Jhāna, Eros, Logos and Creativity
Reflection #71: the logos and eros meet inside each of us to birth creative bliss
In my deepest meditations, I have, a few times, entered a state of jhāna. Jhāna is a mental state that is sometimes called a “meditative absorption” and when you are experiencing it, your attention becomes so concentrated upon the object of meditation that your awareness becomes completely absorbed by it.
The surprising thing about jhāna is how extremely pleasurable it is.
The whole point of jhāna is to learn to access joy, bliss and rapture from internal mind states thus allowing the meditator to (in theory) transcend the addiction to pleasure that comes from external senses. (There are levels of jhāna, and here, I’m speaking of jhāna level one. The higher levels are calmer, less rapturous, but deeper.).
One interesting thing about my experiences of jhāna is that the ones I’ve experienced feel symmetrical and ordered. They are kind of like a universe of light with a concentrated point in the center with energy flowing in a torus pattern from the edges of the universe to the center and back out. I admit, I had to search Google to learn the word “torus” refers to this geometrical shape. This is what the jhānas I’ve experienced feel like to me:
And, since I’m a trekkie, I realized that I had seen this shape somewhere. The experience “looks” and “feels” like a warp bubble from The Next Generation’s Enterprise D:
Recently, however, I had a quite different experience.
In regular meditation one day, there was suddenly a red, amorphous non-symmetrical mass. It was pulsing and felt primal and organic – Quite different from the symmetrical experience of jhāna I described above.
This primal energy, at first, felt like something I should avoid. But I also felt deeply drawn to it. I wanted to reach out to it. It was as if it called out to me. And, in fact, it tentatively kept “reaching out” toward me. I desired to experience it. For several sessions I ignored this desire and just observed it dispassionately as all good meditative instructions tell you to do. After all, one of the traditional, at least traditional Buddhist, goals of meditation is to reduce desire.
However, on this one particular day, I decided that my mind kept presenting this amorphous blob for a reason and that, well, I’m not a buddhist and perhaps I should lean into this desire. Let’s face it, it’s all in my mind anyway, so I was “desiring” something that was already inside of me. So far, since starting meditation, my mind has seemed to know what it needs to do, so I decided to trust it.
So, this time, when the amorphous primal energy appeared and reached out, I welcomed it, and let it flow into me.
Oh. My God.
It felt warm and powerful. There was so much energy, and it was primal. It felt like I had taken Captain America’s super soldier serum.
It was raw. Primal. It felt, and I hesitate to admit this, but, as Hemmingway said, writing is about finding one true sentence: It felt erotic.
And I admit, I liked it. At first, it felt like something I shouldn’t be doing, but then I realized the “shouldn’t” was social conditioning, to the rest of me, it felt right.
It did not feel at all like the cerebral ordered energy in my head that has led to the symmetrical jhāna torus states. This energy was low, in my gut and rose upward throughout my body. It filled me from the bottom up.
At the same time the primal asymmetrical energy rose, the symmetrical ordered energy filled me from the top down – from the crown of my head, working its way down.
And then…..the two energies met and merged around my heart area.
And, when they merged, “I” completely “disappeared,” other than being lost in the ecstatic, erotic, joyful, blissful, happy dance of these two energies inside of me.
I don’t know if this was another form of jhāna. I don’t think it was, because it was sensual and erotic, but not in cheap way. And simultaneously, it also felt ordered and geometric. I don’t know what it was. But it felt like two long lost lovers who hadn’t seen each other in years finally embraced into a blissful feeling of coming home.
Then I stumbled across something I had written in an old journal entry:
A realization: there is a suppressed darkness within me which, if ignored, reappears as anger, impatience and frustration, but it can be channeled instead into creativity where, when all aligns, it is merged with the divine, the subconscious and the superconscious combine and are filtered through the conscious, creating art. This darkness, when not released through creativity, is why artists and creatives get crabby when kept from their craft for too long.
That sounds like the same thing! The powerful energy is the same creative energy!
Upon reflection, I have a conjecture.
The normal “head energy” is logical, ordered, driven, and symmetrical. It is Logos, the creative force of order in the universe. Traditionally considered “male.”
The raw, powerful, primal, asymmetrical, fun loving, spontaneous, powerful, erotic energy gives itself away in the word I used to describe it: erotic.
That energy is Eros, the other half of creative energy in the universe – traditionally considered “female.”
And when these two eons' old energies meet and mix inside of a human being, they have a “sex of creativity” (instead of procreativity) in the psycho-spiritual plane.
It was as if I could, through overwhelming bliss, just barely glimpse the potential of what a human can be when both halves are integrated and in balance.
The collective ego of our civilization seems, to me, to have corrupted or diminished our understanding of what we call Logos. We reduce it into a concept that only includes rational, logical, and, “related to language.”
But, to me, it feels like much more than that inside. It feels like that which brings non-form into form. It brings order and cohesion to thoughts, and, with action, we use those logos generated thoughts to create something in the material world.
