What Should We Make of Pornography?

It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self discovery, rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives. (Marianne Williamson)

The 50 Shades of Grey Series should be an eye-opener for anyone who condemns pornography and "perversion". The idea has gone mainstream, so there must be something the sexual theme of BDSM appeals to. If millions connect with it, can it still be a perversion? I remember sitting in a plane once, and a woman in a seat behind me remarked somewhat embarrassed to the woman sitting next to her as she glanced at her 50 Shades of Grey book, "Well, it is really just a love story."

I can't really comment on "The 50 Shades of Grey" as I have never read it, but I can comment on pornography as I have watched it. Like the 50 Shades of Grey it can add a little sparkle to the bedroom by jump-starting our sexual imagination, or it can be a stumbling block along our spiritual path; a "sinful" temptation that allures and we have no idea why.

I had an eye-opener on pornography a few years ago when someone shared a link to some very explicit sexual scenes in a spiritual community. It was titled "Sex is not the Enemy" and showed scenes of some attractive people who appeared to have simply fun having sex with each other and apparently did not mind at all sharing their pleasures with others. It was then that I first understood the core issue with porn, it is a guided trip down the pleasure lane, aiming to steer our lust in a targeted direction. The pornographic agenda rarely has love in mind. Free flowing sex on the other hand has no agenda whatsoever, and mostly, is a physical expression of love.

If you want to read a fair assessment of the pleasures and challenges with pornography, I would recommend "The Porn Report" by Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catherine Lumby who provide an overview of the distribution and usage of porn in Australia. The fact of the matter seems to be that porn viewership is widespread, many just want a little extra sparkle in the bedroom while for some, lust is steered into - what our spiritual community would call - a deviant direction.

Robert J. Stoller, M.D. has an astute observation in "Observing the Erotic Imagination" when he writes, "In perversion the desire to sin is essential for being turned on." That is indeed a very interesting problem statement. The purpose of pornography can be to break moral taboos. The sex addict ventures further and further down a road to nowhere just to keep the climax going. Expect pain along this road as the same institution that gets you exited about the pleasure trip - the ego - beats you up over it afterwards. Yet, as Marianne Williamson points out, if that activity is useful in the sense that it brings to the surface certain aspects that you have repressed before, who but you can say whether it is a hindrance or a help along the spiritual path.

A spiritual journey is quite simple really. It is all about falling in love with life and all the people in it. Shadow work is the opposite. It is about discovering why there is a lack of love in some areas of our life. And instead of just brushing it aside in the name of spirituality, we openly and honestly ask, so why exactly is that? Have a look at all the hidden symbols in pornography and try to understand why they appeal to you. Sex is not the enemy but the lack of love is. The problem statement is that this lack of love is hidden inside and it may be a good idea to bring the true cause out in the open until one day you are finally able to choose love every step of the way. 

Sex and Spirituality: A Survey

Every mind blowing orgasm is spiritual: 3 responses

Sex is spiritual if you express love: 9 responses

Only have sex with your spouse/life partner: 3 responses

Sex distracts from finding God: 0 responses

I started this poll in the Spiritual Networks community as a follow up to an earlier poll that I had seen and that, quite frankly, put me off a little. The question was whether bisexuality is a sin and while most respondents concluded that it wasn't, the survey nevertheless left the impression that sex wasn't supposed to be just for fun. So when I posted these four questions, most agreed that sex is spiritual as long as it is an expression of love. Three out of 15 respondents had the more conservative attitude, arguing that you should only have sex with your life partner (all three were women). Three other respondents were on the other side of the spectrum, arguing that every good orgasm is spiritual, independent of who you have it with.

In the sex is fun category, I especially liked a comment of one participant, defining s-e-x as a "synergetic energy exchange", to which someone else added s-e-x-i-e-r, "synergetic energy exchange in ecstatic release". In fact, she added that she is always happy to share this feeling with "All There Is" :)

Some added that sex can certainly be an expression of lack of love, but it doesn't have to come to that. One woman added the deep insight that men are likely afraid deep down that they cannot have multiple orgasms like the women which explains the subconscious drive for debasement, aggression and lack of love that is often expressed in pornography.

I was actually little surprised that no one went with the fourth option, that sex is a hindrance for finding God. I have met celibates in the Spiritual Network before, but not of these views were expressed when I asked this time around. Overall this survey was perhaps yet another reminder that for 10 spiritual travelers that could well be twelve spiritual paths. In fact, one women said that she would have voted for all four options if multiple answers were a possibility. 

