the tantric map · the three states

i came to these slowly. through study that didn't make sense the first time, or the fifth. through watching my life change shape and returning to the same texts to find they had changed too. the ideas didn't open all at once · they continue to open in layers, each one requiring something new from me before it will let me in.

i've learned in tantric Buddhist practice, there are three states of mind that make everything else possible. renunciation · releasing the grip on what isn't serving you. bodhichitta · turning the heart outward, toward others, not just yourself. and the correct view of emptiness · recognizing that nothing, including yourself, is as fixed as it feels.

they aren't stages you complete. they're practices you tend, or you forget them. they go quiet. they stop working. you come back and find you've been operating without them and didn't notice until something hurt.

i find them easier to hold now that i'm finding intentional practices and faces to put to them.

and i find them hardest · and most necessary · when i'm holding more than one romantic connection at a time.

Osiris · renunciation

for a long time the idea of renunciation never resonated with me. it sounded like the removal of wanting · becoming flat and still and unattached in a way that felt more like disappearing than practicing. the concept itself was the block. i couldn't find a way in.

what shifted was recognizing that renunciation isn't about desire at all. it's about the grip.

i recently had to let go of a relationship to make space for what i truly wanted. the hard part wasn't the loss. it was arriving at the clarity first · knowing what i wanted clearly enough to decide the current form had to go. and then sitting in the gap i created, before anything new had arrived to fill it.

that gap · the space between what was and what i was moving toward · that's where renunciation actually lives. not in the wanting less, but in the willingness to stay present in the in-between.

Osiris is the face i put to this. not the god before the loss, but the one in the gap · scattered, in the dark, between what he was and what he would become. he didn't rush out of it. he couldn't. and what Isis reassembled on the other side wasn't the same Osiris. it was something that had passed through dissolution and arrived changed.

when you're open to many romantic connections, renunciation isn't a one-time event. it comes back around. sometimes it's a relationship that has run its course. sometimes it's a version of yourself that can't hold what you're becoming. sometimes it's just an idea of how things were supposed to look · and you have to let that go too, to see what's actually in front of you.

renunciation isn't emptying yourself. it's being honest enough about what you want that you're willing to dismantle what's in the way. the wanting came easy. the gap took everything.

Isis · bodhichitta

bodhichitta is sometimes translated as awakening mind. what it points toward is more structural than emotional · a reorientation away from the self as the center, toward something larger. a bodhisattva · a being who has reached the threshold of enlightenment and chooses not to cross it alone, delaying their own liberation to remain present for all who suffer · lives from this orientation. the dedicated heart doesn't turn inward. it keeps moving outward, even when moving is hard.

Isis is the face i put to this because she is precisely that. love as action, not sentiment. after Osiris is scattered she doesn't grieve in place · she goes searching, piece by piece, across the whole of Egypt. she is the embodiment of the heart that moves toward, that refuses to let love become passive. that's why she holds this teaching for me.

being open to many romantic connections asks something similar. the heart that moves outward, toward more than one, without losing its center. it isn't about volume. it's about orientation · choosing, again and again, to move toward rather than inward.

i move well. i'm good at searching, good at covering ground toward something i care about. what i sit with is whether i should be still before i move again. whether the next pursuit is coming from the dedicated heart or just from momentum. whether i'm moving toward someone or away from the quiet.

loving openly is full of possibility. so is the question of what's driving me toward it.

Thoth · the correct view

when you're holding more than one romantic connection at a time, something becomes hard to ignore. each dynamic is its own thing · its own texture, its own timing, its own truth. none of them are fixed. none of them are quite what they were last month. trying to hold them as solid, as settled, as permanently shaped · that's where the suffering starts.

what i'm learning is that this isn't a failure of the relationships. it's just how things actually exist · always in relation, shaped by context, changed by proximity. nothing fixed. not even me. not even the people i love.

i tend toward clear-headedness. my views are usually clean. what i'm sitting with is the difference between clarity and correct view. clarity is a disposition. correct view is a practice · the ongoing recognition that what i'm seeing is always relational, always shifting, always a little more porous than it appears.

Thoth is the face i put to this. he doesn't make the truth. he records it. he stands at the scale not with an opinion about what the heart should weigh, but with the capacity to see what it actually does. that witnessing without distorting · that's the quality i'm reaching for.

loving openly asks for it constantly. the ability to see each person, each connection, each moment · without the ego quietly adjusting the weight to match what it needs to be true.

still in it

renunciation isn't completed. the dedicated heart needs tending. the correct view slips.

being open to many romantic connections doesn't resolve these three · it intensifies them. every relationship is another opportunity to practice the open palm, to ask what's driving the movement, to see clearly without distorting.

three angles on the same practice · holding desire without being held, moving with knowing rather than momentum, seeing what is without needing it to be otherwise.

toward love. toward pleasure. toward all of it, with both hands open.

i'm in the middle of all three. with more than one person. i expect i'll stay there.