I often wonder if I am alone, or perhaps among a dwindling few, who still hold on to the spirit of romanticism in modern times. This age, increasingly foreign and disconnected, can make me feel like an alien, peering in on a lethal experiment. I remain looking, mocking my naivety in what should be my prime years of romantic exploration.
The setting for my half finished love stories never remains constant, although takes on an ending theme of pixelated pain. My generation’s backdrop is the end of times, either spurred by religious premonitions or scientific prediction. We are constantly on edge, unveiling fact by fact- the exposure of truth and universal destruction, each occurrence happening as quickly as one can refresh their facebook page.
Astrology identifies the millennial generation of twenty somethings as Scorpio Plutonions. Whether you adhere to astrological predictions or not- these are pretty spot on.
According to astrology, this generation's soul’s journey is built around learning and exposing truths, breaking down walls, and enabling radical transformation.
In order to do this, they must experience individual awakening, and from their uncovering of the taboo- they can liberate humanity. Those with this Pluto placement will deal with loss, abandonment, death, addiction, heightened sex drive and betrayal. Through transmuting this power, and using it to heal yourself, you can change the collectives attitude to transmutation. We are increasingly separate, often incapable of making eye contact, glued to our phones, our fingers achedly swiping for the next best thing. I wonder if this is perhaps not a symptom of apathy, but quite the opposite.
Maybe we feel too much, maybe we resent the crisis we've been handed, are afraid of feeling the despair because each moment is being retweeted as our last. In feeling, we become a part of it all.
Interpersonal relationships involve delving in the despair we try to drown out. Our relationships with ourselves can be worse too, privy to the trends of the ever changing media, reduced to actual “likes” and contingent on presence through a screen.
Society teaches us about sexuality from two extremes, either shame based abstinence, following a religious rhetoric- or a careless promiscuously as easy as an endless cloud of pornography, or a swipe and 2.1 miles away. Regardless of where on this skewed spectrum your beliefs lie, there never seems to be much discussion about the non-physical aspects of sex. It is, after all, the closest we can get to another human. The gateway for all procreation. And of course, incredibly, inconceivably, magical.
The few times I have been lucky enough to achieve an instance of love that transcends all moments, past, future, and facebook live- I have been lifted up and revived.
Those moments are few and far between. I tried dating apps, but I couldn’t help but wonder if they rob us of serendipitous connections. You can’t feel someone’s smile through wifi (even if they are only 1.2 miles away). Being in love made me feel like I had safely returned to my own planet, there was a familiarity to touch that exceeded the end of times, a familiarity to trees, to all of life. Even grey cityscapes, smog sunsets and the age of technology retained a magic that was long forgotten.
Somewhere between the polarity of toxic abstinence and hypersexuality, lays a subatomic dance that exceeds the lengths of the cosmos. This dance, as old as the stars themselves, is now known to us as “quantum entanglement” The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles, having once interacted, can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other. They will continue to affect each other, even when separated by time and space. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’ And it indeed is, spooky as fuck.
In applying this principle to humans, think about our molecular make up of particles and fluids, and think of the moments when people would experience entanglement: being twins, being the recipient of a blood transfusion, organ donors, family members, and of course, being sexual partners.
To bring this back down to earth, consider the moments in sexual relationships where you have intuited a partners actions, where you feel another’s presence and emotions from miles apart. Where maybe, you have fallen in love, and found the line between your feelings and your partners indistinguishably blurred. This is actually the result of these particle dances, particles that are meshed together in the most intimate of ways.
Even if we are detached, our magnetic fluids mingle and melt together, trapping us in an invisible net that extends above and beyond time and space. It’s kind of poetic, and beautiful, and also terrible. In the heated delirium of sex we form quantum vows, vows that have the power to bind us to another person. The merging of two bodies of light, capsules of polarized luminous material, merging and unmerging and intertwining and dancing.
Tantra is the only school of thought and practice that has given sexuality the sort of attention it deserves, exploring the deep spiritual ramifications. “Tantra” comes from the Sanskrit word for weaving. Soul weaving. There is nothing casual about Soul weaving, no matter how much we try and diminish and hide the potent power of sex.
And yet, we are proud and great at pretending . You can try to mentally record every second with someone, as if you were watching your own movie, seeping in the cinematic beauty of it all. But then it fluctuates, and reality hits you on the back like a stair you missed in the dark. The tangles of distant texts draw you both away, pregnant pauses and silences in the unapologetic form of blue bubbled texts. You are quantumly still with them, as if you lost a limb and could still feel it. It can feel like your very cells are tearing in half. And yet, you can still live stream their movements, each one more unrecognizable than the last.
You try and replay the movie, but we are the generation of faux apathy, and when you grasp for the shards of vulnerability amidst the cool facade of disconnection, you get cut.
Scientifically, we are still incapable of gauging to consequences of these silent resonances and quantum contracts. Perhaps heartbreak and attachment is a longing for the particles someone took with them. A mere quantum side effect of intimacy, drawn out by emotion. The upside to quantum entanglement, is that maybe if you grow, they grow too.