If a man disowns his dark masculine desire for freedom, then he kinks the hose of his masculine force. His energy will not flow freely, and his attention will be bound by unfulfilled yearnings. Most importantly, if his hose is kinked in this way, he weakens his masculine capacity to stand fearless in the death that is conscious life. He will not be able to face the unknown, the groundless ground of being, and still function from his heart in love.
When was the last time you really ravished your woman? That is, when was the last time you really "took" her, savagely, lovingly, with no inhibition whatsoever? Or, has it been so long that you are fascinated and even turned on by rape scenes on tv or in the movies?
When you are unable to express your dark passions with love, then they go underground in your psyche. Your dark desires become disconnected from your heart. Instead of being moved to embrace your woman with masculine force and aggressive passion--throwing her down on the bed, ripping off her clothes, and pinning her down beneath your body as you both yield yourselves in ecstatic loving--you begin to fantasize about controlling and dominating women in unloving ways.
The desire to ravish is the sexual aspect of the same masculine desire that wants to break through opponents on a basketball court, break through philosophical barriers to intellectual insight, or break through the fear of death into spiritual freedom. The desire to ravish is the desire to break through a woman's resistances to open her heart and body into ecstatic loving. The pleasure is in releasing her from all the conventional restraints of her psyche, so she has no choice but to surrender in love.
When this masculine desire to ravish becomes dissociated from your heart, then you will settle for breaking through a woman's resistance without love, through violence or coercion. Although few men will readily admit it, most men have entertained fantasies about forcing a woman to have sex against her will. In fact, most women have entertained fantasies of being forced to have sex against their will. The dark feminine desire, to be forced to surrender, is as strong as the dark masculine desire to penetrate through a woman's resistance. The difference between rape and ravishment is love.
Your woman surrendering to receive your strong love, or you lovingly "forcing" your woman to surrender into greater ecstasy, is the basis of ravishment. When you are unwilling to play these dark masculine and feminine poles in love and humor, then they will appear in loveless ways, such as rape fantasies, obsessions with soap operas, tragic stories of loss and brutality, and violent pornography.
Sexual energy is at the root of your bodily force of life, and your relationship to ravishment reveals your relationship to life altogether. This is also true of your woman. If your woman is afraid to surrender completely and receive your loving in all of her parts, she will also be afraid to surrender completely and receive the loving of the divine through and through her. She will feel essentially empty, and so seek to be filled with the "love" of food, shopping, social events, and conversation.
If you are afraid to yield yourself completely in the ecstasy of physical love with your woman--going beyond all sense of control and separate self so your heart and her heart are one in the midst of absolutely abandoned passion--then you will also be afraid to yield yourself completely in divine freedom. You will grasp onto your sense of self and control instead of yielding through your fear into the boundless unknowable infinity of existence. You will feel full of your own tension, and so attempt to empty yourself in the conventional masculine habits of tv, ejaculation, and work.
You must learn to let go, absolutely, in love with your woman. Unless you choose to live your life as a celibate, there is no way around this. You must be as fearless with your sexual desire as you are with your spiritual desire. The essential masculine fear is loss of self--which is also the essential masculine desire. So, if you are like most men, you are willing to lose your self in controllable ways like sports, newspapers, and orgasm, but you remain fearful of losing your self, for real, in love-ecstasy with your woman, surrendered in the unknowable infinity beyond mind.
As an experiment, the next time you make love with your woman, feel through your own physical and emotional boundaries into her. Feel into her so deeply that you become unaware of yourself and totally aware of her. Feel yourself move into her, your boundaries dissolving so that you become her, utterly aware of her breath, her movements, her emotions. Love her with more abandon than you've ever allowed yourself before. Feel through not only your boundaries, but also her boundaries, so that you are both dissolved in the immense force of your loving. Relax into the force of love so completely that only love remains.
Allow this love to ravish your woman to bursting, filling her heart and body beyond capacity, so she has no choice but to surrender to the depth and force of your loving. With a relaxed and spontaneous body, allow your love to penetrate her so deeply that she is overwhelmed, to the point of tears, as you yield yourself, letting go of all fear, only giving love.
In the midst of this self-yielding and giving of love, allow your entire masculine desire to manifest, dark and light. Do and be everything you ever wanted with her, in love, spontaneously, and with deep feeling into her and through her. From time to time, take special care to allow space for her energies and desires to take you to places you would never have gone on your own.
By reclaiming the full force of your dark masculine loving, you will not only re-own your capacity to ravish your woman in selfless ecstasy, but you will also re-own your spiritual guts. You will develop the courage to let go of yourself in the face of ego-death. You will unkink the hose of your masculine spiritual force by opening to the dark side of your sexual desiring, allowing the force of love itself to draw you beyond the need for control and fearful grasping. You will cultivate your capacity to "die" into love, with no need to hold onto your self.
Over time, as this force moves through you more freely, you will discover a naturally enhanced capacity to yield into spiritual "death," or the dissolution of your sense of separate self in the freedom of unboundedness. Rather than gripping onto yourself, you will be able to ease yourself more fully into the consciousness who you truly are, and in doing so you will recognize the Great One, with no boundaries, who is living you now, and who is not other than you. But to let go of your sense of individuated separate self takes guts. And you won't have them if you don't even have the daring to let go of the sense of separation between you and your woman while making love.
To truly ravish your woman in love, you must yield yourself in the worship and trust of her heart, which, in truth, is your heart. Such fearlessness will prepare you for and perhaps even initiate you into the worship and trust of consciousness itself, such that you will find greater and greater capacity to yield into and as the boundless One who you truly are.
excerpt from Way of the Superior Man
