

During the many centuries of its existence mankind has developed in many areas. Let us consider some aspects of this development in regard to marriage within the last few centuries. This will give you an idea of the movement until now which, in turn, will open your vision of the movement in the future. You will see the current attitude toward this institution with the larger picture in mind. History can be properly understood only when the spiritual meaning underlying earthly events is gleaned.

In the not too distant past marriage was primarily an arrangement that served a number of functions. But the function of sharing, of love, and of mutuality on all levels of the personality it served least of all. In fact, love, mutual sexual surrender, and the profound exchange on dynamic energy levels were rejected and condemned. Marriage was supposed to be a financial and social contract to satisfy other personality functions of lower motives. For example, financial and social advantages were of primary importance in marriage. But what was more significant was the absolute conviction that these lower motives and reasons were morally right and virtuous. Men married women who brought a good dowry, or women who raised men's social image. In other words, greed and pride were glamorized and endowed with righteousness.

Men considered themselves the superiors of women. Marrying a woman meant nothing more than acquiring a slave who obeyed the master of the house and who saw to it that the man received every comfort and every convenience, but who made no demands for herself in any way. In exchange for these services -- which included being an object for man's mostly impersonal lust -- the woman received material security. She had no other responsibility in life than being an adequate object to her master. Of course, you understand that the man's responsibility entailed much more than mere financial responsibility. Since the woman was not considered a full fledged equal, then morally she was barely responsible. In those centuries the reality of emotional and mental responsibility did not exist as a concept, but it certainly existed as a fact. Even without the awareness of the concept, men acknowledged this fact as far as other men were concerned, but totally negated it when dealing with women.

This was not only the result of man's distortion and negativity, it was just as much the result of a strongly imbedded intentionality in the woman's psyche. Women negated self-responsibility on all levels for the longest time, and therefore co-created the unequal relationship between the sexes.

Both sexes equally feared -- and still fear -- the powerful spiritual energies involved in the forces of love, of eros, and of sex between a man and a woman. This power is the creative stream itself from which all that is manifest is made. This powerful current can be evoked by different methods. In other words, not only as a binding force between a man and a woman. It can be evoked through spiritual disciplines within an individual, by himself or herself. In that case, it merges the masculine principle and the feminine principles and power currents within an individual soul.

The unpurified soul cannot stand this power current. To the degree that unpurified soul substance festers in the personality, to that degree the power current has to be denied, suppressed, and split. Sexuality that manifests without love, without commitment, and without respect is just such a split-off, denied power current. Human beings who believe that pornographic or promiscuous sex is more pleasurable than the sexuality that streams from a unified wholeness and that combines with love and spiritual union could not be more in error. The precise opposite is true. But the power of such sexuality is so strong that it cannot be borne by the soul that still lives partly in darkness.

Another human error is the belief that a decently married couple who are faithful to one another are necessarily beyond the stage of split-off sexuality. The typical marriage of former times was a complete expression of the suppression, of the repression, and of the denial of spiritual power currents. In the man this denial often manifested as an inability to experience strong sexual feelings for the woman whom he loved, honored, and respected. Sometimes the unconscious fear of the power current is so strong that the split is total and therefore a man finds himself totally unable to experience sexuality with a woman he loves. In many cases, however, the split exists with one and the same woman. He can give relative honor and relative love to a woman whom he has married, in spite of deeming her inferior, but blot out her reality during the act of sexual union. This act can be performed only when the woman becomes a low object in the mind of the man. So pornographic sex can take place even within the framework of the respectable marriage that is socially acceptable.

For the woman the denial of the unified power current -- which is too strong for the unpurified soul -- often manifested in a total denial of the sexual reality of her body. And when her sexuality manifested in spite of all her attempts to deny it, then she experienced it with guilt and with shame.

Today the misunderstandings about sexual guilt and the repression in your world are as great as ever. These repressions, these denials, these guilts, and these false shames are not merely a result of social mores and of bigoted influences. They are the product of the inability to carry the force of the fully unified power current whose strength can be borne only by someone at least relatively liberated from his negativity, from his fear, from his doubt, and from his destructiveness.

