Preface

SACRED SEXUALITY IS ABOUT LOVE —not merely the positive feeling between intimates but an overwhelming reverence for all embodied life on whatever level of existence. Through sacred sexuality, we directly participate in the vastness of being—the mountains, rivers, and animals of the earth, the planets and the stars, and our next door neighbors.

Sacred sexuality is about recovering our authentic being, which knows bliss beyond mere pleasurable sensations. It is a special form of communication, even communion that fills us with awe and stillness.

Sacred sexuality is about the reenchantment of our lives. It is about embracing the imponderable mystery of existence, about the curious fact that you and I and five billion others cannot account for our existence and our sexuality.

When we truly understand our sexuality, we come face to-face with the mystery of the spirit. When we truly understand the spiritual dimension of existence, we come face to face with the mystery of sexuality. And when we truly understand anything, we are immediately cast into mystery and wonder.

The average American apparently makes love twice a week. Assuming that the ordinary person commences sexual intercourse at the age of seventeen and can look forward to an active (if perhaps gradually declining) sex life for a period of at least fifty years, this means that he or she will have repeated the sex act some 4,800 times by the age of sixty seven. For some people the figure will be much higher, perhaps around 8,000 times, while for a small minority it may be as low as a few hundred times.

Why, then, is it that countless people nevertheless feel dissatisfied and curiously ill at ease with their sexuality? Why is it that they feel a sense of shame or guilt about their genitals and about sex? Why do we generally hide our sexual feelings, sometimes even from our partner?

As Morton and Barbara Kelsey, who have given hundreds of workshops, noted in their book Sacrament of Sexuality, “We have found very few people who, when they were honest, did not share real concerns about sexuality.” These concerns reveal a deep confusion about the proper place of sexuality in our lives. Despite the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and although we know that “everyone does it,” we feel strangely ambivalent about sex.

This book traces the causes of sexual malaise, showing how it is rooted in a deeper, spiritual dilemma: the obscuration of the sacred dimension in modern times. I will argue that there is another, more rewarding, challenging, and creative option to contemporary sex as performance. That option is sexuality as a transformative vehicle of higher human growth: sacred sexuality.

The present work has grown out of my own struggle with sexuality in the larger context of a meaningful life. Like so many people, I have for many years confused sexual need with the need to be loved and have passively expected to be loved rather than taken it on myself to love actively. I have explored many of the opportunities opened up by the sexual revolution, but these explorations gave me neither lasting happiness nor inner peace.

My own sexual dilemma did not begin to lessen until I seriously obliged myself to integrate my sex life with the deeply felt urge to become a whole person. Ten years ago, I voluntarily adopted a lifestyle that required me to inspect closely the psychological mechanism that made me a sexual and emotional consumer rather than a fully cognizant participant in the play of life. Luckily I have a partner who was willing to experiment with different approaches to this problem, which, I believe, lies at the core of the existential dissatisfaction experienced by numerous men and women today.

For a period of time we made love daily, working through our respective problems and learning to be vulnerable with each other. Then we economized our sexual life and even practiced celibacy for a stretch. More than anything, that period of voluntary sexual abstinence allowed me to really see my own habit patterns. Step by step, I succeeded in disentangling the sexual drive from my emotional needs. I became a little freer in myself, a little less guilt ridden, and more capable of genuine love. In due course, I also found myself more able to invite the sacred into my intimate life.

I looked to such traditional spiritual schools as Hindu Tantrism and Chinese Taoism for practical guidance. My professional training as an indologist specializing in the Sanskrit literature of Hinduism particularly qualified me to investigate the original sources of Tantrism. My research in this area prompted me to contribute a series of articles on Tantrism to the widely read Yoga Journal.

The favorable response to these essays subsequently induced me to conceive and edit the book Enlightened Sexuality, published in 1989.With that anthology I tried to give voice to a sex positive spiritual orientation to counterbalance the inherited Christian puritanism from which many of us are still suffering.

Encouraged by the public response to Enlightened Sexuality and feeling that there was room for a more systematic treatment of sexuality in the context of a sacred life, I next embarked on the present work.

This book is arranged in three parts. In Part I, I review the stark reality of our contemporary sexual malaise, or what I call the sexual stress syndrome. I also trace the roots of the modern sexual dilemma and unhappiness to what I call modal guilt and shame, the denial of the body, and the felt sense of being cut off from the ground of existence.