Ego or Love - There is Nothing in Between

When I was younger, I enjoyed watching pornography; today I can't. I mean, of course I can, but I don't feel well afterwards. It is a little like drinking alcohol. When I was young I could drink a lot; these days, two glasses of wine is as good as it gets, afterwards I just don't feel so well.

So what is this all about? The alcohol has something to do with the aging of my body; I am sure some in my age group have had a similar experience. The porn experience is about the aging of my soul; it is a spiritual thing. It is hard to see love in pornography. It is a deliberate act to take us on a pleasure ride. The ego says, "yeah", but the spirit turns away. By the way, I didn't write this note to beat up on porn, I wrote it to explain the intrinsic choice in everything: love or ego. 

As long as we operate in this body the ego will always be meaningful to us. There are dimensions that we simply need to satisfy. The desire to have our means of living; the right for a healthy body; the hope to see our children and spouse do well economically and health-wise, et cetera. Yet, as the decades go by, we grow also spiritually. Longings that in the olden days sent us on a robot-like hunt we suddenly experience as a conscious choice: ego or love; the answer is simple indeed for us spiritual traveler: love. There is nothing else in-between.

The laws of spirituality, philosophy and life more generally, can be boiled down to one simple choice: love or ego. The world appears so multi-dimensional because we are pulled in all kind of directions; our animal instincts, evolutionary biology, the influence of our parents and environment and the longings of our soul. There often is a voice in our head - a feeling in our heart - "what can I get out of this situation". Enlightenment happens when we realize that we are not necessarily this voice or this feeling. Yet, the spiritual super-ego, "choose love no matter what", will also not be without conflicts. It takes spiritual maturity to experience that we are not this drive.

True liberation happens when we feel that we are part of this moment and when we see love in every interaction. The voice "What can I get out of this situation?" may still babble in the background, but we know that we are experiencing this moment with the intention to choose love. That's when we are finally Home. When our intention is love and when everything that we see is love, the Way has become a no-brainer. 

The Field

I am at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January 2005. At one of the 300 exhibitors booths on the floor of the Sands Expo Center is Tiffany Holiday, a woman who performs in pornographic movies. She is kissing and touching another female performer, and a crowd of men gathers around. There are rules for how much sexual activity can take place on the convention floor, and the two women are pushing the boundary. The crowd engages them to go further.

The other woman leaves, and Tiffany begins to simulate masturbation, all the while talking dirty to the men gathered around her. The crowd swells to about 50 men. I'm stuck in the middle holding a microphone for a documentary film crew. Emboldened by the size of the crowd, the men's chants for more explicit sex grow louder and more boisterous. Holiday responds in kind, encouraging the men to tell her what they like. The exchange continues, intensifying to the point where the men are moving as a unit-like a mob.

Men's bodies are pressed against each other as each one vies for the best view of the woman's breasts, vagina, and anus. Many of the men are using cameras, camcorders, or cell phones to record the scene. It's difficult not to notice- not to feel- that the men pressed against me have erections. It's difficult not to conclude that if there weren't security guards on the floor, these men would likely gang-rape Tiffany Holiday.
(Robert Jensen, Getting Off Pornography and the End of Masculinity.)

Robert Jensen experienced this scene and referred to the excited crowd as mob. Yet, reading about this experience it felt more like a trance. It was as if all the male spectators were caught in a massive dark energy field, and, as the author alluded to, things could have gotten out of control very fast. History is full of scary field stories, like the lynching of presumed criminals or even genocides. Adolf Hitler deliberately created these dark power fields during rallies. The crowd had to gather late at night in massive stadiums, at a time when the will power of the spectator was naturally weakened from the fatigue of standing for hours. After a passionate nationalistic speech he cried "Do you want the total war?" and all they could cry in unison was "yes!"

All these examples are of course dark ones, even though the idea of an energy field of like-minded people doesn't have to. When you go to a rock concert you are caught in an energy field. The experienced artists know that and deliberately manipulate this field. So you could say that whenever like-minded people gather they create a field. You can have economic ones like housing or equity market bubbles, a fashion fad, a shared corporate culture or a community. You could even think of positive fields like a spiritual community, a church or a school.

The field is something you can observe when you are very sensitive and silent.  You can observe the trigger when it touches you and you can feel that your behavior changes as you join a different set of people or go to different kind of place.  When you join a field totally, you can observe that your behavior changes accordingly.  Sometimes you get completely transformed by this field to the degree that you cannot recognize yourself any more.

