The Erotic Cosmos: Consciousness Lives as Relationship
We Are Both Cosmic and Local; Practices for a Relational Universe
Long before science proposed field theories of consciousness or panpsychic models of mind, many cultures, from the Hawai’ians to the Quech’ua, had already articulated that all being is relational, that the universe isn’t a buch of isolated things floating in dead space, but rather a vast web of interbeing. They knew that consciousness isn’t locked inside the skull, but that it flows between kin, across waters, with the winds, through stories and songlines. That the “self” and the body aren’t “things”, but porous, interconnected processes in the mind of creation; the manifest world is an energetic and vibrational ecosystem; we are living inside of entrained and aligning oscillations of sound and light, occurring at all scales from heartbeats to galaxies.
They knew that consciousness isn’t an emergent byproduct of human brains, but that brains are rather exquisite tuning instruments to a harmonic, coherent field, picking up and processing signals; transforming inputs to story and meaning; cocreating the world as conduits between the immaterial and material realms.
Moreover, the ancient body knows that it’s in our natural design to be both cosmic and local: we are wired to tap into the oneness, through practices, molecules, ceremonies, and then to come back into our personality and enjoy our opinions and experiences and unique placement in space-time, while not mistaking the latter for the only and absolute truth.
In these relational worldviews, consciousness hums as desire, or eros, the propulsive force of life. Eros as the primal pull to connect, associate, unfold, create, dissolve, expand. Eros as the movement of all things toward coherence and beauty: the seed drawn to soil, the ocean to the moon, the lover to the beloved, the neuron to the next spark of meaning. Consciousness as eros is a tension field in which all of material reality is suspended. Eros is the cosmic yes.
This erotic, relational view of the cosmos finds deep resonance in classical Tantra, especially the nondual Śaiva and Śākta traditions of Kashmir and Bengal. Whereas much of Western philosophy frames consciousness as a private, interior phenomenon, Tantric texts articulate it as an immersive and expanding field. Every act of perception is not a solitary witnessing, but a relational unfolding between Cit (awareness) and Śakti (its creative potency).
Therefore, the world isn’t “out there,” separate from the perceiver. Rather, it arises in awareness and as awareness, moment to moment. What we perceive is not the world as it is, but the world as it shows itself in relationship with us. The mountain reveals one face to the geologist, another to the farmer, the mystic, the medicine maker. Noone is seeing the whole, or making the exact same meaning from what is seen in common. Our knowing is shaped by the very conditions of our embodiment, our history, our state of consciousness in the moment of knowing. And so is everyone else’s. What we see as truth is context-sensitive, ephemeral and dynamic.
In a cosmos where perception is participatory and reality is relational, we can no longer pretend we can stand outside of the world, observing it objectively, naming it completely, having mastery and controlling it from a distance. We are always implicated, always entangled. We are always INSIDE the mystery. The more deeply you look, the more you realize you are the terrain, there is no way to make a map or to get above it. ACK!
In this view, all arrogance, or the belief that we fully know, finally know or exclusively know, is a contraction of consciousness. It is a closing of the field, a refusal to be in dynamic relationship with the ever-becoming real. Humility, by contrast, is an openness, a plasticity, a willingness to be changed by what we meet. We remain mold-able our whole life long. This understanding invites a particular kind of sweet humility: not the false modesty of knowing less, but the reverence of knowing with.
For those of us who want to know, who need to know, who only feel safe in the knowing, this kind of allowing can be a tough sell!
How long can we be in ambiguity. How long can we allow some softness or curiousity before our stories harden. How long can we stay in the spaciousness of not collapsing reality into certainty. (Certain practices can help this, specifically practices of radical inclusion, becoming a welcome field, and no make-wrong. If you haven’t worked with these concepts, they are life-changing. I talk about those with Patrick in this episode of the Rose Woman pod and you can join me for Living Tantra to cultivate this.)
The Tantric sages were not relativists in the modern sense. They weren’t saying “everything is equally valid.” They were pointing to a more subtle truth: that if knowledge is always conditioned by the knower, true clarity can only arise through purification of perception, and that this purification is liberation. That we put energy and time into becoming witness of our own condition. This is why the Tantric path is always paired with devotion, a frame of surrender past the small s self, or identity.
Choosing to see through the cosmology of a relational universe, and being firmly seated in a unified theory of consciousness, we can awaken a new and reverent way of being in ourselves. When we see the universe as alive, intelligent and emergent as love… when we see we can’t be separate, we enter naturally into right relationship, which is the seat of all ethics. And we can live then with more reverence, relaxation, care and joy, as part of the web of life. We craft communities, and social structures that reflect this reverence.
