| THE
POWER OF LOVE: EROTIC AND SPIRITUAL BREAKTHROUGHS
The
following self report shows that the feeling of love, as it thrives
between young lovers, is a powerful means of slipping through the eye
of the needle into the bright world of joyous communion with, and attunement
to, another person. Monica is a pretty, petite woman in her late thirties.
She is divorced and works as a secretary. She has lived an active spiritual
life for many years and has experienced a variety of meditation states.
I was
sitting at the edge of my bed waiting for my lover. He had just called,
and I was looking forward to his visit. As I was thinking about him
and how much I loved him and valued his love, I grew determined to
just love him that night, to be concentrated in loving rather than
allowing myself to be distracted about worries about our future. In
that moment I simply accepted that he was not yet ready to make a
long term commitment to me.
My lover
arrived shortly after I had made my resolution, and for some reason
it was not difficult at all to focus on that feeling of love. As we
were making love, I remember looking into his eyes and being “undone”
by the love and naked vulnerability I saw in them.
All
of a sudden I felt no separation between us. I was startled by that
and wanted to draw back. But realizing that I was cutting myself off
from him and the love that we were feeling for each other, I continued
to look into his eyes and to simply be present with him.
I “fell”
into the fullness that had arisen in and between us. It was so uncomplicated
and natural, and my mind was amazingly calm and quiet. A simple joy!
And our love making wasn’t passive either. In fact, it got rather
boisterous and passionate.
I have
had the experience of losing myself a few times in meditation, but
this was the only time it happened during lovemaking. That day I was
undoubtedly emotionally more open than usual, but also his depth of
feeling seemed to draw me into a deeper feeling. Afterward he asked
me whether I had noticed anything different and nodded in agreement
when I told him what I had felt. He said that for him it was as if
we had been encased in a large bubble of energy.
The bubble
of energy experienced by Monica’s lover probably represents a
far more common experience than is assumed. While it cannot be called
a mystical experience in the strict sense, because there is still a
sense of duality, it does signal an important spiritual opening.
A thirty
four year old divorced man was converted from agnosticism to a metaphysical
perspective on life by just such an energy experience during sex.
As he described:
I have
known this particular woman for almost three years. I always felt
a special type of connection with her since the time we met, and she
claims the same feeling. Our friendship grew deeper as time went on,
and we became lovers. We both felt a profound deepening of our love
for each other.
I had
not had many sexual relationships with women before meeting her, and
it was with her that I first experienced what it was to make love.
This I feel deeply. I know what it is to make love, because it was
her, because of her. My relationship with her has caused a change
in me that I am very thankful for.
For
personal reasons I had to move across the nation, while her life was
in California. We had to separate. The weekend prior to my departure,
we took a beautiful room at an inn. We dined, walked, and made love
that evening. With her I had experienced what lovemaking could be.
However, it was during this particular evening that I experienced
what I feel was the beginning of a joining of our spirits.
We were
making love, and while I was kissing her, I felt a strong desire to
be a part of her, and for her to be a part of me. Our kissing intensified,
and I began to experience the sensation that my physical senses were
falling away. My body was disappearing, as was the sensation of her
body against mine. I began sensing energy swelling and flowing toward
her, and in my mind’s eye I saw a white shapeless form, moving
and growing. As the form grew, the energy grew and intensified.
This
lasted just a few seconds, before I pulled away from her lips. I was
as startled by this as she was. We both gasped in surprise and looked
at each other for a few seconds, not knowing what had happened and
not knowing what to say. She then told me that she had never been
kissed like that before, and I confessed the same to her. She had
experienced the same physical sensations, though she did not visualize
the white shape. Then, after collecting ourselves for a few moments,
we resumed our lovemaking.
In his
book Tenderness Is Strength, Harold C. Lyon, Jr., related an
incident that involved a parapsychological phenomenon of mutual visualization
during a moment of self surrendered sex. Early one morning, he went
fishing. For three hours he trolled for lake trout, using all his skills
to perfection, and was about to head back home when he had a strike.
He had caught a twenty six inch trout. Excitedly he shared his adventure
and joy with his wife, who was still in bed. He recollects:
We had
not been comfortable in our relationship for the past few months,
struggling to resolve our differences and blaming each other for them.