Say you go to the shopping mall. You feel that impulse to buy, so you end up buying more than you ever need.  When you go home and when you don't look at your shopping bags for a couple of days and open them later, you are in amazed and wonder how you could have purchased so much stuff. As you join the mall you get sucked in by the mood of the like-minded shoppers and the clever store and mall arrangements of the advertisers. Being part of the field happens to all of us. We think we are doing things  out of our own free will but actually are under some kind of spell.  When you are carried away, it is like you are being hypnotized.  No one can force you against your will to join a field but you can be lulled into something in the same  way the guys at the LA Adult Entertainment Expo were.

By Christian and Su Zhen

Don't Confuse Mind Sex with Mind-Blowing Sex

To the ego's dark glasses you need but say " I will not look here because I know these images are not true."
A Course in Miracles

Have you ever observed how different "mind sex", the exploration of sexual fantasies is from actually having sex. When you have sex, your mind gets blown away by the dance of yin and yang energies. When you have mind sex instead, you think this is just letting off a little steam, but this is not so. Every fantasy is a castle of the ego and you are sent on a pleasure trip that takes you away from who you truly are. While sex is of God, mind sex leads is of the ego and thus leads you away from God - it is as simple as that.

It is of little use to condemn sexual fantasies, you would be condemning yourself that way. If you meet someone attractive and if you afterwards have steamy fantasies there is little you can do about it. What you can do though, don't engage in it, just let this energy come and go and then move on with your life. But if you have spent the night watching pornography and next day you get one sexual fantasy after the other, you very much can do something about it. Stop watching pornography!

Many spiritual leaders have described our brain as a garden. Once you let weed in, it spreads fast and you have to painfully pluck it out one by one. Recent neurological discoveries very much confirm this theory. As they say, what fires together wires together. After some excessive consumption of pornography don't be surprised if your first glance goes to the breasts of your potential soul sibling. You may not really have access to her soul after a pornography orgie. Sexual addicts often report that they need to use all their willpower not to view all women as sex objects. And experts of the video game Tetris report that they see three dimensional rectangles floating in real life as well after playing the game. We see in front of us what our mind engages in all day; it is as simple as that.

Pornography, at least the stuff that is geared towards the male audience, is a classic ego device. The camera zooms into body parts and not people; most of the images display a power game that the ego loves. As you watch the graphic images you see in fact a hostile act of body parts which is hardly a symbol for wholeness much in contrast to having sex with your soul partner. Also, as every consumer of hard-core porn can tell you, the further along you go on this pleasure trip, the darker the sexual images will become. Sex addicts will also tell you that if you go down this pleasure ride long enough you will discover a strange trance. Biologically, engaging with the dark side releases chemicals in your brain that can get addictive over time. Psychological and spiritually a lot more is going on: the further you go down the mind sex road the more dirt you will throw on love. It is the demon whispering in your ear, "Go to sleep my friend - just enjoy the joy ride!"

The more you engage in these imagination, the more inclined you think that this is who you are; the more power to give to the demon, the more steps you take away from God. Experience for yourself how fear creeps in whenever you give a little finger to your demon. You can stop this nightmare; find a way to disentangle yourself from it. Shadow work is a process, it is a journey towards understanding who you truly are deep down inside. These graphic images may be beneficial to learn something about yourself, but eventually you will have to give up all forms of mind sex. Where your sexual fantasies are, true love cannot be. A spiritual path is a journey towards the light and away from darkness. When you connect with the Tao you will only experience love and all dark symbols will naturally drop by the wayside. After you have walked down the dark alley for a while, after you have understood the appeal of the symbols that you have seen, the Tao will intervene and take you in a different direction for the simple reason that every additional step would just hurt you. You will know when you are ready to drop all that and then it will not be so hard to do.

Just imagine, do you really think you will have sex the way you fantasize right now? Do you really think you will perform these acts that you see in on the internet or in pornographic movies? Just observe yourself, whenever you are doing something that deep down inside tells you that you are throwing dirt on love - you can observe for yourself that you are being infused with a strange dark energy at this moment. In fact, this strange dark feeling can actually add to the sexual excitement and is even something you can get addicted to. It is perhaps obvious to say that for a spiritual path traveler this dark energy is a step away from God. Guilt will surely come your way as the force that first entices you to engage will later beat you up over it.

