Sex, Spirit, and the Good Life

by

Patrick Marsolek

"Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often the struggle is unconscious and short-lived." - Kazantzakis, Nikos (1960); The Last Temptation Of Christ; New York; Simon and Schuster.

Most of us are in the midst of "living the good life" or laboring to do so. Life is a blur of needs and desires. We're searching for ourselves but usually end up not finding that self. The thrust is to have rather than to be. Our needs and desires concerning sex, spirituality and material wealth become demands. The way back to ourselves is slow and begins by winning small degrees of freedom, freedom to be. But not knowing how to be, we seek ourselves through orgiastic states - sex, religion, drugs, possessions and relationships. We expend most of our energy pursuing sex, power or money. Is it possible to have a new understanding of life, a different view of desire, and spiritual practice? Are sex and spirituality part of the same force? Can we gain some degree of freedom from our endless needs and engrossing desires?

Spirituality or matters of the soul is seldom linked with sexuality in the West. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience says, "The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, object, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any general assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast." This is the consensual mind set, where our experience of sexuality is fragmented: stimulation of physical pleasure centers or reproduction of the species. This splitting avoids any metaphysical unity of sex and spirituality, which is re-creation before it is recreation.

Some stories come down through history about cultures that viewed sexuality differently. The mystery religions of classical Greece held that the erotic life was both ecstatic and enthusiastic and could move one outside the self. Sexual spirituality was reunited with the Quest. Then there's Rudolph Otto's famous description of religious experience from The Mysterium Tremendeum , "The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its profane. . . mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic form and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents . . . and it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of- whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures." Though he's speaking of religion as separate from sexuality, doesn't the language used illustrate how closely these two worlds are blended?

Sexuality is a powerful force in our lives whether we like it or not. Freud, who almost single-handedly conditioned much of scientific thinking regarding our knowledge of self and consciousness, was obsessed with sex. He felt that almost every aspect of our lives was somehow related to sexual function - - mostly dysfunction. Freud's contemporary, Jung, took this much further, pointing out that mans' needs are far wider and deeper than sex, that the sexual form of the libido is only one form of libido. It could also be physical or spiritual.

Washburn's concept of "polymorphous sensuousness"offers exciting possibilities. In The Ego and the Dynamic Ground, he says, "Although psychic energy is, for the body ego, most highly concentrated in the erogenous zones, it is not confined to these areas. It circulates freely throughout the whole of the . . . physical being, and in doing so it enhances the arousal capacity of all bodily parts and regions." He goes on to say, "For the energy that fuels these experiences, although released from the sexual system, is not sexual in essence. Rather, as explained above, it is a nonspecific energy; it is an energy that potentiates all modalities of experience without being uniquely or inherently expressive of any one. This energy begins in prepubescence and is marshalled in many ways including in the neural field in preparation of a spiritual quest. This energy helps to create an enchanted world where everything is charged and numinous." If we could move beyond the constraints of a limited parochial view of sexuality and understand better the expanding and transforming psyche during prepubescence, we could gain some clear insights into the sensuality of consciousness.

Perhaps it's in puberty where we get off track. Be it cultural conditioning or peer influence, for some reason amidst this tremendous explosion of sexual and psychic transformation we become habituated into one way of perceiving our sexuality, one familiar place that feels safe. Frijtof Capra remarks, "Our habits can imprison us. Sure, they stabilize and protect us but they can also recycle mindlessly and chain us into bonds of iterating sameness and inertia." This happens with sexual 'stuckness.' Washburn says that when the energy in that area of the genitals is blocked it often transforms itself into other shapes. This is where you get sex related to power and to gathering things. All the sexual innuendoes in advertising tell you that this is the good life.

Yet we can sense, even in that 'stuckness', these compulsions aren't strictly for sexual or material satisfaction. Inherent in compulsion is the possibility for reaching outside of ourselves. Sensuality has spiritual components; the spirit has sexual elements. Stanislov Grof states that in sexual experiences that "have transpersonal dimensions, the individual had the sense of having transcended his or her identity and ego boundaries as they are defined in the ordinary state of consciousness. Experience of this kind can occur as entirely intrapsychic phenomena where the subject is not involved in actual sexual activities but, rather, in a process of deep self-explorations, or they can occur as part of an actual sexual interaction with a partner." This transcending of identity can take place outside of sexuality, amidst other needs and desires, when that 'nonspecific' energy is unblocked through myriad forms of loving and creativity.

Spiritual states of this kind can occur in bhakti yoga, where there is a direct sense of sexual connection with the divine. Another variety involves a full identification with the divine being; with partners as Shiva and Shakti, or Apollo and Aphrodite, similar to the Tibetan tantric rites, and also singly in narachastra prayoga, where one experiences his or her own sex organs as those of the divine.

Joseph Campbell states that "the sexual function is the marriage of the conscious and the unconscious and also the third party, the synthesis with the Buddha of immeasurable radiance." This thrust towards enlightenment, no pun intended, is often sublimated through power and things, and you can get stuck along the way. Campbell talks about "double consciousness", "double phallus consciousness", "lower and upper phallus". The lower phallus, he says, is caught in the natural world - - even the underworld, and the higher phallus experiences what Campbell calls "turn-about shakti-pah", a reverse shakti, or divine energy, that extends from spirit and enlightens itself. This is male as well as female, wombic as well as phallic. Only by transcending the physical phallus can one reach the spiritual phallus. This compulsion to transform phallus to phallos emanates from the deepest level of consciousness.

In any process there are always polarities. James Hillman says that within the ability to raise to great heights is also the possibility of falling to great depths, indicating that when people are making spiritual leaps, suddenly all the shit comes to the surface. These may be things you thought you had dealt with before. The struggle that Kazantzakis talks about is at a deep, intimate level that few people talk about. It's easier to hide in celibacy or denigrate sex than to wrestle the tiger. Grof says of sexual experience that, "the misunderstanding or misuse of this energy becomes the architect for emotional disorders. A misguided strong sexual arousal can produce serious pathologies and difficulties in living one's life. Distortion begins to appear at all levels of one's existence. It is necessary to remove this biological noise from the spiritual systems. The aim is to experience loss of one's own boundaries (desires, needs, wants) which have become demands in order to serve a fusion and unity of the regeneration of the spirit." The Kana Upanishad indicates any trip along your own path is a razor's edge. This is a basic spiritual problem; it's so easy to trip over and fall into a torrent of passion that sweeps you away.

These choices are the inevitable supreme ordeal which tests one's commitment to the path of regeneration of the spirit. It is not something you do; it is who you are. The basic choice a seeker has to make is whether to serve, to serve the basic "life force" which permeates our existence - - animate as well as inanimate objects. By "being"in the service of the life force more real time is spent in the zone. The radiance of being is not only in you but all around you. To stay on the path calls for a supreme effort. It calls for risk-taking. To transcend sex and materialism begins with an incredible sense of freedom. Rollo May stated, "A point where freedom and destiny become one in the same, and spirit/ mind/ body become one." This is the good life.

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