Sex, Love and Power

When the power of love replaces the love of power, (wo)man will be God

Our spiritual community has wrapped a big super ego around sex and given that many of us have encountered a "dark side" in the bedroom, we are somehow afraid that our spiritual leaders are right in their claim that sex stands in the way of experiencing God. This is not so. In fact, we very much have God's approval when it comes to sex. God says in Neale Walsch's Conversations with God " I am in every bedroom." Sex is the ultimate physical expression of love, yet, every path traveler will have to explore and make peace with this energy differently and will probably have to face a demon in the bedroom as well.

A demon has always something to teach us. He helps us getting in touch with our animal instincts and will show us the image that we have of ourself and of others deep down inside. Whenever power symbols appeal to us in the bedroom, changes are that we haven't yet claimed our authentic power base in other areas of our lives. So the demon can in fact show us who we truly are and by claiming our authentic power base elsewhere, we are finally free to discover sex as physical expression of our love.

When we just repress our animalistic drive, we will never understand what sex truly is. George Gurdjieff was an influential spiritual teacher who tried helping people wake up from their hypnotic "sleep walking", as he called it. He would get his disciples completely drunk and would then encourage them to reveal their true colors. For example, he would suddenly shout "rooster" at someone and his drunken disciple would spontaneously let out a loud "Cook-a-Doodle-Doo" while everyone would collapse on the floor roaring with laughter. This is just one way of shadow work when you openly admit to yourself and everyone who you think you are deep inside of you. Perhaps sex can be thought of as a similar eye-opening experience. Your fantasies and your bedroom partners activate a side of you that you normally don't have access to.

Shadow work is hardly a "card blance" for doing everything you fancy doing. You can discover for yourself that if you always do what you want to do, you will face many situations when you cut yourself off the divine energy. Shadow work is pretty straight-forward: do whatever your heart desires and observe how you feel in the process and what kind of energies you carry around in the aftermath. When you fully experience something and afterwards understand what it stands for, you have brought a subconscious drive to the surface. You now know what will happen if you engage in these behaviors, physically and spiritually.Try to understand the meaning of everything you do. Every action, every graphic image that you perceive is a symbol. Try to understand what it really implies for you personally and make your choice.

Sex permeates everything we do and are about so we have to bring this drive to the surface. You can see it so clearly how many dimensions are intersecting in this single desire: our genes, our upbringing, our neurological wiring, our psychology and spiritual norms. Biologically, there is no denying that we are all driven by the "selfish gene" that wants to propagate itself as it has been doing successfully for millions of years. We may aspire to be a monk but our ancestors haven't been monks since otherwise we wouldn't have been around. We have to accept our drives and have a great chance exploring and realizing who we really are and understand other people as well. Let's be happy with the drive that we have in us and be proud of the distance that we already have traveled.

Sex is divine energy. When you fall in love with someone you have that natural desire to have sex. It is an expression of intimacy. The dance of yin and yang, male and female, push and pull, is divine. Symbolically, we celebrate the divinity of our partner physically. During sex we can experience a glimpse of Oneness. Yin and yang merge literally during the act of ejaculation. During the orgasm, for a brief moment, you experience Samadhi, the union with God. With this oneness, you both are able to create like God.

There is spiritual beauty in the physical act of two bodies joining, but we should not lose sight of the darker aspects of sex. In fact, the shadow comes out at night especially if we only look at our bedroom in rose. Sex can also be a pure expression of power. The evolutionary biologists are right. Our body combines million of years of gene competition. Psychologically, pretty much everything about us is power hunger even though we certainly don't like to put it that way to ourselves.

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam in their fascinating book A Billion Wicket Thoughts, analyze 400 million internet searches between 2009 and 2010. Do you know what the second most popular heterosexual sex interest was? It was Cuckold porn, the fantasy of being dominated in the bedroom by an alpha male who has sex with your partner while you watch helplessly. Interesting, isn't it?And can you guess what - by far - the most popular sex search was? It was Lolita sex, the fantasy of sexually robbing the innocence of a young girl. Dominated by stronger bodies while dominating weaker bodies in return; you can see the capriciousness of your ego - the power hunger - right here. The ego whispers in your ear that you lack the power to fully satisfy your partner, but it shows you the appeal of dominating weaker bodies and spirits to compensate for it.

