Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Us
Rodin “The Kiss”
In the last few weeks we’ve seen some pretty incredible signs of change and those signs are visible, finally, in the everyday 3-D world. There have been several major Supreme Court decisions that strongly indicate a process of devolution* is well in place and that things are not as they seem. Over the last couple of years many of us have perceived some covert operations happening for the greater good but the results of those have been frustratingly slow to materialize in our day-to-day reality. Now, however, we are getting to see a bit of that work come to fruition.
One of the most momentous of these SCOTUS decisions is the overturning of Roe v. Wade during what is ostensibly an ultra-liberal Biden administration. Since the harvesting of babies has been a lynchpin of empire’s practices from time immemorial, this amendment being overturned now is extremely telling and positive.
To be honest, if you had told me 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, that I’d be happy about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I’d have said you were completely crazy! I believed, as many still do, that this amendment insured a woman’s right to control her own body and that only misogynist fundamentalists opposed it. Of course, I still believe in a woman’s right to control her own body, but I know now that Roe v. Wade has absolutely nothing to do with that freedom and is in fact destructive in a myriad of ways-to women, men, children and the fabric of our society. And of course abortion is still legal, though you wouldn’t know it from the inflammatory protests and remarks made from supporters of the amendment. It is now simply up to each state to decide, as it should be, and many states will keep abortion laws as they are. It is the abortion machine to which I object and think an abortion should be a very big deal, a very rare choice, and not something to be used as everyday birth control.
Since life-- always God given-- begins at conception, then abortion ends a life. If you don’t believe that life begins at conception which, by the way, seems to be the consensus among almost all doctors and scientists, atheistic or God-loving, then research who was behind getting Roe v. Wade passed in the first place. Find out what their reasons were for pushing the amendment forward. Research what Planned Parenthood is actually about, their eugenicist origins, where their money comes from, what they do with the aborted babies. Who benefits from aborted babies? The real answers may surprise you and they are some of the ugliest realities of our life on earth. Babies and children are abused and sacrificed for power, pleasure, and evil worship and they always have been.
As said, the motivations behind Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with giving women control over their own bodies or women’s rights or healthcare freedom. The fact is women have control over their own bodies but few actually take on that responsibility fully. If we’re speaking simply on the physical and practical level for a moment, it is possible for women to accurately monitor their ovulation and successfully avoid pregnancy. There are natural ways to prevent pregnancy that work and don’t involve rubber or poison hormonal cocktails but do involve educating oneself. Check out the Billings method. Of course, one needs to commit to actually following through with the process but once learned it is no more than a minute a day.
Women, through various breathing and energetic practices, can even learn to stop ovulating all together for as long as they don’t want to get pregnant. Again, this takes the willingness to be fully present to one’s own body and its processes, to learn about it, to understand it as a spiritual vehicle. Using abortion as birth control is not taking control of one’s body and has nothing to do with real freedom. Instead, it usually indicates a startling lack of engagement-physical, emotional or spiritual, with one’s own system.
Men, also, can learn to separate orgasm from ejaculation, hence preventing unwanted pregnancy and preserving their power at the same time. This requires men to take control over their own bodies-- to learn about them, to become conscious of the true sexual power at their disposal. It requires them to use this power conscientiously, to discover what it’s really for, and to stop abusing it. This is not to say that ejaculation is in and of itself an abuse of that life-giving power, but it should be consciously practiced.
Right now, the majority of men and women throw away this sacred gift of sexuality, this energetic and spiritual power, that sex offers and instead hurt themselves and everyone else in the process. Most people have no meaningful connection to their own bodies. They are habituated to, and reliant on, alcohol, drugs, sugars and carbohydrates, cigarettes, brain-washing entertainment, and the lowest expressions of sexuality. Despite the supposed openness of sexuality in our culture, shame and disconnection characterize most expressions of it.
“Sex positive” now seems largely to mean having casual sex with whomever, whenever, without question or remorse. It is often mindless, usually purely for pleasure or comfort or distraction. My definition of “casual” includes more than just anonymous, drunken one-night stands, though these too, are part of a “sex-positive” culture, in which questioning such behavior is considered “shaming” of those who do it. Casual sex is sex which is purely for pleasure or comfort or power or entertainment, outside of a committed, loving relationship and it is ALWAYS destructive. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Within a loving, committed relationship sex can still be misused, leading to drained energies, disempowerment, and codependency.