How silly. How useless. Our lovemaking had become mechanical, lacking
the flow and fulfillment we both sought. An hour after I had climbed
back into bed, we found ourselves making love with incredible passion,
spontaneity, and tender joy, flowing from orgasm to orgasm. There
was a letting go, a total surrendering to our own inner rhythms, which
had eluded us for months. In the midst of my orgasm I had a vision
of the big lake trout, organic and beautiful in the depths of the
lake, and I realized that I could not make her take my lure even when
it was presented with perfect technique. She had to be ready to strike
the lure, with no holding back. This was a natural flowing instinct,
not something I could force or manipulate.
Incredibly,
in the afterglow of our loving, Eta shared with me that she too had
seen a vision of the organic lake trout in the throes of her orgasms!
We both realized in a flash that with all the technique in the world,
we couldn’t make our love flow until it was ready to flow, any
more than I could make the lake trout take the lure. 7
Of course,
the shared visionary experience is not the point. The crux is the mutual
lowering of the couple’s ego defenses, which allowed love to flood
their hearts and transform their lovemaking into an ecstatic affair.
This happened
in a very dramatic way to another respondent to my questionnaire whom
I will call Mary. Her breakthrough, which involved a more advanced stage
of unitive consciousness, happened just a few months prior to my completing
this book. Mary, who is in her mid thirties, was brought up as a Catholic
and predictably felt, as she put it, “rather divided about sex
and spirituality.” She had tried several times to break away from
her tradition but was always drawn back to it, although she married
a non Catholic during one of her phases of involvement with Catholicism.
In 1989,
her husband, Carl, went to an office Christmas party on his own, met
a woman to whom he felt deeply attracted, and exchanged a long, passionate
kiss with her. When he asked her to go to bed with him, she refused
because he was married. Carl confessed the brief encounter a couple
of days later. Mary was understandably shocked. In her own words:
I was
devastated. Carl had never done anything like it, though he had not
promised anything either, merely said it was unlikely that he would
have an affair. I had been afflicted with jealousy before, unreasonably
so. Even though Carl assured me that his love for me was deep and
lasting, I was disillusioned and depressed, and lost interest in anything
but our relationship. I had no appetite and no orgasms.
But
then I started to see this incident as an answer to my prayers. I
had asked God to show me how to love. A short time before I had read
Meister Eckhart. He wrote that love is its own reward: when you love
other people, then you really do share their joy, and so it multiplies
your own joy. I wanted this very much, but was too self involved to
really feel it.
Carl
told me that something happened to him that day. He felt a weight
had been lifted from him, and he started to feel stronger in other
areas of his life—like his job. He wasn’t going to be
hung up about money and security anymore.
I flitted
between being loving and understanding and being full of worries and
what ifs. I loved him a lot but tortured myself wondering where I
would draw the line. I was afraid of being a martyr. Nevertheless,
a few days later I decided not to leave him. Not only did I love him,
but I trusted the depth of his love for me.
That
night after our daughter was asleep, we continued our dialogue. He
told me many things, including the ways he loved me. He also told
me that he worried if I were unable to have orgasms anymore, blaming
himself.
Until
that evening, I was never able to have orgasms without using my fingers
on myself. Our usual way of getting me to come was with him lying
on top of my back. But the dam broke that night. I had powerful, easy,
beautiful orgasms in all sorts of positions.
The
pleasure I felt was throughout my body. I had no conscious control
over it, and I didn’t feel limited by my body. It was like I
was overflowing—swimming through Carl, swimming through God.
I felt totally ecstatic. Carl was telling me he worshipped me—that
I was a goddess. We were praising God together. I felt finally at
one with my sexuality. And I felt the closeness of God as never before.
I felt completely accepting of Carl and of myself. Pure love. It went
on and on.
We both
felt the momentousness of that night. We stayed up till 5 A.M. talking
and making love. It was incredible to me that I could now look him
in the eyes and have glorious orgasms without even trying.
I was
in a bit of a daze in the weeks that followed. There were some downs,
but the feeling of being transformed has stayed with me. We both feel
that we have fallen in love again, but in a deeper, even more exciting
way. Before I had tried to link up my spirituality and my relationship
with Carl, but it never really worked. He didn’t share my Catholicism,
and it was hard to talk to him about spiritual things. But now I feel
like we have come from different directions and met on new ground.
Soon
after that evening I realized that I was wasting my time with Catholicism.
