What is adultery? Adultery is defined as cheating on your spouse, but more basically it occurs when you cheat yourself. If you weren’t cheating yourself, you wouldn’t need to cheat on your spouse. Adultery is self-disregard and disrespect. Adultery is looking outside of self to find wholeness by switching partners. The whole you had is not as good as the whole you are going to have. And that is not a joke. People get outraged by the affair of their spouse because they do not feel whole. People are angry about betrayal by the spouse because they have betrayed themselves. We have all betrayed our spirituality and cheated ourselves. So what is cheating? Basically adultery is self-deceit. We were disappointed in ourselves. We wanted more, we believed we didn’t have enough, we felt lack, separateness, and entrapment. We felt entrapped by our survival strategy, our psychological/social story, designed to find security, love, power, and happiness. . We were cheated, deprived and angered by our story, and so we went to find something better, something more, something different, an outside solution to an internal, spiritual unawareness problem, a different frog medicine.

The spouse wasn’t an effective medicine, now we will find a better one. We were not satisfied with the faults of our spouse. I will seek a better person so I will not feel my separateness, my lack and my entrapment. I don’t want to feel that my strategy is defective and dysfunctional. I believe my strategy will work. I will charm someone else in pretending to be my wholeness. I will charm someone else into being my spirituality, so I don’t have to become something I don’t know much about. I will find someone else who has the qualities I believe I lack. I will find someone else that has the qualities I believe my spouse lacks. I am turned on someone who has the power or love or tenderness or playfulness or responsibility that I don’t believe I have. Whatever I believe I don’t have, I will be attracted to in another. I will be turned on by that. I am disappointed that my partner did not give me what I believe I do not have. Instead of discovering my wholeness, I will try to find it in another.

I repeat the same mistake. When I married I believed my partner would enhance my ego, fulfill my lacks, give me security, give me excitement, give me fulfillment, give me wholeness, fill me up. My spouse would free me from my victim experiences, from my sense of inadequacy, my fears, my insecurities, and make my search for my own wholeness and spirituality unnecessary. If my partner did not make me happy, at least he or she should not have not made me unhappy. Adultery is based upon the belief that I am defective and something outside has to make me okay. I don’t have to change, I just have to find something or someone to compensate for my so-called lacks or problems I sell myself short. As long as I believe I am merely a finite being, I will be tempted to go to outside finite answers to an infinite appetite.

This is a metaphysical analysis of adultery, affairs, and cheating. There is no one who has not committed adultery, had an affair with something or someone and cheated himself, because we cannot be content with our strategy and our story. So either in fantasy or in acting out, we seek to self-medicate, whether that affair is with drugs, food, money, sex, pride, illness, failure or power. We will have an affair with something as long as we are wed to our story, to our self-deception and ignorance about our infinite spirituality. Real intimacy and oneness is considered a dangerous thing because you can’t control the outside world where you think the source of that energy lies.

Ezekiel 23:37
That they have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands, and with their idols have they committed adultery,Hosea 4
¹² My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them: for the spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring from under their God.
¹³ They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery.
¹⁴ I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not understand shall fall.
Romans 13
⁸ Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
⁹ For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
¹⁰ Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
Galatians 5
¹⁸ But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.
¹⁹ Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
²⁰ Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies
James 2
¹⁰ For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.
¹¹ For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law.
¹² So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.

Mark 8:38
… this adulterous and sinful generation

In the Scriptures, adultery has to do with idolatry, and idolatry is false worship, false values. Idolatry means that we wor-ship, or give worth to, some separate object besides our own spirituality, our oneness with All.