You can tell from these researches that men lust after power in the bedroom with the fear of impotence as its mirror image. How easy it is to impress a young woman who doesn’t have any sexual experience. They feel empowered when they are able to dominate and satisfy their partner in bed. However, sweeping an experienced woman off her feet instead requires authentic power. The fear of impotence always lingers, but few men are willing to face it. By repressing it they grow more distant from their bedroom partners and the sex life is getting more disappointing for both sides. So men express their sexual frustrations with porn instead and rarely realize how different mind sex is from actually having sex. Mind sex in all forms is about power while earth-chattering sex is a physical expression of love.

Do not immediately condemn power and aggression when you see it. The whole point of shadow work is that you reflect on what exactly the demon wants to communicate to you. Our spiritual community wants to embrace the power of love and looks down on the love of power. Yet, all the demon says is please look again. There is something that you currently disown about yourself. While dealing with dark forces is always very confusing and can be quite destructive for us spiritual travelers, try nevertheless to find out why these dark symbols appeal to you. First, understand what these symbols truly stand for, and second, find a creative way to make them your own in real life without undermining your spiritual journey in the process. No matter how scary your demon may look to you, there is always a creative way to express your natural power base without undermining your spiritual path.

All ego fantasies in the end boil down to the fact that you have not yet found your authentic spiritual power base and your demon brings this insight home in steamy images. Learn from your bedroom demon what kind of adjustments likely lie in store for you and work on expressing them. Perhaps you are simply too aggressive in your day to day dealings and your demon encourages you to get more in touch with your caring feminine self. Perhaps you are not assertive enough, so your demon wants you to stand up for yourself. Perhaps there is fear inside you that you are not able to satisfy your partner. Shadow work assumes that you will always find a creative outlet for your authentic needs and as you do, the demon will naturally fade into the background.

We are not condoning sexual fetishes, but we also don't condemn them. Just observe what is going on in your bedroom and explore how you can manifest your authentic power base in real life. Sexual fetishes are certainly not helping your spiritual path but at least the problem statement is out in the open. Suppressing your darker desires in the name of spirituality may just mean that the rude wake-up call still lies ahead. Experiment with your partner and discover how with her help the love of power naturally evolves into the power of love. Love and power do not have to clash at all. Wherever love is you will command natural power. But you may have some work ahead to claim it for yourself.

This note is part of "A Demon in the Bedroom" series. Please also look for
"Sex and Spirituality: The Dance of Yin and Yang" and
" Don't Confuse Mind Sex with Mind - Blowing Sex"

By Christian and Su Zhen

The Car Wash

I wondered the other day whether spiritual liberalization isn't a little like driving your car to the car wash. Initially, there is the intention to have a clean car and one is driving up to the tracks to let the machine take over. At this point of letting go of the control there is always a little turbulence, but then the machine takes over and the cleansing process takes place. You sit back, do nothing, and before you know it, you are free to drive anywhere you like in your clean and shiny car.

Letting go of the I is the scary part and there is always turbulence associated with this process. You have to willingly let go of something that God knows you don't need it, but the little I thinks it is sacred to you and presents it to you as the least weapon to keep you on the ground - Buddha was confronted with the dancing girls and Jesus was tempted with a power trip. Do you already know what your final temptation will be about?

But once you are through the last turbulence, the force takes over and washes all impurities away. They say you are still only 50% ready for the trip, but the Source will takes over and wash the rest right out of the system. Once you are done with the soul-cleansing wash of samadhi, you are ready to go wherever you want, the peace and light will follow you wherever you go and You and Your Father are finally One.

And then a Miracle Happens ...

When we were at graduate school, my wife used to have a t-shirt that showed two professors in front of a huge blackboard with convoluted formulas on it and a text somewhere in the middle that stated 'and then a miracle happens'; the reviewing professor said to the other 'I guess you have to be a bit more explicit in this step'.

I feel our spiritual community is in a similar position when it comes to the stage of samadhi or the process of enlightenment. Take Mr. Tolle who described falling in a state of deep depression when he suddenly saw a vortex that sucked him in and the next day the sun was shining, the birds were singing and a huge load had been lifted off his chest. While the vortex experience will probably always stay mystic to us, I think we can zoom in on the depression state a bit closer.

Being enlightened seems to mean that you have successfully dismantled your personality and left behind like an old skin. You die without physically dying. I have a hunch that this demolition course can be experienced in front of your open eyes, even though I have no idea how long it will take. A couple of books suggested it may take years between the time when you realize that you are on a demolition course and the time when the job is complete. Well, let's start chipping away.