The strongly sexual person, who experiences sexuality without love, without a deeply personal melting with a specifically chosen other, who chooses passing partners without heart and mind -- in other words, who is promiscuous -- is essentially no different from the moralist who is faithful to a wife with whom he has a surreptitous mating as a marital duty. Both are afraid of the love-sex current that has been unified through the power of eros, through the power of mutuality in soul development, through a commitment to each other, and through personal purification.

Both the man-woman relationship of the past and the attitude toward the institution of marriage are a direct result of this fear of the unified love-sex current. Self-purification was practically non-existent for the average person. It existed only in the churches to any important degree. But there the full power of the current was diminished by the edict of celibacy. True, some especially gifted and advanced individuals did evoke this spiritual power through their own separated endeavors. The mystical ecstasy is nothing but the release of a spiritual power current in which God is experienced as a living and physical reality. Ideally this can also happen through the melting of a man and a woman who are sufficiently free from fear and who follow together a path of self-purification. Their union will release this inner power current so that God will be experienced both in themselves and in each other.

Before discussing this experience more, let us go back to the evolutionary stages of your history. The picture I painted about marriage is not a very attractive one. Marriage as it has existed for so long was truly a more sinful state than all the sins that the moralists who perpetuated these standards condemned. These moralists directed the accusation of sin toward illicit sex or toward promiscuous or pornographic sex that could be detected outwardly. It is true that all of these indicated a denial of the God-given unification of love and sexuality -- of the greatest power current that is an expression of the Divine Presence. So in a certain sense this fear and denial is a symptom of the unpurified soul, the fallen spirit, if you will. But since all of you also fulfill a task in the movement of the return to a state of Godness, then it is futile to rail against this fact. Those who do this are themselves fallen spirits -- unpurified souls -- and therefore a part of this evolutionary movement. The appropriate attitude toward the fear of the full power current is acceptance of this fact of life. A gentle training is needed so that the personality can gradually acclimatize itself to this high-powered force and therefore can bear it in comfort. Ecstasy will become comfortable as the soul grows in stature. This happens through a process of development over many incarnations.

The real sinfulness of the attitude toward marriage which prevailed not long ago was the result of secondary guilt. Instead of admitting the fear of loving an equal and admitting the fear of experiencing the pleasure of sexuality, the woman alienated herself from the man by making him the enemy. Instead of admitting her fear of self-responsibility on all levels, the woman made herself an object and then blamed the man exclusively for this mutual creation. Both sexes denied the fear which might be called, in a much deeper sense, the primary guilt. This is a guilt that all mankind shares. But the denial of the fear caused secondary guilt. Some of these secondary guilts were giving energy to -- were empowering -- the impulses of the lower self. So material greed was fostered. Money, power, and social advantages played into the motives for choosing mates. One's public image, appearance values, and the idealized self image were nourished. Pride and vanity were elevated into moralistic false values. If you consider the moral indignation, the moral self-righteousness of men and women toward those who deviated from the accepted standards, then you see the strength of the secondary guilt. The mask self did not even pretend to advocate something genuinely good and valuable. The mask self claimed that greed, calculating self-interest, prideful appearance values, and the mutual using of each other were the highest of moral standards. Such claims go way beyond ordinary hypocrisy. A hypocrisy so deeply rooted and so pernicious required a strong uprooting, otherwise the soul could not heal. It is important for you to see the nature of the attitude toward marriage through many centuries. People marrying for love were -- and still are -- the exception.

The collective state of consciousness created these conditions in most marriages of the past. The same collective state of consciousness also created karmic conditions, prerequisites for specific guidance for the ensuing incarnations. For example, the antagonism that existed generally between men and women had to manifest specifically between individual men and women to a much greater degree than is the case now. So it was often predestined that two such individuals had to meet as prospective marriage partners. Their elders would arrange it. This kind of union gave the scope to bring out in each person both general and specific negative feelings and attitudes which, having become conscious, became the basis for transformation. Thus the marriages made in heaven were by no means always positive unions of love and affection, of attraction and respect. The negative mutuality between many individual men and women -- in other words, the antagonism -- created the collective consciousness, it created karmic conditions, and it also created the then existing standards of society.

