I hope we aren't presuming too much in this dialogue, though if and when we edit this for publication we should be careful to go back and add material when necessary.
Let's go into "lust" a bit more deeply. Certainly lust that excuses treating an other as an object, what Martin Buber calls an I-It relationship, is unhealthy and cannot be the foundation of any long term holy relationship (defining holy as a treating one another as I-Thou, a manifestation of God equal to oneself). But, having said that, should we give up on the word altogether?
Is there such a thing as "holy lust"? This might be a level of desire/attraction that surpasses mere passion. I have no idea, really. I'm just thinking out loud. Yet I seem to have a sense, perhaps a long lost memory, of holy lust—a desire so great that it overwhelms the ego's sense of separateness (its intrinsic sense of hellish isolation), and pushes us beyond both I-It and I-Thou into the radical nonduality of I-I where self and other are united in a way that reveals something all embracing, all consuming—something the mystics of all traditions might call God—as the root and branch of all reality.
The intense sexual imagery that Jewish and Christian mystics use to speak of their relationships with God comes to mind, though I doubt they would use "holy lust" to describe it.
I admit to a love of mixing words in odd ways to create controversy, but sometimes doing so also opens new windows and lets in some fresh thinking. Any thoughts on this? If so, I would love to hear them. If not, let's move on.
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