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"Then you are saying to me that I am not as much a human being as your wife is?" Helen continued our conversation, which she may have recognized had become a game, but one that needed to be played out to the logical end to clear the air.
"No, Helen, you are a beautiful human being and a beautiful woman all at the same time," I replied in my defense that night, "who could ask for anything more?"
"Tell me then, Peter, what prevents you from being truthful with yourself, and with me. Would you not love to be with me in this bed, this very minute?"
"I would love nothing better," I answered. "It would be the greatest joy. I have dreamed about a situation like this for so long, like you wouldn't believe, and here I stand and find it difficult to take that one last simple step. I am idiot, right? I am untruthful to myself and to you. And do you want me to tell you why? The reason is that we have all been taught for centuries to be untruthful with ourselves and with one-another. That's why I can't move."
Helen began to laugh. "That's a tough one to break, Peter, isn't it?" She continued gently. "It is the toughest thing that I have encountered, to get us to accept our universal humanity. We recognize the principle of that universality, which supports our unity in being. We even say we understand it, and we do understand it. We even have proof of it, as your dreams illustrate, and still we deny ourselves. We have lived like that for a very long time, Peter."
"The truth is," I replied to her, and the laughter faded then, "you are as much a star in the heavens of our humanity, as a woman, than my wife is as a woman, or any woman I have ever met. At this higher level where we are all one, as we truly are, we reflect and share a common humanity. As you say, there is no difference."
"I never said there is no difference," Helen had replied immediately. "You said this. I can also tell you this, there are very few people who stood at this spot where you stand right now, who have made this kind of profound statement and presented it so clearly. This means that my invitation still stands, for you to be truthful with yourself, and with me, and the whole of humanity." With this said, she pulled the sheets back on the side of the bed where I stood.
I remembered that my response, finally, was immediate. It was swift, and what came out of it made the very air sparkle, even in the dark.
"Had Helen reached her stated goal?" Steve asked everyone after he described what had happened to the minutest detail. Steve apologized to me in the same breath, for dragging my personal intimacies through the fire, to which he added that they are really not any different than what any person could have experienced. He said that the process involved was no different than that of the slave boy in the Meno dialog, who was guided by Socrates to reach his final goal of doubling the square. Steve said that my experience was really no different than the process of someone being guided in solving a paradox in mathematics by becoming truthful to the overriding principles. He said that the sexual dimension of my experience doesn't make the experience of exploration in any way different. He said that we habitually see the sexual dimension as something different and private, and thereby we tend to yank it out of the universal lateral lattice that Helen had described as the reality of our being. But what is the end result? The end result is that we tear away a bit of our being. "So, I must ask you all again, did Helen reach her stated goal?" said Steve.
Ushi answered him. "Yes, she did reach her stated goal. Peter had even verbally confirmed that the goal was to elevate the concept of truthfulness to such a high level of recognition that the small marriage concept could no longer be supported. He said this himself. Also, Helen had never actually announced her goal. Still, what she accomplished was profound. I can confirm this personally. I can confirm that she had shattered Pete's small marriage concept, which allowed the next stage to unfold two days later, and a whole lot that came after that. In fact, we wouldn't be here without that beginning. But that is not what Steve is really asking as about, isn't it? We assume that Helen's goal had been to uplift the marriage bond to the recognition of the universal marriage bond, defined by the universal nature of our humanity. I think Helen may have had a still higher goal in mind that is vaguely related to the small marriage idea. That is why Steve apologized to Pete for talking about his most intimate sexual affair and made a special point of it. I think Steve is saying that we can still see the sexual dimension related to that small private sphere, even while we admit that we can no longer support that kind of concept on the platform of the universal lateral lattice. I think Steve sees no evidence that this subtle paradox, which has huge consequences, has been resolved even now."
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