I further show that sex need not be a dull routine or dreaded twice a week or once a month encounter. It can be a healing event and one that reconnects us to the sacred dimension of existence. I include many first person accounts of men and women who have experienced the sacred aspect of sexuality, which demonstrate that sex can be a window onto the ultimate reality, whose presence can make us whole.

Traditional cultures, which do not recognize our modern separation between sacred and profane, have always considered sexuality as an aspect of the great mystery of existence. I believe that these cultures contain many important clues for us. Hence the core chapters of this volume, those of Part II, are dedicated to an overview of the significant ways in which traditional societies—from the Stone Age to our own era—have integrated sexuality into their religious spiritual world views.

Men and women once embarked with unshakable faith on the great adventure of the spirit, risking everything for a glimpse of the eternal reality beyond appearances. Today, adventurers of the spirit who boldly scale the mountain of self-discipline and self transcendence are as good as extinct. We have too limited a view of our humanness; hence we also have too limited a view of our own sexuality.

Yet we cannot live fully as sexual erotic beings without first recovering our spiritual depth. Our sexuality can help us get in touch again with that depth; it can serve as a gateway to the spiritual dimension. In this book I explain why and also show how this is possible in practice. The extensive historical survey in Part Two shows how other cultures and traditions have dealt with this matter. We can learn many practical lessons from them.

In Part Three I spell out more clearly how we might use the knowledge gained in the preceding chapters. Although it is not intended as a workbook, I believe that this volume contains enough material of practical consequence to inspire you in your personal attempt to reintegrate your sexual life with the sacred.

Within the limited compass of this book, it was possible to present only a selection of materials on sacred sexuality. I have focused on the most salient traditions and, within them, on those features that allowed me to develop a rounded and sufficiently varied treatment of sacred sexuality through the ages. I believe that my discussion is both sufficiently broad and detailed to serve as a reliable introduction to this far reaching and complex subject.

I am aware that the premise on which this book is based—that sexuality and spirituality are perfectly compatible—might seem revolutionary to some readers. It indeed represents a significant departure from our inherited sex and body negative perspective. In pondering with me the age old alternative approaches presented in this volume, therefore, I invite you to make a courageous leap—the kind of imaginative leap that Democritus made when he insisted that matter was composed of atoms, or Philolaus when he taught that our planet was not flat but spherical, or Copernicus when he boldly announced that the planets were circling the sun, or Darwin when he concluded that Homo sapiens evolved from a more primitive species.

Today the ideas of these ingenious men are commonplace; we also know that they were not the first to hold them. Similarly, the whole notion of an erotic spirituality is not new, but it calls for a quantum leap in those of us who have been exposed to centuries of sex negativity.

Sacred sex, which is the experience of ecstasy, is the real sexual revolution.

CHAPTER 3
The Hidden Window:
Spiritual Breakthroughs in Sex

SEX, LOVE, AND TRANSCENDENCE
According to a national survey conducted in 1973, four out of ten Americans have experienced what they described as a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift them out of themselves. One in five of these people claimed that he or she had this experience more than once. Fifty five percent said they partook of “a feeling of profound peace” and 43 percent spoke of “a sense of joy.” It is clear from their descriptions that not a few of them had been the beneficiaries of a full blown mystical experience, in which the sense of body encapsulated identity is lost.

The high incidence of such religious or mystical experiences in our secular, materialistic civilization has come as a great surprise to some people. However, another survey finding is at least equally amazing: most of the respondents never talked about their extraordinary experiences until the time of the survey. This self imposed silence on the part of closet mystics may well be one of the principal reasons why our unspoken cultural taboo against ecstasy continues to be so strong and influential. How our society would change if we were to tell one another freely about our most sacred moments and our happiest and most remarkable experiences!

I believe we all have the potential for such uplifting experiences of total happiness, when all self centeredness is suspended. Abraham Maslow, the great pioneer of humanistic psychology, has shown that such moments of self transcendence occur frequently in mature, well integrated persons. He called them peak experiences.

In the mystical state (unio mystica) there is no sense of being divorced from anything, and all opposites are transcended. Self and other are merged into a single whole, and there is no within and without, no space and time. No words can adequately portray the content of the mystical experience, and it harbors depth upon depth of revelation that the intellect cannot fathom. But, above all, it is a state that is felt to be vastly superior to, and more desirable than, the ordinary state of being and consciousness.

