By
the same acts that cause some men to burn in hell for thousands
of years,
the Yogin gains his eternal salvation. - Tantra
For
a thousand years, the Western Judeo-Christian, authoritarian
male-dominant strategy for handling the emotions, the body,
pleasure, and our most basic instincts, was to keep them well
in check, and generally disavow as best we could any feelings
below the waistline.
Freud
said that empires were built on the resulting sublimated energy,
but the game is over. It turns out there's nothing unspiritual
about pleasure, and it's good for your health. It is instructive
to ask just how we ever came to feel so bad about even thinking
about feeling good. The passions are so overwhelmingly powerful
that religions have been warning you away from them since the
dark ages. The heightened intensity of the sexual experience
soon persuades us that it is the most important one in the world.
People get carried away, and begin to believe that the next
great orgasm is the only important thing in life. People use
each other for lust. The most extreme instance is called rape.
When we can't handle our attachments, they enslave us and we
enslave others. Yet, ironically, through no other human activity,
save dying, is the opportunity for ego-loss, transformation
and transpersonal realization so prevalent and powerful as in
conjugal love-making.
On
the direct path of conscious awareness - The Path With No Obstacles
- sexual union naturally also means the union of the continuing
practice and its realization. This is what the west has come
to refer to as Tantric love. (Ultimately, tantra means more
than embracing your physicality: all action, thought, and realization
becomes spiritual liberation itself.) The high art of making
True Love is mystical and miraculous beyond comprehension. It
inundates your entire being. It delivers you - body and soul
- to unimagined heights of ecstasy. The discovery of the key
to the union of spirituality and sexuality is at once a path
to, and a gift of Enlightenment.
The
ultimate consummation of physical love-making is complete transcendental
Union. It bestows upon the lovers the experience of a spectacular
breakthrough to the Infinite - beyond, but concurrent with our
everyday existence. What begins as duality and polarization
within time, climaxes as a shared soul-merging experience of
Eternity. A transformation occurs which evolves from desire
and passion to a level of total and perfect bliss, otherwise
rarely known in human existence. Spiritual merging in love is
the elusive prize that everyone seeks when they lay down with
another, whether they know it or not. Lust is only a call to
love, and many have yet to answer it. We may think we are content
giving and taking personal gratification, yet all the while
the heart seeks nothing less than to lose itself absolutely
in love, and be consumed in ecstatic union with the beloved
and the Universe.
How
to achieve such divine deliverance through one of the most common
"animalistic" functions we perform is the secret known to enlightened
lovers as the direct path of Love. It transcends the trap of
the ego-self: In effect, the world's greatest aphrodisiac is
selflessness.
No
one is better than the Bodhisattva
in bed.
The
point of giving her sexual pleasure is to awaken the bliss that
she will then combine with meditation on emptiness in order
to attain enlightenment. - Miranda Shaw, Ph.D. Passionate Enlightenment:
Women in Tantric Buddhism - (Princeton University Press)
SURRENDER
The paradox of sex is that the same act can both liberate and
imprison, depending upon one's intent, state of mind, and conditioning.
Sex can drive you either towards or away from Enlightenment.
The great enigma is, how can we transform the trap of addictive
physical appetite to the ecstatic realization of Divine Union?
It
all depends on your true and underlying purpose. It calls for
constancy and commitment to the ultimate goal of Enlightenment.
Why is the divine gift of lovemaking so often little more than
a desperate groping for glandular stimulation in dark rooms,
accompanied by feelings of hunger and shame? Ironically, and
all too often - when people use each other uncaringly - this
most universally accessible mystical experience of orgasm is
debased into something dishonorable and dirty. But anti-sex
admonitions in turn only give rise to guilt, when - despite
heroic efforts to curb our "lower appetites" - we find ourselves
indulging in what is, after all, the single most compelling
human urge after breathing and eating. We might even say that
repression of this primal biological imperative creates rapists
and pedophiles.
Shame
is taught by "authorities" who can embrace neither their animal
nor their spiritual nature. They fear one and fake the other,
and call this "correct." Certain religions contend that sex
must be solely for insemination and procreation, or it is devil-worship.
By that logic, one should certainly refrain from using one's
hands (not to mention lips and tongue), and get it over with
as quickly as possible. Obviously the Good Lord made this procreational
pleasure-drive far more powerful than most individual's (and
any church's) power to control.
A
truly relevant and realistic religion would teach us how to
consecrate our sexuality, not deny it. We need to unlearn our
guilt about wanting sex, even as we realize what a guilded cage
it could very well become. Of course men and women compromise
their morality and good judgment all the time for sex (although
probably no more than for love, money, power, or fame). But
the inherent dangers are hardly reason to avoid the experience.
Respect for that very danger should make us take care as we
take pleasure. Let us celebrate and make sacred our natural,
innate sexuality. Copulation as high communion? Is there any
better way?
SEXUAL
SPIRITUALITY
Many in today's generation are beginning to re-learn the sacred
approach to lovemaking, as in indigenous tribal customs, mystical
rituals, Sufi and tantric couples practices, and post-sexual-revolution
"high monogamy." Cultures much older than ours have evolved
ways for seekers to include their physical bodies within the
context of spiritual practice and the enlightened life. Meditation,
invocations, breathing exercises, incense, candlelight, ceremonial
objects, rituals, music, and potent libations have been used
to create a special environment and mind-state in which to sanctify
sexual union. Such careful preparations tend to quiet the neurotic
mind and increase sensitivity and sensuality, while at the same
time engendering the proper reverence.
The
essence of this conscious sex approach is to transform the very
energy of your appetite for personal pleasure into one of cosmic
realization, by harnessing your own desire to the happiness,
the thrill, and the total fulfillment of your partner. Thus
you achieve Unity through duality, by making her (or his) ecstasy
your own. Giving and taking merge, and you two become One. The
transformation from ordinary mechanical, confused, guilt-ridden
sex to the profound gift of natural/spiritual lovemaking depends
upon a broadening of one's focus from the genitals to the heart,
from passion to compassion.
Spiritualized
sex opens you at all centers at once, animal to divine. Transcendent
love is a religious experience. Every touch is The First, and
time stands still. The senses are magnified a thousand times.
Your partner becomes a Goddess or God, whom you worship in awe.
You notice everything, and it all conveys tremendous meaning
and potency. Foreplay is truly playful, breathtakingly tender.
The pleasure is immediately and continuously perfect, the passion
intense and profound. Time itself disappears and the Holy Universe
becomes self-evident. Opening all your centers, engaging all
your faculties, the animal/emotional/spiritual crescendo of
love lasts forever, and the climax is an exquisite release of
the body, the heart and the soul in a spectacular shared revelation
of the Universal Self. The after-glow of such a cosmic physical
union endures for days.. weeks. The experience is healing and
unifying in every way.
HOW
TO MAKE ENLIGHTENED LOVE.