Eros, on the other hand, hasn’t been diminished in our definitions, but we, as a logos-driven society, suppress it. Some of us have even been taught that eros is wrong in some way.
That seems like a suppression of the feminine, and that, perhaps, is one major source of our societal problems. For example, that suppression may be one reason that women have been discriminated against and far-too-excluded from power throughout the male-dominated western world. Not only has society suppressed the internal feminine, but also, the feminine on a humanity-wide scale.
For example, how many westerners have been taught that sex, eros, is sinful? You are born a sinner, we are told by some institutions. That’s another way of saying something is wrong with you.
And invariably, that means that what we are taught is wrong with us stems from the type of energy I felt. We feel our primal, bodily drives are wrong. We think our desires are wrong. We must suppress the body and transcend it and live only in the mental and spiritual realms, we are indoctrinated to believe.
No wonder I resisted it for so long! I was taught, subconsciously and sometimes explicitly, these very things.
Our prudish nature, perhaps, has caused us to suppress this natural energy to the point that Freud thought that this suppression of the body’s sexual urges was the root cause of psychological problems (I disagree with Freud, I think that fear of death is the root cause of psychological problems, but that is a topic for another reflection).
If I am right, and believe me, I could be wrong, we are long overdue in allowing Eros and Logos to take center stage, together, inside of us, in a balanced and wholesome way.
And, perhaps if more of us achieve this balance inside, we will start to achieve such a balance on the outside, at the societal level.
We must stop thinking of these two energies as “opposites.” That is something that our logical side loves to do - to cut things up into dualities of “right” and “wrong.”
But instead of thinking of our eros and logos as “opposites”, perhaps we should start thinking of them as complements that attract one another – complements that attract the best of one another.
When we think of them as opposites, they naturally fight, which blocks their ability to dance together. And that dance, I believe, is what gives rise to the creative transformation that is possible in our lives.
The place where these energies meet is the source of true creativity. And, when they are in balance, we can access the source of creative energy. What happens inside of us should mirror what happens in the material world - a male and a female attract one another, and when they “dance” with each other, and, if they do it well, they bring out the best in each other. The energy of procreation can be transformed into Creation.
As I said, the collective ego has co-opted the word logos as, “rational and language based.” Even our translations of John 1:1’s famous verse, we translate as, “In the beginning was the word….” But the actual word John used was ‘logos’ as the greeks understood it.
Logos as a divine force of creation and transformation makes more sense in John 1:1. Could it be that logos transforms energy into form? And eros, transforms form into energy?
In Greek philosophy, logos meant a universal divine reason and creative order. Not just “reason,” but divine reason with creative force. I believe this is the idea that John was going for.
Eros, on the other hand, may represent the daimon, the shadow, the Muse. It’s creative potential, raw creative energy that turns matter into a force of creation — the matter of our brains, suddenly, with eros, spark with creative non-form: ideas and thoughts. These inspirational sparks of eros, then re-combine within us, dancing with the logos to produce everything we create in the material realm.
When a person assumes these two forces to be opposites, and especially if one or the other is repressed, the result for him is not attraction, but a fight between them, which blocks a person’s full ability to create the transformation in his life needed to reconnect with true self filled with joyful creative potential.
Perhaps, in striving to become fully ourselves, our true self is a synthesis of the male and female. A symbiosis of the logos and the eros, that combines both psycho-spiritual ideal and the sensuous physicalness of a human. The spiritual is our grace, the expansive, forceful, perpetrating energy that strives for freedom, and the physical energy is our gravity. It is open, receptive and gathering. The logos gazes to the horizon and dreams, but without the eros it is completely lost and untethered from reality, while the eros provides raw, creative power that drives all, but without the logos, it will have no outlet for such passionate power and the energy becomes repressed and destructive. Apart, both energies are ineffective. But together, they produce life. Not just un-deadness in the biological sense (bios) but life in the fullest spiritual sense (zoë). When we properly marry the two energies inside of us, in equal harmony, then we evolve into a true human with one foot on the earth and one hand in the stars ready to live life to the fullest and create.
“I came that they may have life (zoë), and may have it abundantly.” — Jesus, John 10:10
PS - I wrote a short story called The Christmas Shaman about the wise men, the nativity, and The Epiphany as a story that points to a potential journey that happens inside each of us. Read The Christmas Shaman here.
Posts Referenced in this Reflection:
Ignoring your Daemon Unleashes a Demon
Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clintavo, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.
This reflection explores themes addressed in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist.
Inside of each of us lies a divine force - The Sovereign Artist Within - a remarkable force which brings joy, peace, creativity and love back into our lives. This approach to the creative process saved me, and it can save you too, perhaps it can save us all. Connecting with The Sovereign Artist manifests as an explosion of creativity, peace, and quiet inner joy. It transforms the artist into a reflection of itself - sovereign, free, joyful and loving. If that is of interest, please click the button below to join the book’s waitlist.
Very interesting essay! And what a cool meditation experience. I've saved this to reread.