In recent times, consciousness has made a great leap. Mankind has become ready to shed these old attitudes and to create new conditions, new standards, and new moral values. This can be seen in your time by many drastic changes. The women's liberation movement, the sexual liberation movement, and a different attitude toward marriage are signs of a newly emerging consciousness. These manifestations must be viewed in the light of an overall evolutionary direction. Otherwise you cannot really grasp the inner meaning of all these changes.

In all the evolutionary movements the pendulum tends to swing from one extreme to another. At times this is inevitable, sometimes even desirable, provided the movement swings into an exaggerated direction only to a certain degree. But when the degree is greater than necessary or desirable, then fanaticism and blindness develop in the same way as they did in the opposite direction from which the pendulum has swung.

So, for example, the sexual freedom of today is a reaction to the shackles of former times. To a degree this is a necessary phase which the individuals may have to experience temporarily until the wisdom of the new consciousness completes itself and commitment to one mate is experienced as a freer, more liberated, and as an infinitely more desirable act than the uncommitted, free-floating exchange of partners. The cycle had to move from the involuntary monogamous commitment -- with its accompanying infringements of personal unfoldment for both men and women -- to an awakening of the realization of the debilitating effects of this attitude and a subsequent libertinism and polygamous expression. From there the movement can proceed to a new groundedness in real inner freedom and independence that voluntarily -- in other words, consciously and deliberately -- chooses the monogamous commitment because it knows that this yields infinitely more satisfaction, gratification, and fulfillment.

A particularly pernicious aspect of the old attitude toward marriage was the fact that the sexual need and the need for companionship were polluted by opportunistic, materialistic, and exploitative ends. When one soul current is secretly put into the service of another, then both become negative. If love, eros, and sex were given their rightful place, then the real need for success, the real need for respect from the community, and the real need for material abundance could function in a higher-self way. What was worse was the fact that this pollution and this displacement were looked upon as if they were the morally more desirable attitude. Thus, mankind had to break away from this distortion. That is why a certain amount of upheaval became inevitable. So at times the sexual revolution had to manifest in undesirable ways. But undesirable only when seen out of context. The true lesson must always be learned individually. This lesson is exactly what I am saying here. The old ways desperately need profound change. A new sexual expression and a joyful acceptance of the sexual drive has to emerge. At the same time, the individual men and women need to understand the enormous importance of the wholeness of love, of eros, and of sex; of affection and of respect; of tenderness and of passion; of trust and of mutual partnership; of sharing and of helping each other. It must be understood that the committed relationship is not -- as is still commonly believed -- a moralized edict that deprives you of pleasure. The contrary is true. It must be understood that the power current that is evoked through a fusion between love, respect, passion, and sexuality is infinitely more ecstatic than any casual fusion could ever be. It is so powerful in fact that the very authorities against whom so much rebellion is launched now have feared this combined current more than anything else. These authorities are not that far removed from him who allows himself to experience sexuality only in a split-off way. In a way that is cut off from the heart, that is removed from real intimacy and from true sharing.

Knowing the state into which you can grow -- and into which you must eventually grow because this is your innate destiny -- is very important. It is the blueprint without which you cannot steer your ship. But there is a subtle and yet distinct difference between this model that beckons to you and a forceful attempt to be what you have not yet grown into organically. By virtue of your humanness, you cannot immediately be the ideal, totally fused individual that you are destined to be. You know that it takes a long time, much life experience, many lessons, many trials and errors, and untold incarnations until your soul substance has emerged to become this whole being. But you need to know that such a state does exist, even if you are still unable to experience it. However, you need to know this without self-pressure, without self-moralizing, and without discouragement. For all of these attitudes are erroneous.

Unfortunately, the attempt to enforce an ideal state that individuals cannot possibly live up to at this time has been practiced by almost all organized religions. This is why organized religion has fallen into ill repute today. The state of wholeness should be placed lightly into your consciousness. In other words, it should never become a whip. It should merely be a reminder of who you essentially are already -- and therefore of who you will become one day.

