(Excerpted from David Deida’s interview in Common Ground magazine, February 2016.)
Common Ground: What do you mean when you speak about a man ravishing a woman?
David Deida: First, it means that the man has to be in touch with God or with the depth of this moment. We will keep the description heterosexual because that is how your question is oriented. So, the first step would be for a man to have done whatever practice he does in his own life up to that moment before sex, so that they were grounded in infinity. Then with every breath there would be the inhale of infinity and then the exhaled release of infinity. Their heart would be receptive to love and able to release and give love. When you are a man who is free and can bring that to sexuality with a woman whose heart is yearning to open in love (which of course, every human’s heart is), that is a beginning.
The feminine is identified with love and light as opposed to consciousness, so the center of the feminine’s life is being opened and filled full of love. The impulse of the third-stage masculine is to give her that love she has been yearning for her entire life, usually secretly. In most women’s hearts, they feel, “No one has ever met me or fully seen me.” She feels like that even if she has been married for 20 years. Most women have never felt they met someone who knows them deeper than they know themselves. Because the third-stage man is vulnerable consciousness, he feels her deeper than she could feel herself. He feels her yearning heart and meets her at a deeper place than she could feel herself, deeper than she expected–that is ravishment.
Ravishment is the capacity for a man to smithereen a woman, to obliterate her resistance and flow wide open to love, beyond her control, beyond her alone-capacity. Ravishment is where she is taken open to the place she has intuited as her divine nature–infinite love. To be taken open by a man who is consciousness as a practice, a man who is not trying to fuck her, who is not trying to put his dick in her to have an orgasm, who is not trying to get her to be quiet or to calm her emotions. He is completely accepting her the way she is. And then loving her so deeply she has no choice but to burst open with his full presence. Ravishment is when she has no choice. She has received your depth of consciousness so consistently, through your body, through your breath, your eyes. There are techniques for all of this, for her to receive that depth of consciousness so fully she can’t help but surrender–even if she wants to resist, she can’t. Loved, by consciousness. So ravishment is about opening a woman beyond her own fear into the love that is her true nature, deeper than she could take herself.