The unitive condition comes always as a surprise. As popular writer Joseph Chilton Pearce would say, the unitive experience affords us a glimpse through the crack in our cosmic egg, our particular mind set or interpretation of reality. It opens up a new view of reality—a view that is qualitatively so different from our ordinary perspective that it cannot but surprise us and put us in wonderment.

Sometimes this kind of breakthrough happens when we are in love and during or as a result of sexual intimacy. Indeed, sexual love is the most intense and tangible way in which ordinary men and women strive for a union that transcends the boundaries of their everyday experience. In the sexual act, we seek to forget ourselves, if only for a brief spell. We seek to make a deeper contact with our lover. We want to escape the sense of being imprisoned by skin and separated from the rest of the universe.

Often, however, this desire remains quite unconscious, and then sex is engaged in as a mere diversion from the concerns and stresses of daily life. Our contact is only skin deep, and we fail to give that primal impulse toward union full expression. Consequently we continue to feel alone, abandoned, betrayed, and unloved. Yet we are again and again pushed to repeat sexual contact. Since we are not, like animals, blindly subject to the reproductive cycle, this urge can be understood only as having deep psychological as well as physiological roots.

Sex is the ordinary person’s substitute for a spiritual or sacred way of life, with orgasm being a surrogate for the utterly blissful unitive state. In that state, extolled by mystics of all ages and cultures as the pinnacle of human experience, reality is encountered in its nakedness, without conceptual blinders. As Greeley noted:

Intercourse does deautoinatize somewhat our ordinary reality orientation. It does take us out of ourselves; it is an experience of passionate unity; it is an attempt at sharing, a temporary immersion in fundamental life forces.

My investigations—conducted by questionnaire, interview; and a careful study of various cultures—have convinced me that sex can be an important gateway to mystical experiences or encounters with the sacred. Sex has long been considered in this positive way by many religious traditions, even those, like Christianity, that are known for their puritanism. My conclusions are confirmed not only by Greeley and McCready but also by Marghanita Laski, a British writer. In her classic book Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, she made these comments:

Among contemporary secular people of the kind that composed my questionnaire group sexual love appears to be a common trigger. In this group sexual love was named as a trigger by 33 percent of people (18 women and 8 men). Eleven of these people (6 men and women) made unmistakable references to sexual intercourse, and of other references to ‘love,’ ‘being in love,’ etc., sexual intercourse was probably implied in several cases.

Surprisingly enough, Laski’s finding that sexual love appears to be a common trigger does not seem to be confirmed by the research of that other intrepid collector of mystical self-reports in Britain, Sir Alister Hardy. Hardy, an emeritus professor of zoology at Oxford who is well known for his contributions to marine biology, has been pioneering the rapprochement between spirituality and biology since the 1920s. In 1969, at the age of seventy three, he established the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College in Oxford. Ten years later, he and his collaborators had collected over 4,000 first hand accounts of mystical and psychic experiences. The team’s provisional analysis of a large bulk of these materials is contained in The Spiritual Nature of Man.

Of the 3,000 cases so far analyzed by Hardy, only 12 are stated to have had sexual love for their trigger. If correct, we must wonder whether the British have no love lives, which is clearly absurd, or whether they do not mix sex with love or passion. The most likely solution to the problem posed by the low figure in Hardy’s survey is that his fellow British were simply reluctant to write about their sexual lives.

In the following, I will present a number of first person accounts by people who have courageously broken the existing taboo and divulged their extraordinary experiences during sex, including mystical union. Since most of them still preferred to remain anonymous, I have, with the exception of my wife’s case, preserved the anonymity of all respondents to my questionnaire and personal inquiries.

© Georg Feuerstein Ph.D., 2004

Please join us next month for the second part of this book excerpt -

THE POWER OF LOVE:
EROTIC AND SPIRITUAL BREAKTHROUGHS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., is the author of over thirty books, including The Yoga Tradition, The Philosophy of Classical Yoga, Holy Madness, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, and Lucid Waking. He is the founder-president of the Yoga Research and Education Center (www.yrec.org) and is internationally known for his many interpretative studies of the Yoga tradition. Since the 1970s, he has made significant contributions to the East-West dialogue and is particularly concerned with preserving the authentic teachings of Yoga in its various forms. His passion for India’s spirituality was awakened on his fourteenth birthday when he was given Paul Brunton’s "A Search in Secret India", and he has followed the yogic path in various forms since that time.

Reprinted with permission from, Sacred Sexuality - The Erotic Spirit in the World’s Great Religions by Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D, Copyright 2003, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, 800-246-8648, www.InnerTraditions.com .