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.