Just as it is foolish to turn into an atheist because of the errors of religion, so it is foolish to discard marriage altogether because of the previous distortions. Before marriage began to be doubted as a valid institution by many different individuals, the attitude toward this institution had already begun to change considerably. This happened in the last several decades. As opposed to the past, individuals now chose partners freely and were generally motivated by love. However, at times this also led to erroneous solutions. Often, individuals who were too young and too immature to form a really meaningful union chose marriage based on superficial attraction and without a deeper knowledge of the self and of the other. No wonder that such marriages could not survive. But this step, too, had to be gone through before maturity could be gained. Just as an individual cannot learn unless he experience mistakes and immaturities, neither can the collective consciousness. New ways have to be tried out by both the individual and the collective before the soul reaches wisdom and truth. The freedom to choose independently, the freedom to experience sexual and erotic pleasure, the freedom of making mistakes and learning from them, the freedom of growing into different and more mature relationships -- along with the growth of the self without condemnation -- all of these are necessary prerequisites in order to learn the real significance of marriage. This means to see it not as a shackle imposed by a moralizing outer or inner authority, but as a freely chosen gift. It is the greatest, the most desirable state imaginable. It is one that provides the keenest pleasure and the greatest fulfillment. But in order to bear all of this both the soul and the personality have to become strong, resilient, mature, and thus capable of carrying the power of its energies. Bliss, ecstasy, pleasure supreme can never exist gratuituously. In other words, they can never be cheaply snatched. For they cannot be borne that way. They can be borne only when the personality has reached sufficient purification, security, faith, self-knoweldge, and comprehension of the universe. In other words, Christness.

Sexual liberation has to go through some stages that may seem exaggerated, or that may even be exaggerated, before further sexual liberation -- the unification of love, of eros, and of sex -- can create the New Age marriage. Fleeting sexual encounters should not be looked upon as the final state of liberation. They are, at best, a temporary limited phase to go through. No one who has experienced this stage has ever been truly satisfied by it, not even on the physical level. You may delude yourself by thinking that this is the best you could hope to experience. But it is not. You may even deny your deeper unfulfilled longing because a part of this hitherto unfulfilled longing has been assuaged. But you have much further to go in order to give yourself what you really need, what you really want or desire, and what you should have.

As with the sexual revolution, the feminine liberation also had to go into some kind of extreme -- at least temporarily. So women had to become just as hard and just as unyielding as their greatest enemy, the man, in order to experience their strength, their capacity to be independent, their capacity to be self-responsible, their capacity to be creative, and their capacity to be resourceful. As long as this is a temporary manifestation, a passing phase, an interim phase from which further changes will emerge, then it is all right. But when this is seen as the final ideal, then it becomes just as damaging as the suppressed and dependent child-woman that you no longer want or need to be. The New Age woman combines independence, self-responsibility, and full-fledged adulthood with the softness and the yieldingness that previously were associated exclusively with the dependent parasite. The New Age man combines his heart feelings, his softness, and his gentleness with his strength and his abilities, not in a way similar to the woman, but in a complementary way. The two can form the New Age marriage.

The New Age marriage will not be formed early in life. If the participants are young, then they will have reached considerable maturity as a result of genuine, intense pathwork, such as this. The New Age marriage is a nucleus of strength, with the partners fortifying each other in their common voyage, and also fortifying each other in a commonly undertaken task for the greater cause. The New Age marriage is totally open and transparent. In other words, there are no secrets whatsoever. The soul process of the pathwork is totally shared. This openness and this transparency has to be earned. It is a path within the path, as it were. You need to expose your difficulty in achieving this openness, rather than either denying it or hiding it. If you do not expose your difficulty to be open, then your unfulfillment cannot be alleviated, no matter how much you try to blame it on your partner or on outer circumstances. Part of this openness is the honest revealing of your fear of the strong spiritual current, of the forces released by the unification of sexuality and the heart. When the fear is shared -- even though both may be unable to shed the fear as yet -- then the obstructions will be eliminated relatively fast. And some kind of vibrant fulfillment comes from this sharing.

