Spirituality and Sexuality

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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I’m going to start this thread with a bit of music and poetry from several sources.

Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video, 1989:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icrUkBaSefs

“The Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross, adapted into a song by Loreena McKennit, lyrics here:

http://www.quinlanroad.com/explorethemusic/maskandmirror.asp?id=91

And finally, a Wikipedia article on Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, the great Sufi poet and teacher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalal_ad-Din_Muhammad_Rumi

These are offered as illustrations, not as authoritative texts, for the point of this thread, that being: the love of God is both similar to, and deeply conjoined with, erotic love. Sexuality and spirituality are conjoined twins, and one cannot suppress either one without also suppressing (or twisting or poisoning) the other.

What is spirituality?

I begin with the observation that we are each an expression of the All, yet each of us is also separated from the All and unaware of it.

What I mean by “an expression of the All” isn’t complicated. I simply mean that each part of the universe (including each individual person) emerges as an expression of the whole of the universe, so that the All is written in each of the parts, and each part connects to the All. Yet because our senses and our rational minds can observe and think about only the parts, the All, though everywhere, is often missed. And so we experience solitude, separation, the illusion of the unique and atomic self.

Spirituality is a desire to end that separation and unite with the All (or, in many mythologies, with God). This is not a detached yearning. It is a wild and passionate love, for in each of us sleeps a love for the All from which we came and from which we are separated, and when that love is awakened it is overwhelming. And what, at its most sublime, is sexuality? Also a wild and passionate love, and also a desire to unite with the beloved from which we are separated, for each other person is as much an expression of the All as we are, and so to unite with another is a way to unite with the All.

It is possible to engage, after a fashion, in either spirituality or sexuality while rejecting the other, but to do so is to put chains on what should be free, and to try to contain and make safe what is inherently uncontained and dangerous. Sexuality is often bound by man-made rules (that sometimes pretend to be God-made but never are); these it may shrug aside as an elephant ignores a cage made of paper strips; yet there is one rule regarding sexuality that is genuinely God-made, and that is that it be from the heart and not just from the loins, a yearning for union of the spirit along with the flesh. Sexuality that fails in this is a half-hungry and tepid thing, a relief for bodily urges but nothing that can either exalt or endanger the heart.

And spirituality? In its purity, the longing of the spirit for the All is profoundly sexual, and stirs the flesh along with the mind, so that one cannot but think of the Beloved in erotic terms. And so it is no accident that I, a heterosexual male, embody and personify in my mind the All as a Goddess, and She is my Lover as well as my Mother, the joy of my flesh and of my spirit alike. Yet there is a thread of Eros running through my relations with the God as well, though it is more muted and disguised.

There is this about those who would put chains on sexuality in the name of faith, and say that it is a wicked thing, or at best a dubious thing, to be contained within a cage of only-thus: only between man and woman, only in the bonds of marriage, only to produce children, only when the chains of law have imprisoned Pan and made Him safe. And that is that, without fail, such people also put chains on the spirit, and say that the love of the All is also something not to be trusted, except when it occurs within the confines of orthodoxy, and results in the prescribed words and thoughts. For one cannot chain one of these without also chaining the other.

The puritan is the inverse image – reversed in shade, but identical in form – of the pornographer, who strips sexuality of its spiritual dimensions and renders it controlled, safe, no danger to the heart, tame, and ultimately dull and vacuous.

The mistake that both of these make is to sever the two and try to have one without the other. To do this is to sever the tree from its roots, or the head of the fish from the body: both parts in the end will die.

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[quote=“Navigator”]
…Spirituality is a desire to end that separation and unite with the All (or, in many mythologies, with God). This is not a detached yearning. It is a wild and passionate love, for in each of us sleeps a love for the All from which we came and from which we are separated, and when that love is awakened it is overwhelming… ]

The traits that hinder love are the same for awareness and spirituality. When the spirit is free of ego forces true intimacy  and love exist.  But be careful love is a deep understanding;  where lust and erotism; in and of themselves; are less.