As liberally as I was interpreting it, it was still holding me back,
giving me an excuse (when I wanted it) not to think for myself, not
to listen to God in me.
I feel
clearer, freer, less conflicted, and happier this year than ever before.
I am rid of most of the self hatred and guilt that I had carried for
so long. I have practically given up the word “should.”
It is clearer to me what I should do with my time and what is dispensable
clutter. Closeness to God has been important to me most of my life,
but this year, God is in reach, daily, more than ever before. I am
more open to finding God everywhere.
My interest
in sex has skyrocketed. I now understand sex as a God given ecstasy
as much as any mystic’s. I have given up much of my shyness,
as I feel so much better about myself I also have more interest in
other people. I find God deep within myself and by encountering Carl,
I find a new dimension of God.
Mary obviously
succeeded in pulling down a number of walls in that single spiritual
experience. It was Mary’s deep love of her husband that opened
for her the gate to the realm of delight, which then healed her psychic
wounds.
Love was
also the trigger for a spectacular experience that my wife, Trisha,
had several years before we met. She was twenty five years old when
it struck her like a lightning bolt and for three weeks obliterated
her ordinary sense of self:
My mystical
experience was initiated by falling in love with a man I had known,
deeply respected, and more or less placed on a pedestal for almost
two years prior to dating him. He was one of the most mentally and
emotionally uninhibited individuals I had ever met, and this resonated
with my own desire at the time to move beyond all my own conditioning.
I had had no prior spiritual experiences, nor did I know or even suspect
that such a thing existed. Up until this time, I had experienced only
life’s ordinary highs and lows.
I have
no specific memories of our lovemaking, only that it was, from the
beginning, totally uninhibited, frequent, and never enough! My body
mind was completely trusting, open, and receptive.
My first
memory of that incident is of awakening one morning after a night
of lovemaking and feeling as if I had not been asleep. I felt as though
I was conscious or constantly awake on some higher plane. That entire
day I remember feeling totally and perfectly relaxed.
In this
perfect relaxation I stood outside of time. It was as if time normally
flowed in a horizontal plane, and I had somehow stepped out of this
horizontal flow into a timeless state. There was absolutely no sense
of the passage of time. To say there was no beginning or ending of
time would seem irrelevant. There was simply no time.
I remember
coming home from work a few days later, standing in the living room
of my little studio apartment, and suddenly realizing that I had no
edges. There was no me. The thought arose, and these are the exact
words, “This is what I AM in truth.” I remember looking
over at the door to my apartment and thinking, “There is no
difference between doorjambs and smog.” There is no difference
between anything whatsoever. Everything is the same. There is only
apparent difference. I remember that the thoughts also arose, “The
body is a joke. You could shoot me in this moment and I would laugh.”
Everything
material seemed, superfluous. It was all spontaneously and playfully
arising from one great source, and it could just as well cease to
arise in any moment.
Somehow
I had become infinity with eyes. I felt as if I had just been born
in that moment, or that I had been asleep all my life and had just
awakened. I also remember thinking that this was the true condition
of everyone and that everyone could know this. Arms or legs were not
necessary—all that was required was conscious existence.
This
particular moment remains, seventeen years later, the single most
significant moment of my life. It was also the most ordinary, simple,
happy, normal, neurosis free moment of my life. I was simply being
what! AM, and what everyone else IS, in truth. I also recall having
a vision at the time of five young men and women standing side by
side, joining hands, and then leaping off a cliff into infinity—that
is what it seemed like I had done.
I remained
in this state of edgelessness for about three weeks, and life was
intensely magnified. When I walked, I felt so light it was as if my
feet did not touch the ground. I had no appetite for food—in
fact, most of what I tried to eat left a strange metallic taste in
my mouth. And although I ate almost nothing during this period, I
lost no weight. I remember telling my lover that it felt as if my
spine were plugged into the “universal socket” and that
it was a source of infinite energy.
During
this time I was more creative than I had ever been (or have been since)
both at work and outside of work. All the limits on my thinking were
no longer in place. I also became prescient—seeing into the
future and then later experiencing the scenes I had foreseen down
to the last detail. This astonished me.