Sex opens physical, energetic, and vibrational channels and done casually leads to crossed and leaking energies. Since the beginning of time it has been used as a weapon of control because nothing else can access a person’s psyche and make them malleable quite like sexual violation can. The crossing of that barrier against someone’s will can undo the very fabric of that will, which is why sexual abuse has a special kind of perniciousness that is difficult to heal, but of course can be healed.
Willing encounters between consenting adults still lead to a vulnerability and a permeability if the sexual energy is not cultivated or understood or used for its intended purpose in the right context. Over time it makes it nearly impossible for such people to ever experience real intimacy as it erodes the emotional and physical mechanisms required for it and disconnects people so deeply from themselves. It weakens all involved and actually bleeds into society as a whole like a mold-spreading bacteria. It affects space-time fabric literally, physically, energetically and of course spiritually, cutting us off from what is real, cutting us off from divinity. It makes a population rife for exploitation and use, which is why mainstream culture, as underwritten by empire, encourages it so dramatically, so pervasively.
What then is sex and what is it really for? Is there such a thing as “sacred sexuality”?
Sex is a creative act, an act of creation. It is a merging of self with the Creator through the loving vessel of another in order to find completeness. God is expressed throughout all of creation on earth but the aspect of fallenness means we are separate, there is a separation, a gap, a forgetfulness about who we really are and how we are always part of God. This illusion of isolation is central to the pain and suffering here. Our deepest longings for love, connection, wholeness, healing, health, meaning, purpose, and success are actually expressions of a hunger for God, whether we identify them as such or not. Nothing short of God will fulfill those yearnings wholly. That deep desire might be temporarily assuaged by companionship or drugs or art or books or human validation but it will not be fulfilled. We aren’t complete unto ourselves, we need God. And God is always available to us through grace but we have turn toward that grace and accept it.
When I talk about finding wholeness through another, I am not saying that you must be in a romantic relationship to find this completeness. I’m also not talking about the kind of psychological wholeness that says “you don’t need a partner.” You don’t need a partner, but you do need God. History is full of individuals who have found union with the divine on their own, most deeply on their own. It is a reason, I believe, that so much mystical spiritual literature is full of the strongest erotic language and imagery. It is not a limiting or physical or vulgar interpretation of physical satisfaction through God, but an expression of our most passionate loving impulses being poured into that which is most holy. It is every kind of love and desire being turned toward God. Eros, or sexual/romantic love, is not a separate debased form of love. When fully realized and enacted entirely in truth, it is a purifying fire of the highest order. It undoes us in order to remake us.
We are embodied physical beings on earth and we suffer for that, but our physicality in and of itself is not a mistake, nor a punishment. It is how we learn, how we grow. We interact with the world through our bodies, through our senses, and experience emotions as thoughts somatized through our physical and energetic systems. The senses are not temptations to be avoided but cherished as loving gifts of the divine, and can actually be used for the purpose of dissolving self, as unlikely as that may seem.
This dissolution is a many-layered process but one of the basic aspects of it is in the giving over of ourselves wholly into a present moment, outside of story. This creates an opening for grace which is always offered but from which most turn away, afraid of what it will ask of them, afraid what it will show them about themselves. Instead, we must turn toward this grace with total acceptance and vulnerability in order to be within its deepest scope. God wants us to exercise our free-will and choose grace. The relationship with God, as with any relationship, only has meaning when both participants actively choose it.
We can be tempted to seek only the pleasures of the senses selfishly and with total abandon. Many theologians even think that there were some angels here in the early days who got so tempted they chose to stay on earth, taking women as wives and wreaking havoc, rather than fulfill their heavenly commissions. Most people make the choice of focusing only on the material. They live for self, wholly. Sometimes that looks obvious and ugly but often it looks like “normal” people just going about their lives, keeping their heads down, and “doing the best they can.”
The greatest temptation here is to believe self’s stories, to believe that self is all there is. To focus only on feeding and healing that constantly hungry, aching, and limited expression of who we are is the greatest mistake and a selfish one. When we are in a loving relationship with a trusted partner, or on our own, and give ourselves over to the fire of sexual desire it can cut right through those self constructions to our core vulnerability, allowing us access to our essence. We can find deep love with another or real love of ourselves only through loving God, through that inner essence which is always connected to God. Real transformation, real transmutation requires God. Otherwise, we are simply redecorating the prison walls.
When we truly love another person the feeling of completeness we have with them, the longing we have to be with them, can point to what is lacking in us, what is yearning for unification. This is not a psychological or pathological lack, a need to be strong on our own, to be able to satisfy our own needs, to not depend on another. This is not codependency which, paradoxically, needs to be addressed and healed if one is to be available for real union.