Forbidden acts have a strange sexual appeal. Writes Robert J. Stoeller in Observing the Erotic Imagination: "In perversion the desire to sin is essential for being turned on." True indeed! Many sex addicts report that the very contemplation of their taboo activity puts them in a strange trance. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam in their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts suggest that our visceral nervous system is responsible for this. We are wired to release neurological chemicals during periods of extreme stress. In the olden days we had to be on the top of our game when we needed to decide whether to run from the bear or face him. Apparently we can be addicted to these chemicals but we have to keep exposing ourselves to darker and darker sexual symbols to get the same stimulus. That is how the road to addiction looks like. Like with all ego activities, our neurological processes and biological wiring are exploited psychologically and we convince ourselves - consciously or subconsciously -that we are sinning when we engage in these taboo acts. 

Don't beat yourself up over the way you are wired, the whole point of shadow work is to figure out why you respond the way you do. Traveling along the Tao is never about "good" or "bad", everything that comes your way becomes an eye-opening experience instead and this may include mind sex and pornography as well. A spiritual path is all about experiencing and understanding everything yourself. You cannot make a mistake really, all you can do is to delay your homecoming journey, but don't worry, the Tao will at every stage show you the way to the light.

It gets very hard to be on that discovery course if we don't have a partner to play and experiment with. Some people are without a significant other, while others might just be dissatisfied sexually in their relationship. When we can't express our sexual desires we are tempted with substitutes like prostitution or pornography. It is ok to be fascinated with these substitutes but you have to turn towards real life instead if you want to advance on your spiritual journey. Of course you deserve to have a significant other and of course you have the right to mind- blowing sex.

So go out and find sexual fulfillment. The Tao will cooperate with you. Sex is divine and it is beautiful if you manage to get in touch with this natural flow of life. Express this divine energy with the one you love. Whatever your soul partner is, sexual healing will just be around the corner. If occasionally you miss a beat and walk down a dark alley instead that is ok too, your soul partner will pull you right back onto the healing path. Have mind-blowing sex and observe for yourself how the ego's dark symbols fade into the background that way.

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

http://zeitgeistinma.blogspot.com/2013/03/sex-and-spirituality-dance-of-yin-and.html
"Sex, Love and Power"

http://zeitgeistinma.blogspot.com/2013/03/sex-love-and-power.html

By Christian and Su Zhen 

Spirituality and Sex

The essentially religious or creative motive is the first motive for all human activity. The sexual motives comes second. And there is great conflict between the interests of the two.
D.H. Lawrence in 'Fantasia of the Unconscious'

When my older boy was quite small he drew a picture for me, which took me my surprise because art was never really his thing. When I looked at it I could have sworn I saw something that looked like a penis next to an object that I couldn't make out. But then I saw that he had turned one of the P in 'FOR PAPA' upside down, so I flipped the painting and was really surprised about what I found instead. Both objects were now clearly visible and the picture displayed a Christ figure who was blessing a child instead. I thought this was a very symbolic message from the Tao ...share your sperm or share your holiness; you can't have both. Isn't that the message many religions have been preaching since the olden days?

In my experience I don't see how sex should be in conflict with spirituality. Sex is a physical expression of the love you have for a person and the sexual union is a symbolic expression of wholeness: yin and yang finally merge into oneness. I also can't find any fault with tantric sex - you experiment with sexual energy in a spiritual setting with a likeminded partner; where is the harm in that? Experiment with it and see whether you can manifest Heaven on earth that way.

Body obsession is something very different though. Observe how different it is to have sex instead of watching pornography or engaging in sexual fantasies. The bodies merge in the sexual act; the mind has nothing to obsess about. In fact, the mind shuts down when the yin and yang energies dance in harmony. But watch how different mind sex is - the mind is racing from body to body, while the soul level is entirely lost on you. Along a spiritual path you have to be able to appreciate everyone on a soul level, and you can only do that if you can look through their body completely. It is possible to do it, but it is a choice very much as my son's painting indicated. If you engage in mind sex, the spiritual and physical worlds will start interfering with each other.

The process of ejaculation is another debated point in the spiritual community. I discovered a couple of years ago that ejaculation drains my spiritual energy and that it takes me several days to recover from this shock. This obviously is one idiosyncratic male perspective and I have been talking to female co-travelers who do not experience any loss of energy when they have sex. I have no idea how representative my experience is for the male spiritual community, but just in case if you are affected like me, it turns out that there is a tantra discipline that allows you to experience orgasms while your sperm never leaves your body. So you can experience the best of both worlds, physical and spiritual, with that technique.