I also
remember sitting at my desk at work one day and turning to look at
one of my officemates. In an instant I was drowning in bliss, overwhelmed
with love and compassion for my fellow worker, and for every being
and thing I looked at. I loved everyone, including my lover, the same,
infinitely. There was really no one separate to love. Tears silently
rolled down my cheeks. I felt infinite love and infinite pain at the
same time, the pain arising from realizing the power and primacy of
love, yet how little we love.
I remember
thinking that this universal love is what the Madonna symbolizes.
Then suddenly I felt as if I were the source of all creation, that
the universe was arising from me, or through me—from whatever
this infinite thing was I had become.
Then,
at one point I felt as though I were moving into, or becoming blinded
by, brilliant white light. It literally felt like the molecules of
my body were flying apart and that if I allowed the process to continue
I would simply fly apart and disappear. There would be no trace left
of me. I knew in this moment that some kind of atomic release of energy
would occur, that it would have no gross physically destructive effect,
but that inconceivable energy would be released. I also knew that
it meant I would leave this realm for good and that I was not ready
to do this.
In that
instant, I felt fear, and whatever is “me,” that isolating,
binding force, grabbed hold mightily, and suddenly I had edges again.
I felt separate, complicated, neurotic, and unhappy again—all
in an instant. It felt as if infinity had been stuffed into a 5'7"
container, as if my connection to the universal source of life had
been torn asunder. It was so devastating that I even contemplated
suicide in the days that followed.
My relationship
with my lover slowly deteriorated after this. I wanted desperately
to understand what had happened to me, and most of all to regain that
brilliant state of edgelessness. For years, my entire life was spent
urgently searching for understanding of this event. I have gained
a great deal of knowledge and some wisdom about what happened, and
have even lost my edges again for moments at a time, but that perfect
and continuous state of self transcendence remains elusive.
A respondent
to my questionnaire, whom I will call Deborah, offered the following
remarkably similar account of her extraordinary experience of what is
often referred to as cosmic consciousness.8
The experience happened when Deborah was thirty two years old. Again,
the trigger was love. Deborah had been unhappily married for several
years when she fell head over heels in love with Bob. She was unable
to sleep, eat, or function at work; all she could do was think of Bob.
Here is Deborah’s vivid description of the events that followed,
which not only shows an incredibly complex and rich mystical experience
but also her retrospective sense of humor, perhaps a sign that she is
beginning to integrate the experience:
My heart
chakra [psychic center in the middle of the chest] was like a giant
flower, opening and closing and loving Bob. I felt an invisible cord
stretch out and something opened very softly, yet there seemed to
be joyous music—sounds, happiness, and love. It was shaped like
a morning glory flower that would open and close. All I knew was that
I had to be with Bob, and after a week of talking together on the
phone it happened.
Sex
with him only enhanced the love I felt for him. It is quite embarrassing
for me to admit that I was transformed into a nymphomaniac. I couldn’t
get enough sex with Bob, and my genital “chakra” was like
a malfunctioning buzz saw! It wouldn’t turn off! I lost thirty
pounds in eight weeks! We made love three times a day, and poor Bob
didn’t know what had hit him. I always wanted more, which after
a while left him tired and frustrated. This went on for several months.
In the end Bob threatened to break up with me. He bought me a vibrator
to play with so that I would leave him alone. I ran the batteries
out the first night! Yet, I never had a conventional orgasm until
three months later. It was always a matter of cosmic fireworks.
Our
love making was incredible. Every time we made love, I had an out
of body trip. It was like moving through a tunnel at warp speed, moving
through space, passing stars and planets until I seemed to be at the
center of the cosmos. The universe opened up to me. I saw the Earth
being created, saw the early volcanic eruptions and the most angry
storms and explosions. It was almost like watching a Nova program,
except I was there!
All
the beautiful colors of the rainbow would pulse through me at times.
Also, while I was watching great swirling stars, there was an accompanying
sound, which rang like a deep grinding engine in space, or perhaps
it was a giant vibration I felt.
I experienced
such love the whole time and was awestruck and in loving tears during
our love making. My love enveloped everything from the microscopic
to the most gigantic galaxies. My love seemed to be mirrored: Whatever
love I felt for the All came back to me in great multitudes.
At times
my entire body shook and vibrated like a rocket during take off. All
kinds of knowledge and mathematical equations were passing through
me. I understood them all in a split second and forgot them just as
quickly. I even saw myself in a giant pyramid working with those equations.