In the New Age marriage a path of profound self-development and the emptying out of all the hidden areas of the self are a prerequisite for fulfillment and for keeping the relationship alive. When the vibrancy ebbs away, then that, too, needs to be met and explored together by both partners. There may be any number of reasons, none of them necessarily bad or shameful.

When all levels of the personality meet, join, are open to each other, and finally fuse, then the intensity and the vibrancy of the sexual encounter will surpass anything you can imagine at present. You deeply long for this, because this fulfillment is your birthright and therefore your destiny. It can exist only in a partnership such as I outline here. In other words, in the New Age marriage. But this kind of fusion cannot come about easily. It is the result of infinite patience, of growth, and of inner change or transformation. But it should live in your vision as a possibility that you can actualize.

The fusion of the personality on all levels means the fusion of all the energy bodies. This is rarely the case. As you continue to work on yourself, you will come to know when this fusion exists on the physical level only, when it exists on the emotional level only, when it exists on the mental level only, and when it exists on the spiritual level only. All these energy bodies exist as realities. They can either fuse or not fuse according to the prevailing conditions. When the fusion takes place on all these levels, then not only do you become one with your partner, but also with God. You realize God both in your mate and in yourself. So you need to accept the fact that the power current is too strong to bear unless your personality has reached a high degree of inner development and of purification.

When it is finally realized by mankind that sexual fusion is insufficient and uninteresting unless it includes all the energy bodies in the process of coming together, then the approach to a sexual encounter will be different from what it is now. In other words, it will never be casual or haphazard, but will be considered a holy ritual. These rituals will be created by the individual couples and may change at different phases. They will never deteriorate into fixed routines. The sexual encounter is a true fusion of the masculine principle and the feminine principle as universal forces. Each sexual fusion will be a creative act, thereby creating new spiritual forms and new heights of development in the two selves that can then be given on to others. The merging and the complementing of these two divine aspects -- the feminine force and the masculine force -- will create not only total fulfillment, ecstasy, and bliss, but enduring values and a true experience of Divine Reality. In other words, of the Christ both in the self and in the other.

My beloved friends, this lecture should not discourage you, no matter how far away you may seem to be from the possibility and from the destiny outlined here. You are moving in this direction merely by being able to comprehend this lecture, by being capable of choosing to use it in the most positive way, no matter where you are. Knowing this truth will free you -- just as knowing any truth must free you -- even if you cannot obtain its completion in this life. Rejoice that it exists, and therefore that it waits for you. Know this truth as the enrichment that has been given to you.

There exists a tremendous tension between the male energy current and the female energy current. This tension can manifest either in a positive way or in a negative way. If it manifests negatively, then sexuality is hooked up either with denial -- homosexuality, repression, asexuality, impotence, frigidity -- or with a negative expression, such as sadism, masochism, and fetishism. It may be necessary to give some expression to sexuality that is attached to negativity. For if it is completely denied, then the total personality is being thwarted and the tension can lead to such a powerful accumulation of energy that non-sexual violence accrues. If these expressions occur either in fantasy or in situations of mutual consent where no one is harmed or forced, then this can be a step leading to a more cohesive, connected sexuality -- especially when this is not being glorified, but is understood in its true meaning.

When the tension manifests positively, then it is truly a psychic nuclear point. The New Age marriage is a psychic nuclear point. The energy released, the creativity liberated, and the mutuality of ecstasy are deeply spiritual experiences in God, through God, and with God. Divine sexuality must be recognized in the New Age. It is to be found neither in the old taboos and denials, nor in the moralizing judgment about this creative force. Nor is it to be found in your deviations that occur by necessity as a result of your incomplete development. The explosive force of the male/female union and its release mechanism permeates the total personality and transcends the finite. It truly spiritualizes the body and materializes the spirit, which is the task of evolution.

With this, I bless you, my beloved ones. The Christ within your deepest soul fuses with the Christ consciousness and with the divine energies that surround you. It fills you with His love, with His strength, and with His blessings.

May 17, 1978