My hunch is that we are all traveling on different paths and we all return home to our Source from different directions. Some eat meat, others not; some have sex, others stay abstinent and some earn a living in ordinary occupations, whereas others spend their time in seclusion. Just experiment for yourself and see what works along your spiritual path. In my experience there are no taboos, just activities that are consistent with your spiritual progress and others that interfere. Once you have gotten a taste for how blissful the connection with the Tao really is, you will find it in your best interest to cut out all the interferences anyway. So please don't lose sleep over the potential conflict of sex and spirituality, just see for yourself how you can combine the physical and the spiritual in a way that works for everyone.

Sex is not the Enemy

I remember someone posting this thread in a spiritual community followed by a link to a website with some very explicit sex scenes. When I looked at them I had to agree with her, you couldn't really call them pornographic just because they seem to portray the natural yin and yang experience of sex, the dance of female and male energies in all their creative shapes and forms. The other day I remembered this thread and suddenly wondered so what then constitutes pornography? When I had a look at a random selection of the images that are so readily available on the Internet, I thought that perhaps the only difference is that pornography is artificial in contrast. It is an act. These scenes are just created to trigger your sexual instincts and fantasies.

A few years ago I had an insight which might be obvious to you, but it was a revelation to me : there is mind sex and then there is real sex: http://zeitgeistinma.blogspot.com/2010/07/sexual-fantasies-sex-and-spirituality.html. When you have sex you do not think, you dance. It is a natural exchange of energy,  a natural expression of our Devine presence. In contrast, the mind sex binds you and can even become addictive. 

So yes, in theory, sex is not the enemy even for a spiritual path traveler. More than that, if you try to repress this natural force, expect some Freudian slips. Yet, if possible, try not to indulge in the dimension of sex that binds you. The whole point of our spiritual journey is to become free. I have a hard time defining what exactly constitutes sex that binds you.This might be the pornographic stimulus or it might be the sexual fantasies that you can spin like a yarn in your mind. Perhaps I can use the same simple trick that  Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart came up with when he had to define on what exactly constitutes pornography. He said,  "I know it when I see it". In the same vein I would say, when you encounter sex that binds you, you will feel it. So see whether you can cut loose this dimension of sex. I hope you will discover for yourself that even a devoted spiritual path traveler can participate in the creative yin and yang without being stopped along the Way. Sex is not the enemy.

Mind Sex: 21 Days to Serenity

Watch a pornographic movie, masturbate, get drunk, chat with others in adult web communities and see what happens in the following days. Observe how you perceive people you  see and meet in the street; do you see them as bodies or as spiritual beings? Watch your thoughts, are they replaying the events of the night before? Wean yourself from all sexual activities for 21 days and see what happens. Do sexual scenes still capture your imagination afterwards? Do you perceive people that you see and interact with any differently. Our scientific folks would perhaps conjecture that your sexual drive is going up after 21 days of days of abstinence. My claim, the opposite is true. Try for yourself' just understand that 21 days of abstinence is a steep climb. But once you have made it you will perhaps see for yourself, passion and serenity is a choice. You  can have peace of mind or the spice of life, the choice is up to you.

Bodies

I was in a bar the other day watching the soccer tournament when I saw some advertisements on the screen next to it which appeared like some magic sex spell. It displayed young girls with lolita-like body postures. The slim teenager bodies had surprisingly big breasts and - me, being a man - I couldn't help being glued to the screen. Actually, the ad company was a little too effective in creating these images as for the life of it, I couldn't have told you what the ad was about.

I vaguely remember God saying in Neale Walsch's Conversations with God that you will always discover the soul of your sister or brother despite their bodies if you really look. I experience this most of the times. If you meet a breathtaking 'body' on the street and really bother to look at his or her face, something amazing happens - the gestalt changes into something else. Sadly, the sisters and brothers with the sexiest bodies often have plain faces. Exceptions to the rules exist of course, but then the gestalt changes into the most amazing art work.

So why was I so depressed the other day when the media got me? I couldn't get to the soul of the girls, my sex instincts prevailed. Well, it's a kind of a media sex spell. They define the environment you are in, and probably also used some digital magic to blow up specific bodyparts. Exactly the same applies if you go to a sexual websites or see pornographic movies. These scenes are designed to activate your sexual fantasies - and where your mind is, soul perception is hard to come by. It's like going to a magic show and being surprised that you cannot figure out the trick.