Waiting

You can't hurry Love
No you just have to wait
Love doesn't come easy
It's a game of give and take
You got to give it trust
No matter how long it takes

But how many heartaches
must I stand before I find the Love
To let me live again
Right now the only thing
That keeps me hanging on
I remember mama said

No, Love, Love doesn't come easy
But I keep on waiting
Anticipating that soft voice
To talk to me at night
For those tender arms
To hold me tight
I keep waiting
I keep on waiting
But it ain't easy
I ain't easy
But mama said.

You can't hurry Love
No you just have to wait
Love doesn't come easy
It's a game of give and take
How long must I wait
before loneliness will cause my heart to break?

No I can't bear to live my life alone
I grow impatient for the Love to call my own
But when I feel that I , I can't go on
These precious words keep me hanging on
I remember Mama said

Horsepower

We don't discuss sex and spirituality very often, perhaps because sex is still considered somewhat of a taboo in a spiritual community - to me it seems the two are quite connected. I thought of the image of a wild, powerful horse. It takes an effort to tame it, but if you succeed, the wilder and stronger the horse initially is, the more powerful it will be once you have channeled its energy in the right direction.

I have heard some say that the process of channeling once sexual energy into spiritual power is what it takes to achieve the highest union with the source, samadhi. I don't know whether this is true, but I remember sitting in a meeting once and suddenly felt a strange sensation in my testicles. It almost seemed as if some strange force was suddenly emanating from there, which got me thinking whether our spiritual energy originates from our sexual organs. If that is the case, we should be able to fire up our horsepower so to speak via sexual restraint. This is certainly an area we can all experiment with and see whether it is true or not. I also wonder whether this applies for women as well.

I once saw a couple of beautiful glass paintings in a Delhi hotel next to each other that certainly seemed to make this point. The first showed the classic scene of a warrior with his girl making out at night in a desert. His sexual energy, depicted by a massive sword pointing towards her, was just about to leave his body. Next to the painting was the image of the Buddha in his meditation pose, experiencing the state of samadhi. You could see how his sexual energy was moving up his spine into his brain - a perfect recycling of energy.

The Old Flying Dinosaur

I once saw a report on the discovery or history channel that told the story of a huge flying dinosaur who was relatively old and lived somewhere in South America. When mating season approached, he migrated all the way from there over Canada to the south of Spain. When he arrived he saw thousands of his kind mating, but no female took any interest in him, so he died there of a broken heart.

I saw this story many years ago. Given that I still remember it, it must have left quite an impression on me. Another sad story had a similar impact, which supposedly took place a few centuries ago in France. When a family man couldn't take the company of his father anymore, he threw him in a rage out of his house and pulled him by his hair out of the cottage. Suddenly the old man cried "No, not any further - it was here when I let my father go".

You will say that these stories should not scare the spiritual path traveler. We have conquered our sex drive so we are unlikely to travel in old age from Argentina to Spain only to be laughed at by the object of our sexual passion. You will also say that we are mindful enough not to live in a dog-eat-dog social or professional environment, and what we don't do onto others, others are unlikely to do onto us. But what about the lingering fear of not reaching enlightenment? No amount of meditation or spiritual contemplation can get you to samadhi. We all know that the last step happens by the grace of the Source. The only way to overcome this fear is to stop searching, isn't it?

The Final Illusion

It ain't about how fast you get there
It ain't about the other side
It's the climb! (Miley Cyrus)

Enjoy your journey, whether you think of yourself as climbing one mountain after the other, or whether you think of yourself as sitting on a couch and letting the life lessons pass by one by one in your personalized video game. The important thing though, your life happens now and nothing else matters. If you are looking out to the other side you might trip over a stone.

So what is the final illusion? It is looking out for the final liberation, samadhi. How do you know who is looking? Is could be the mind with its endless urges for the more and the better. You tell yourself, once you are there everything will be better. I remember a thought once popped up in my head which said, "if enlightenment these days comes a dime a dozen, who will read my books when I reach samadhi?". I couldn't help laughing at the naivete of our ego. But that is what our mind does. It just takes the concept of the more, power, security, etc. and wraps some spiritual clothes around it. So enjoy every step of your journey and watch out for the final illusion.