Eros is a Greek word for love. He is the son of Aphrodite, the shining goddess of love and beauty, while Thanatos, the personification of death, is born of the goddess Night, that thrives on the darkness of our lack of consciousness. Eros inspires us to engage passionately with life and others, living by the call of our hearts because it’s what makes living worthwhile. Living through the heart and becoming more heart-centered is the most liberating experience we can embrace as human beings. But as easy as this sounds, living through the heart takes a whole lot more than what we assume. It is the most profound and enlightening experience because to embrace the calling of our heart, to embrace Eros, the creative forces within, also means to embrace Thanatos, its opposite, the forces that divide and destroy.
The Greek Poet Hesiod established in his Theogony that Thanatos is a son of Nyx (Night) and Erebos (Darkness) and twin of Hypnos (Sleep).
In the psyche, Thanatos can represent self-defeating and self-harming behaviors. It is not possible to have Eros without Thanatos. As we all know, we live in a world where we experience separation from the whole, in other words, duality. In order to transcend duality and become whole, we must consciously recognize and integrate both these aspects within the psyche. Unite both the unconscious with the conscious. Or, as Carl Jung stated, make the unconscious conscious. We have to recognize what hides in the darkness, unconscious patterns, and self-sabotaging ways.
We may act negatively or engage in self-harming or destructive behaviors because of different wills that come into play or different Gods from darkness, a place where the light of consciousness doesn’t shine. Unconsciousness is, in other words, a state of sleep and unawareness. We may engage in such a way or choose people, places, and things that do not serve our highest good because an unconscious part of us is still trying to tell a story we have yet to recognize. Until that story is heard and we become conscious of it, we cannot let it go, and our unconscious patterns, Thanatos, drive us in defeating ways that are not based on self-love. To let go of Thanatos, we have to embrace Eros, who leads us into our vulnerability but also helps us recognize our light, strength, and honor.
As above, so below. The coming together and pulling apart, both Eros and Thanatos are two inseparable steps in a single symphony and dance within the cosmos, creating a perfect, imperfect galaxy. We must honor Thanatos, isolation, variance, antipathy, misunderstandings, and estrangements as part of the flow, the whole, and the growth of relationships. Both our relationships with ourselves and other people. Sometimes, those who are most idealistic about love find the greatest pain. We can avoid the painful side of Thanatos if we stop denying its presence but instead try and acknowledge what it is trying to teach us in this imperfect, perfect dance we call life. Separateness is an inevitable part of life and just as essential as union for harmony and attraction to take place. Both hot and cold, positive and negative, light and dark, when we understand the nature of duality, we realize that nothing in the Universe can exist without it because unity allows us to know it all, but duality, on the other hand, allows us to experience it all.
When unity consciousness asks what it can become, a projection of the self comes into being, where it can see itself from a different perspective and allows it to move differently through reality. This results in an infinite dance of positive, the self, and negative, its projection, where the self tries to see every different aspect of itself in a different way. When one moves, the other moves in the opposite direction, creating endless waves trying to see the back of the other, hence the spirals we can see in the Fibonacci sequence and galaxies, splitting into many other levels and waves. Since that moment, every being in the Universe has been a creation from that positive and negative energy.
Don’t miss my post Demystifying Our Connection To The Divine!