   "May your light shine on and on" - The Beatles
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Hi Navigator.

I would like to first reference Plato’s Symposium

classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html

where a hierarchy of loves is given starting from the physical loves, toward the spiritual loves which are discovered later.

While I agree with you that love is a divine madness without which physical love normally does not occur, I would also like to point out (as a traditionalist) that the copulative act must be treated as such and only a committed couple is ready for this endeavor. Marriage helps transform physical love into spiritual loves – which is far from a bad thing.

So I half-agree and half-disagree with your position.

mrn

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Venery may or may not be taken as a persuit of ones higher nature. But pleasures and inspirations tend to feel higher than the usual state of the universal substance: Namely, dead and unconscious, automatic neutrality. That’s the general All, the common “Omega”.

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And so what do you say to being dead and conscious?

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Spirituality and Sexuality go hand in hand, I agree. But I belive that being sexual is the key to finding our sprirituality

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Yes, it’s a pretty important part of the consciousness: The sexual.

8

Ah, now I begin to understand Ichthus’s spiritual Insertion better. I’ve been opening my mind to God and have received nothing…but…should I have been opening my legs?

9

Goodness, I despaired of this thread receiving any replies, then took a day away from the boards and look what happened!

Yes, I have read Plato’s Symposium, and believe that his hierarchy of loves is part and parcel of his general system of thought that separates spirit from flesh and exalts the one over the other. In this, Plato and I have a fundamental disagreement which probably cannot be reconciled. Nor do I agree with his hierarchy, since it seems obvious to me that all aspects of a human being are crucial to being who we are, and there is no point in trying to decide which is best. Is your heart more important than your lungs? Since you cannot survive without both, how can that question possibly be answered?

While one can have genuine spirituality without engaging in physical sex acts, one cannot have genuine spirituality that itself is not partly sexual in nature. And so what is the point of separating these two and trying to exalt one as more evolved than the other?

Maybe. Sometimes. Sort of. What I would say instead is what I said in the opening post: that sexuality without its spiritual dimension is tepid, tame, and ultimately vacuous and dull. And very often – most of the time, in fact – sexuality complete with its spiritual dimension includes an emotional and moral commitment between two people. Not always! But almost always. Well, wait: always an emotional commitment. I think that’s safe to say. But a moral commitment in the form of marriage, or even of its extra-legal equivalent? No.

I reaffirm: all rules applied to sex, other than that one, are ultimately futile. And I certainly disagree with your final sentence, since it seems to me to reverse cause and effect. Marriage is, or should be, an outcome (or a possible outcome anyway) of a love that is both spiritual and sexual. It is the expression, in moral commitment, of that love, a focus of the will to reinforce the heart. And that’s fine, but the mistake often made is to exalt the institution over the love itself. This is the attempt to cage the elephant within a cage of paper strips. The elephant has a tendency to shrug such barriers aside.

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Heart and legs both, of course. Ichthus was half right. :sunglasses:

(One finds that so often with religious people!)

If you don’t find yourself ravished and pleasured, that wasn’t it! :wink:

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Ah, but is it? That’s the assumption of classical materialism: that the material universe is “dead matter.” It becomes difficult, though, if one makes that assumption, to account for the emergence of living matter from this dead source.

So much of classical materialism has been undermined by modern physics: the idea of determinism being the most obvious, and, less obviously but no less certainly, the idea of a completely objective physical reality where consciousness has no defining role.

It seems less inherently problematic to me to regard the universe as inherently alive and conscious, and organic life merely as one expression of that universal life, a particular form it takes. And then pleasures and inspirations, rather than a rising above the background state of being “dead and unconscious,” are a fulfillment of the living and conscious state which is the genuine background of life.

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Instead of “the sexual”, perhaps it would be better to refer to the “libido”, without which we go into depression and ennui. I’m not sure that is always expressed sexually, even though it is somehow linked thereto. Perhaps we could examine why Renaissance poets had Platonic loves to whom to write poetry.

