Sept/Oct 2007

editorial

 Wild erections and speculations

By RAVI DYKEMA

 

Do you think Sex is sacred? Is your desire for your penis or vagina to merge with another’s penis or vagina sacred? Do you think sex has been given to humanity by our “creator” as a means to achieve our spiritual potential, however it is variously described in religious traditions: joining Jesus in Heaven, union with God, dissolution of ego, enlightenment, etc.?

Or do you think sex is not sacred? Is vagina-embracing-penis-leading-to-orgasm just for briefly making babies? Does sex-for-pleasure constitute a road to suffering and damnation?

This is the subject we discuss with three experienced folks in “Sacred sexuality, intimacy, orgasm and spirit” (page 31 in the print version of Nexus).

Perhaps our personal sexual road could go in either of the above directions, to sacredness or to suffering. One of the greatest scholars of world religious history, the late Mircea Eliade, wrote in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, “The tantric texts frequently repeat the saying, ‘By the same acts that cause some men to burn in hell for thousands of years, the yogin (tantra yoga practitioner) gains his eternal salvation.’”

In this country, experimentation with and teachings about spiritualized sexuality accompanied the advent of feminism. This may have been a coincidence but I doubt it. I was a student of traditional tantra yoga in India when I was in my 20s, and I grew up during the great social transformation wrought by feminism. These influences, along with the nascent environmental movement, got me thinking. I think huge social structures like patriarchy and humanity’s destructive exploitation of nature relate to our comfort or discomfort with our own body’s nature, especially our sexuality, and especially our genitals.

Here’s the “establishment” male-centered formula that expresses the sex-is-dirty philosophy, as I understand it. Woman equals sex, pleasure, seduction, sin, debauchery and spiritual death. Man must control her (and himself), resist her (and his urges), rise above the lure of her vagina, dominate his penis (which is inspired by her), and only then can he become good, clean, redeemed, saved, spiritually liberated and pleasing in God’s sight.

I think humanity’s attitude toward Earth’s environment, toward nature, parallels this formula. To see the connection, replace “woman”, above, with “body”. Our bodies ARE our most intimate contact with nature/wilderness. Nature courses mysteriously through our inner wilderness all the time in the form of sensations, emotions, urges, thoughts and actions. Have you not at least once viewed your own sexual urges as a wild thing, mysteriously wet and panting? If we consider our body’s nature as devilish and bad, leading us into temptation and ultimate suffering, than we must use our intellect (or something holy and external to our bodies) to dominate it and to avoid its panting, in order to be happy and fulfilled. Similarly, I think, humans in the developed world have “conquered” and “tamed” Earth’s wilderness through powers of the intellect, often in appallingly destructive ways, and we numb ourselves to filthy rivers and oceans, smoggy skies, rampaging species extinction and ravaged ecosystems. This numbing parallels our numbing ourselves to our penises and vaginas, to our own wild nature.

Enter tantra about 1500 years ago, in which “the human body acquires an importance it had never before attained in the spiritual history of India,” according to Eliade. “The body is no longer the source of pain, but the most reliable and effective instrument at man’s disposal for ‘conquering death,’” he writes.

OK, I know it is a long way from Indian tantra’s esotericism and extreme discipline to modern Neo-Tantra and other sex-and-spirit teachings, but at least some people are exploring a new formula: Our bodies and our urges for pleasure offer us a heart-and-spirit-opening opportunity. The vagina is a sacred temple; the penis is a divine scepter. Nature is our ally, nay; it is an essential guide, on our journey to wholeness.