After
three months of this, I had to shut down ... or die. I couldn’t
possibly handle the knowledge and information that was passing through
me. The experience slowly declined over a period of six months. I
stopped meditating, reading and studying. I focused completely on
mundane things. It was like holding back a great flood.
Although
Deborah had studied metaphysical subjects all her life and was a frequent
meditator, she was nonetheless quite unprepared for the powers unleashed
in her by that experience. Her fear of death was very real. It is experienced
at the threshold between the kind of spectacular cosmic consciousness
that she enjoyed and the full fledged unitive experience of mystics.
The latter experience is possible only when the ego personality (the
entity who we think, feel, and sense we are) is dissolved to make room
for the realization of perfect oneness. Deborah was unable to cross
that threshold, stopped by her fear.
Yet, Deborah’s
story has a happy ending in ordinary terms: Three years after this experience,
she and Bob got married. Prior to her mystical awakening, Deborah’s
sex drive was not very strong. Since then, however, her sex life has
accelerated, though her orgasms are more conventional than cosmic now.
She is relieved that the frenzy has ebbed, adding “for now anyway.”
Most important, Deborah is feeling grateful for the experience, since
it made her grow in ways that she would have thought impossible. She
admits that she is not ready for a repetition of the experience just
now but hopes that one day she can, as she put it, open herself again
to the universe.
SEX:
THE HIDDEN WINDOW
Sex—or,
to be more precise, sexual love—can be a hidden window
onto the spiritual reality. That window or opening manifest all of a
sudden in the solid walls of our conventional existence. At the height
of passion or in the fullness of love, we might suddenly feel transported
to a different plane of existence where all our sensations, experiences,
and thoughts occur against the peaceful backdrop of an overriding sense
of at-oneness. In the case of the well known writer George Leonard,
the opening happened spontaneously after lovemaking, when all
the built up tensions of the day were eased and his awareness stood
at the threshold of sleep. In his own words:
There
was once a moment in the deepest hours before dawn, after a night
of love, when consciousness itself began to change. Awareness of the
different parts of our bodies which earlier in the evening had brought
such delight had faded away, leaving only a generalized awareness
of luminescent smoothness and sinuosity. Separate acts had blended
into a prolonged single movement. Even the divisions between waking
and sleeping had become unclear. Please do not misunderstand me. I
offer no expertise in these matters; such nights may be rarer for
me than for you. But I must tell you that the moment did come when
our own once separate and private emotions began to appear on each
other’s faces. Just that. Every flicker of feeling I might expect
to originate inside me appeared instead on her face. I was left no
sensation, no emotion, no existence apart from her. There was nothing
metaphorical about this merging. In the faint light from another room,
each of us could see our actual selves embodied in another—and
we were terrified.9
Leonard’s
experience captures for us the very essence of love, which is experiential
participation in the other person. In this case, there was a wonderful
mutuality of experience that blurred the customary egoic boundaries.
This unexpected loss—or expansion—of identity filled Leonard
and his wife with terror. This moment of fear was undoubtedly the point
at which they slipped back into their respective skins to reoccupy their
own familiar inner landscape.
We simply
cannot know when such openings will occur, or whether they will ever
occur in our life. But we can certainly prepare ourselves for them.
More than that, we can actively invite them by adopting an
orientation to life that is sensitive to the presence of the sacred
in the world.
Sexual
love, to use Aldous Huxley’s phrase, can indeed be a “Door
in the Wall.”10 The wall consists of preconceptions about and
predispositions toward reality, which we must penetrate in order to
see what is on the other side. Of course, when we succeed in this, we
realize that the other side is on this side as well. Reality is a continuity,
and that continuity is broken up only by the mind that perceives and
cognizes in piecemeal fashion.
This truth
has been obscured by our inherited dualistic philosophies, but it is
a truth that is fundamental to the sacred traditions inspired by mystics
and sages before they were reworked by theologians and other intellectuals.
Prior to the rise of dualism, the sacred and the profane were not experienced
as radical opposites, nor was sexuality excluded from spiritual life.
On the contrary, the further back we go in human history, the more we
encounter a life philosophy that was distinctly affirmative of both
sex and God or Goddess. And so we will next turn to those erotic spiritual
traditions for illuminating our own modern quest.
©
Georg Feuerstein Ph.D., 2004
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