Codependency actually makes one selfish though it may not look like that from the outside. A codependent person is looking for someone to heal their wounds, take care of their needs, to provide continual distraction so they don’t have to address their own pain, even if it looks like they are the ones doing the caretaking. Only a person who has done the psychospiritual work of facing their own traumas and deconstructing the most egregious aspects of self’s citadel can address that deep longing and its desire to give to, and merge with, the beloved.
Sexuality is such a complex and sensitive issue because it touches all aspects of our being. Sexual desire acts strongly on the physical level and for many, only there. But even as we talk about its ultimate purpose and sacred power, the physical should never be ignored. The intense pleasure which it has the means to provide is not a mistake. How could it be? Nor is it only to give incentive for procreation. The sexual act of truest purpose is always one of creation, though not necessarily a creation of biological life.
In Genesis, when Eve and then Adam ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as was said to be the reason for our fall from a constant union with God, it precipitated the possibility of understanding duality, to know more of what God knows. This too was not a mistake, as I see it, but a choice to know more truth, to be a more fully realized and mature being that could have a deeper relationship with the divine. While that fall, and the subsequent radical evil that it let into the world, made this place unbelievably hard and ugly, it also allowed for us to know the deepest goodness and beauty here in contrast. The pleasures of the senses are part of that knowing, a way to understand what it is to be embodied within this duality. The stark contrasts here of good and evil, true and false, are meant to hone our skills of discernment.
The tension that creates spark and desire or “hotness” in sexual relationships comes largely from a play of opposites and engaging with the “other.” The feminine with the masculine, dark and light, object and subject, dominant and submissive, yin and yang, a receptive energy with a penetrating one. These polarities are part of the creation stories and expressions of many, if not all, religions. In Eastern practices the still point, the All, is masculine (Shiva) and the divine energy that radiates into a physical expression of the multiverse is feminine (Shakti). Both are necessary for manifestation, creation, completion, union.
The bible expresses the creation of a single being “Man” which is male-female:
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
This being that God created was male and female as one, then later separated so that they would each have a companion in the other. Having been made in God’s image meant that they were loving God by loving each other properly and in so doing they experienced the completeness within that connection. This is at the heart of the yearning to merge with another. The loneliness we feel is at its core a loneliness from God, and from our own essence, which is always connected to God. Self keeps this essence well hidden, afraid of its vulnerability and the pain that must be processed in order to access it. There is a part of us that is always missing here unless we find a way to connect and merge with it.
The alchemical power in sexuality comes from the undoing of self in a holy fusion with a loving other in order to serve God. 99% of sexual acts (rough estimate!) don’t really touch this intense process or even come near to it. Service requires us to release, undo, and dissolve self. Sex in the right context has this power in a unique way. What is alchemy but fire and water and the ineffable other, sometimes called ether, that is created in its combination, in its combustion. Neither and both and something new. Only through a raw honesty can we access the inferno of intimacy required for this radical process. Through this loving unification we can then experience a dissolution of self and become more of what we truly are. The physical pleasure and a trustworthy loving container are essential to that undoing and hence to that creation. A new human life can be created in the most basic and degraded of sexual acts, and a deconstruction can happen with an abusive violation. However, to realize the full purpose of sex to build something new from love rather than only to destroy and tear down something old, requires full participation, not just consent.
As I touched on briefly earlier, you do not need a partner to harness sexual energy or to use it for its highest purposes. It can sometimes be more challenging, just as the life of deep solitary spiritual practice is challenging, but it is certainly possible and can lead to discoveries that wouldn’t happen in partnership. Total truthfulness with oneself is required here also, just as it is with another. Some of the most powerful examples we have of mystics in ecstatic union with the divine have come from profound work in isolation. Done right it can also set you up to have the kind of intensely transformative and creative partnership with another that you may seek.
While the tides are changing in the world, and they are changing with lightning speed though it may be hard to see right now, we need to shed all that’s false within ourselves, to become what we truly are. We need to claim back our fullest power of which proper sexuality is a part, and a path to God. Empire’s many controlling narratives about sex all seek to devalue and disempower the strength that true sexuality wields. It is telling that there is still so much shame, misunderstanding, and disconnection when it comes to real gender, real sex, real desire, real intimacy, real love, given all the nonsense being touted in mainstream culture about “sex-positive” and “all-inclusive” education. The purpose and the power of your deepest God-given sexual expressions are some of your most potent tools of transformation.
*Devolution: (noun) the transfer of power to a lower level, especially by central government to local or regional administration. For comprehensive and cogent coverage of this process, please go here: https://www.devolution.link/