Sexuality and the Sacred An exerpt from “Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear” by Brendan Myers; exerpted and adapted for Mystic Living Today by the author. When we think of the word ‘the sacred’, we do not normally think of relationships. We mostly think of ‘things’. We look to sacred places, like mountains; sacred buildings, like temples; and various sacred books. Sometimes we speak of sacred people, like priests, prophets, saints, shaman, seers. Sometimes we treat non-religious things in a sacred way, such as a national flag, or the trophy cup of a sports league. But these things are sacred not simply because of what they are. They are sacred because of the relations between people which involve them. The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. Think of the occasions when we encounter, or ‘have an experience of’, the sacred. It is almost always an occasion when something is revealed, and then traded, exchanged, and shared, with others. The sacred appears when, for instance, we share food and drink with our families and friends. It appears when we perform and listen to music, or make art, or tell stories. It can appear in the solitude of one’s own loneliness, but even there one is calling to mind relations with absent friends, or relations with transcendental principles like the Tao, or your Buddha Nature, or God. But perhaps most profoundly, the sacred appears in our sexuality. Here are some reasons why. First, sexuality is the biological process by which our species reproduces itself. Your very existence on earth follows from, among other things, the sexual relationship of your parents. (I know that no one wants to imagine their own parents having sex, but there it is). They, in their turn, were created in the sexual play of their own parents, and so on, all the way back as far as you want to count. Sex happened at every link in the chain of blood and history that connects you to the beginning of things, whatever you understand that beginning to be. Second, in relation to desire, sex is also flirting, courting, and foreplay, and the things we do to demonstrate sexual identity, sexual availability, and sexual desire. It is a fleeting touch on the hand or the face, the click of a woman’s high heeled footstep, and sweet nothings whispered in the ear. In all these things we may find a fascinating phenomenology of reality and illusion. You want to bring home a partner, and so you want to appear desirable to others. You also want to be desired on your own terms. But what terms are those? You might wish you were stronger, wealthier, smarter, more dashing and daring, more witty, more confident, more adventurous, more interesting, than you normally are. And you may want to be desired by others as if you are that much more interesting person. Therefore, with carefully chosen clothes, adornments, accessories, words, gestures, and postures, and so on, you may present to others a carefully constructed illusion, a fantasy. You become an actor playing a role in a theatrical production instead of an authentic self. This is an ancient game. Even the Neanderthals, in Palaeolithic times, wore makeup! And yet this role you are playing is still “you”; for you are the author and the costume designer and the director of this drama. The way you see yourself, how you wish to be seen, what you desire, who you desire, and how you want to be desired by others, are very important parts of who you are. These desires reach to the highest and deepest importance, since we stake the integrity of our own bodies as the field of play. Third, sex is an occasion in which people open and reveal themselves to each other. We have sex facing each other: unlike every other animal on earth, we can look at each other and make eye contact in the midst of sex. We also (usually) have sex while naked, so your partner sees your body undisguised, in its totality, and for what it actually is, whether clean and smooth, or scarred and blemished. Yet to reveal yourself in your entirety this way is also to reveal yourself in your vulnerability. Your partner has a chance to harm you, or to judge you. Thus some people feel they need to keep a protective façade in place, even during intercourse. Yet it is surely when we reveal ourselves in our nakedness and vulnerability, exposed to the possibility of harm or judgment, that we trust most completely. Moreover, in sexual intimacy your partner is open and vulnerable to you as well. You are in the same position to harm or judge her as she is in a position to harm or judge you. In mutually revealing yourselves to each other in their nakedness and their vulnerability, sexual partners liberate each other from fear. This opens the way to an experience the immensity of human love. Sex thereby becomes the place where you cannot have your own liberation from fear, nor your own experience of love, unless your partner shares it with you. Fourth, and finally, sex is ecstasy. When we orgasm, bodily pleasure overtakes the heart and mind: all façades are thrown away, all other interests and cares are forgotten, even if only for a few seconds. The whole of one’s being is consumed by this single and wonderful experience. (This is obviously why we desire it so much). It is here that sex writers speak of an experience “beyond words”, which for some people reaches the spiritual; it is with the language of sexual ecstasy that mystics often speak of the experience of God. In sexual lovemaking, we discover sources of ecstasy which could act as an alternative to doctrinarian forms of spiritual knowledge. Perhaps this is why so many of the Old Testament prophets were so judgmental about sexual acts performed by people not lawfully married to each other. More positively: perhaps this is also why sexual lovemaking almost always appears as part of the creation story in the myths of numerous cultures around the world. Marriage customs, and sexual play in general, is often explained as, and planned specifically to be, a re-enactment the marriage and the love of two gods, who may themselves represent or embody two primordial elements of the world. Or if the first sex is not between two gods, then it will be between two mythic human beings, possibly the very first human beings: Adam and Eve, for instance. As the great scholar of mythology, Mircea Eliade, wrote: sexuality has “a divine model, and human marriage reproduces the hierogamy, more especially the union of heaven and earth.” |
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