What is marriage’s extra-legal equivalent? “Sealing the deal”? Nothing of the kind in similarity. In marriage you learn to suffer lovingly for the greater good – and that is a higher love brought out of physical love.

I was watching a video on elephants last night. It seems they highly regard their family units. They are wise animals.

And I think I must value the heart above the lungs; for no one sings, “I know the lungs must go on.”

mrn

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Well, libido is a more precise term, given what I’m talking about, but I want to make sure it’s understood that “libido” here includes sex even if it isn’t limited to it. The whole point I’m arguing is that puritanical anti-sexuality becomes anti-spirituality as well. (Well, I’m also arguing that pornographic anti-spirituality becomes, in the end, anti-sexual as well.) And I don’t just mean anti-libido, i.e. anti-any-expression-of-life-force-EXCEPT-sex, I mean anti-sex. (Although I also mean the other, of course.)

Vows, a commitment made between two people. I simply am making the observation that “marriage” as understood in modern times, involving a LEGAL commitment, is an innovation and an add-on. It means little with any bearing on keeping a relationship together, mainly relating these days to inheritance laws, child custody, and visitation rights at the hospital, none of which have anything to do with either spirituality or sexuality and so are outside this discussion. It’s the vows and the commitment that count.

Or their heredity and child-rearing strategies point them that direction. But let’s not get sidetracked. One can “highly regard family units” in many different contexts.

Perhaps I should make it clearer what I mean by a “puritanical” attitude towards sex. I mean something that I call “bad-except.” The underlying attitude is that sex is bad, wicked, sinful, or at best suspicious, but it is allowable under certain circumstances. How strict those circumstances are depends on who’s talking, but the basic attitude is that sex defaults to being bad and requires permission or authorization to be allowed. And in all cases, the permitting circumstances are artificial and designed in a one-size-fits-all fashion without recognition of individual differences of temperament.

Anyone with any sense is going to recognize that there are some circumstances under which sex IS bad, but nonetheless there is a sharp difference between the above-described attitude and another which I call “good-except,” in which sex defaults to being good and only becomes bad when twisted by mutating circumstances: rape or other forms of coercion being the main mutating circumstance, or child molestation, or violation of relationship commitments. And that last is very much dependent on the people in the relationship. Some people require an absolutely monogamous commitment, others do not.

In theory, a relatively permissive “bad-except” could meet a relatively strict “good-except” in the middle, but in practice I’ve never seen that happen.

But my argument here isn’t even so much that “good-except” is to be preferred over “bad-except” (although I certainly do think so), as it is that there is a tie-in between attitudes towards sexuality and towards spirituality. A “bad-except” attitude towards sex becomes a “bad-except” attitude towards faith as well, and a condemnation of all forms of spirituality outside a narrowly-defined range. To try to chain and control sex, is also to try to chain and control God.

:laughing:

True enough. But I don’t think Celine Dion was referring to biology in that song.

14

A striking illustration of the connection between eroticism and spirituality:

Bellini’s the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa

aras.org/se_ecstasy.html

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Very good example, Leda.

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I saw in his hands a long golden spear, and at the point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire

Oh Freud…where are you?

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You may or may not know the irony of your question. But just in case…

http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/865/

:smiley:

18

Love is selflessness. The only different between sex and lust is love, making sex a selfless act.

The reward of sex is earned by pleasing a partner. Some people just see the external when they sleep around, and are rewarded and reinforced for being superficial. Thus they grow and evolve in perversion from the spiritual essence of humanity. They become hue hephner where he tradded in seven blonds for triplets. Sexual imorality is a progressive disease.

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Open those legs up only to the finest forces of nature.

Yes, yes.
Such virtue, the selflessness.

And thus began Phils down-going.

20

Divinity is a sensualism.
In such a case, It is the chemical.