The Spiritual and the Sensual

I want to comment a little on my philosophy, which I do not mean to be dogmatic, but mean to be a reflection of how I find wholeness in life, and with my "Higher Power".

Sensuality and spirituality are not two for me. I sometimes talk to a pregnant woman in the mornings. I feel humbled and see in her the essence of God. This is a sensual experience. I also, during my times in a natural setting, experience a deep unity, which is like a marriage, with the rest of Nature. This is sensual, orgasmic and there is a death (an eating as it were) of the ego where all blends into one and the ego has no sense of beginnning or end to himself.

My views are not unlike the mystics of the Christian tradition, Tantra of the East, or other more ancient points of view. Evelyn Underhill, in writing of the Christian mystics, stated that church officials and those of that caliber were often embarrassed by the blatant sensuality of the mystics in describing their marital unity with the Godhead. I have also never experienced real sexuality as anything but sacred. The desacralization of sexuality, I think, has been a nightmare. It has messed us up royally. We have all kinds of conflicted attitudes towards our bodies, our desires, etc. In reality, our desires are, in the primacy, a desire for wholeness, which is a spiritual experience.

I know sometimes I can get dangerous because I also think it is important to confront death and understand death as a living process. Hence, the Goddess eats her child in the poem... which again is an ancient symbolism and manifests today in the image of Kali.

"More than Creator and Creation,
Mother is sheer Creativity,
Always pregnant with Ecstasy,
She gives birth to manifest being
and nurses him at her breasts.
She then swallows her child.
The world dissolves instantly
upon touching her white teeth
while realizing her brilliant,
translucent void."

But, this is not about death as we in the West understand it; it is about being absorbed, transformed and reborn. It is about enlightenment. When I unity with the Divine Wisdom, there is nothing but She and She and I are not two.

I also believe that there is one Process (Tao) in the universe: that Process is mirrored in sexuality. None of us are created in a vacuum. We mirror Nature. Even our cognition mirrors sexuality, or perhaps sexuality mirrors our cognition. I can be talking sexually and be describing the actions of mind at the same time. For example, how often do we say we conceived an idea? Conception is a feminine function and speaks of birth. Furthermore, how often have we heard the cliche, your words are food for thought? Absorbed words are fertilizers (food, or seminal) to the generation of new ideas. What of a tree being absorbed into the soil of the Earth as mulch? Is it not a fertilizer also? Death is a living process. Devouring is about transformation.

On a more personal level, the days I was with my girlfriend Marilyn, I could feel in her a linkage to everything. The literal act of love making was a spiritual experience more important that the reciting of chants, prayers, or anything else that is done in organized churches or religions.

Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching that the entire universe makes love. I agree with this. Let our bodies, minds and souls reflect this.

This is my way of looking at life. As I said, I want to feel whole... like I'm part of this great universe. I am not into reductionism and separating out any aspect of myself, including my sexuality, from the Divine.

16 Aug 2000

For further reflection, I'm going to give a couple of quotes that reinforce what I'm trying to say. I just want to put some depth to my sensuality so I'm not being seen as some kind of demented nut. I think the universe is a multi-dimensional unity, and the more ways what I'm trying to say is expressed, the better.

Anyway, the first is from the Hindu Siviate Sutra:

"The Initiating Point desirous to manifest the thought it holds of all things vibrates transformed into the primordial sound of the nature of a cry. It shouts out the universe which is not distinct from itself. That is to say; it thinks it. Hence the term word. Meditation is the supreme word. It sounds, that is to say, vibrates, submitting all to the fragmentation of life (ever watch the first act of a fertilized egg... it separates in half). This is how it is vibration."

Not distinct from itself is the key line here.

The following is from Jacob Boheme, a Christian mystic, who, interestingly, was Protestant:

"For the Nothing causeth the willing, that it is desirous; and the desiring is an imagination... wherein the will, in the looking glass of Sophia (Wisdom), discovereth it self and impregnateth it self with the imagination out of the Sophia, viz out of the virgin-like looking glass, which, there is a Mother... for the Will, viz, the Father, speaketh in the looking-glass of Sophia and openeth the word of life."

"Speaketh into" is an act of intercourse. The universe is a multi- dimensional unity. Heremes interestingly says our womb of rebirth is Wisdom and Her will is our begetter (Father). Same idea.

From the Stanzas of Dyzan:

"The vibration sweeps aloft, touching with its swift wing the entire universe and the germ that dwelleth in darkness, the darkness breathing over the slumbering waters of life (Genesis: 1:2). Darkness radiates light and light drops one solitary ray into the Mother's Depths. The ray shoots through the virgin egg, the ray causes the eternal egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal germ which condenses into the world egg."

The universe, in my view, is a multi-dimensional unity. What happens between our legs happens throughout the universe. We are the Process... the manifestation of Tao.

16 Aug 2000

The hunter stalks
Low in the grass
blending in
knowing no difference
between himself
and that which he kills

The huntress watches
anticipating when She shall make him Hers
Her heart pounds knowing
What goes out comes back in.

His lips water
Wrenched in deep desire
He springs forth bringing his prey to the ground
digesting the kill
change comes from within

The huntress laughs
Licking Her red, wet lips
The hunter is gone
Alive forever
devourer and devoured are one

25 Dec 2003