INTRODUCING THE TWO RIVERS OF SPIRIT
Spiritual seekers have long moved along two great rivers of awakening. One flows upward, reaching beyond the world toward the formless, the infinite, the pure light of Spirit. The other flows downward, diving into the body, the heart, the Earth—seeing the sacred not beyond the world, but within it.
Ken Wilber calls these two rivers the Ascending and Descending currents of Spirit. One pulls us beyond form; the other roots us deeper in it. At first glance, they may seem like opposites. But in truth, they are complementary movements of the same divine dance. And so we ask:
Where does the Soulfully Gay path belong?
The Call to Rise: The Ascending Way
The Ascending path is the spiritual movement of transcendence. It urges us to go beyond ego, body, time, and suffering, to realize that our truest nature is not of this world. This current is most familiar in contemplative, monastic, or renunciate traditions—Theravāda Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta, Neoplatonism, or the apophatic mysticism of Meister Eckhart.
To follow this current is to hear the still voice that says: You are not this body. You are not these desires. You are something higher, purer, more eternal.
As the Bhagavad Gītā puts it:
“The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.”
In many traditions, heterophilia—the love and desire directed toward the other, the complementary, the unlike—is subtly woven into the Ascending way. Heterophilia, in this sense, symbolizes the spiritual path of yearning toward what lies beyond oneself. There’s a mythic echo here: the masculine reaching for the feminine, the soul reaching for God, the form yearning for the formless.
There is deep wisdom in this. Sometimes we need to move upward, to stretch toward something more, to let go of our limited identities and rest in what is beyond all form.
The Call to Embody: The Descending Way
And yet, there is another pull—the Descending current—which says: you do not need to escape this world to find the Divine. Spirit is not only above; it is within. It pulses in the body, breathes in the Earth, moves in sex and sorrow and laughter and grief. The Descending path embraces incarnation.
This current appears in Christian mysticism—the Word made flesh. It sings in tantric yoga. It’s alive in indigenous and earth-based spiritualities that see no split between sacred and mundane.
It is also profoundly queer.
To be gay, to love and desire someone like yourself, to know beauty and longing and grief in your own body—this is not a deviation from Spirit. It is a direct manifestation of Spirit.
This is the current of homophilia—the love of the same. Not merely a sexual orientation, homophilia becomes a sacred metaphor for the inner recognition of divinity in likeness, of soul touching soul through shared essence. Gay love, when deep and devotional, often resonates with the Descending current. It blesses what is here.
In the words of the 14th-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich:
“In our making, God made us; in our flesh, God loves us.”
Here, the body is not an obstacle to God. It is a temple. Touch is sacrament. Desire is not something to be cleansed—it is something to be listened to.
Beyond Either/Or: The Nondual Way
The Soulfully Gay path ultimately transcends the split between Ascending and Descending. It recognizes the truth of both, yet clings to neither. It is not about choosing Spirit over the body or the body over Spirit. It is about waking up to the reality that they were never separate.
This is the heart of nonduality.
To walk the nondual path is to realize: the One you seek is not beyond the world or in it, but as it. You do not need to climb to heaven or descend to the depths. What you seek is already here, and more radically: you are That.
Ken Wilber writes:
“Spirit slumbers in nature, begins to awaken in mind, and comes to know itself fully in nondual awareness, where subject and object, seer and seen, God and world—are all simply, utterly, One.”
In this light, gay love—particularly when it moves deeply, tenderly, and soulfully—may incline a person toward the Descending current: the recognition of God in what is near, what is similar, what is human. But gay eros, when it burns brightly and ecstatically, has a tendency to fuse both currents. It reaches inward and upward. It merges immanence and transcendence in a flash of spiritual electricity. One could say that erotic longing between two men, when fully awakened, gestures toward the ecstatic unity of Ascending and Descending—a sacred marriage of Spirit with itself.
This Is the Way
So is the Soulfully Gay path Ascending or Descending?
It is both. And it is neither. It is the middle path that contains the extremes and dissolves them.
It begins in the body and rises into awareness, only to fall again into the heart. It does not reject longing—it honors it. It does not deny form—it sanctifies it. It does not grasp at the sky or collapse into the ground. It stands, like a tree, rooted and reaching, fed by both earth and sun.
Sometimes I call this the Soulfully Gay path. Other times, I use a broader name that includes all who are called to unite body and soul, form and emptiness, love and Spirit. I call it the Unitive Way.
To walk this Way is to remember that you are not broken.
You are not half.
You are not seeking something outside yourself.
You are already That which you seek.
