A Not So Fleeting Romance

Pluma Blanca (White Feather), or Quetzal Manik (in maya), came by the clinic for a surprise visit a few years ago. It was my first time to see him. He seemed to know all about me but didn’t say very much. He hardly even spoke Spanish. He liked to talk to me about Tantra and share ideas of the Tantra of the Mayas, the lineage of meditation and healing that he learned from his fore-fathers. Although a healer of all types of diseases, he was fundamentally a mystic who loved to meditate in the forest. He was my wife’s teacher, an indigenous Maya from Campeche. When my wife was attending a European patient he went to the clinic and entered the treatment room directly. He grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper and then wrote down a list of names on the paper. The names were the first and last names of the lovers the young woman had in the last year. The list was a little too long.

He would speak in Maya but nobody understood him. He then began to write to her in Spanish while somebody else translated to her in English. He explained that when humans have sexual intercourse their minds remain energetically connected for 7 years. There is a subtle transmission and continued connection of mental energy shared between the 2 entities. This may be something very pure and harmonious or it may be painful or even degrading, depending on the nature of the relationship. Like two photons sent in different trajectories in a quantum physics experiment, they two lovers continue to communicate and mimic each-others movements across time and space, just like the two photons. Even though they may never see, nor even think of each-other again, and perhaps are escaping eachother at "light speed", there still remain subtle mental impressions that “reside” within each-other and continue to "entangle."

Another complicating factor is the mental confusion that one carries if one changes or has frequent partners. The imbalanced, frustrated, and distorted energies of others sympathetically vibrate with the minds of the other person, and vice-versa. It sounded as if he was speaking of the transmission of a mental virus in much the same way as a physical virus, but with the mind and its clusters of memories and emotions as the vehicle of transmission directly into another mind. Instead of being infected physically, one remains “infected” by another’s mind for 7 years. A part of that person’s soul, or subtle mind is carried inside and continues to live inside of another, for better or for worse. The negative energetic effects of the adventures (frustrations, manipulations, conflicts, turmoil, depression, etc.) of one partner begin to harm his/her mind that sympathetically vibrates with the ex-lover. Their minds were once very intimate. They enjoyed the relationship and presently the ego wants to forget that experience and move on to others. "Love is what happens to two people who don't know eachother." Although they are not connected and don't even care for each other any longer, they still penetrate eachother's minds at the subtle psychic and energetic levels. Perhaps there is some repulsion and/or attraction, some resentment or frustrated longing that keeps their minds in resonance. When is "free love" ever free? Somebody always ends up getting hurt and the result is almost always harm and not love. They try to forget but a part of them still resonates with the other. The shared residual impressions still reside within one and continue to recreate the same dramas as all other earlier relationships. Although this partner may live a responsible and pure life after this relation, there may still be some degree of resonance with the ex-partner and his/her continued, unbridled degradation. Of course, the degree of this subtle resonance is stronger in proportion to the weakness of one's resolve to remain integrated and whole. Hopefully, the suffering and conflict and emotional abandonment awakens one to greater responsibilities and precaution in romantic relationships. A strong mind may more easily overcome this resonance although it still persists and harms. A weak and indulgent mind, on the contrary, may fall even deeper into distortions with the ex-partner who also continues to fall into dissipation. However, it is not just these two individuals that are in resonance but all of their partners as well. Therefore, the possible negative effects are multiplied by all the multiplied relationships of all inter-connected partners.

I am not quite sure why he said "7 years", why 7 instead of 10 or 5, for example? However, I do like the imagery of seven, like "7 years of bad luck" for breaking a mirror. Similairly, in true love between two sentient beings both beings reflect eachother like mirrors. If one party is unfaithful, then it is like breaking a mirror in which the faith, confidence and inspiration created from the reflection of true and chaste love in the other is shattered to pieces. The pieces are but fragments of love from many insecure minds, distorted and mixed into a collage of confusion. The soul becomes an over-crowded house instead of a silent temple.

He explained quite compassionately that her emotional instability was only worsened by her romantic adventures and were gradually making her physically ill. She was an attractive young woman with very liberal values who simply didn’t understand these ideas before he explained it to her. She, like so many others made an all too common error of confusing love with sex, was not satisfied and so began to exploit that part of her being in an effort to compensate for her dissatisfaction. It was the beginning of an addiction and Pluma Blanca explained it to her very clearly and calmly. She didn’t feel threatened nor judged, and seriously pondered his diagnosis. I believe that her conscience understood what Pluma Blanca was communicating. She knew she was suffering and wasn’t happy and somebody had just probed into her private life to offer her some clues as to how to understand her confusions. Before the treatment she was terrorizing all of the young spiritually-disciplined boys around here with her tiny, mini skirts. In the days after that consultation she put on a more modest skirt.