Misplaced genital worship?

Yoni pujas? Penis worship?

By all means accept and respect your genitals and those of your partner. However, think twice before you worship physical genitals as a means of tapping into the dynamic forces that comprise the eternal, vibrant androgyny of creation.

These underlying forces go by such labels as “yin and yang”, “Shakti and Shiva” and so forth. Some worshippers have reverently sculpted these forces of the form of lingam-within-yoni (penis in vagina).

Despite appearances this is not mere fertility worship. They portray something more ambitious: the union of complementary energy currents. If managed carefully, these currents have the potential to operate synergistically, heightening spiritual insight.

What happens during so-called “sacred sex”?

Lovers can employ Synergy-style lovemaking practices with genital union to merge these complementary energies. Yet, genitals themselves only seem to be the means.

The deep feelings of oneness and wholeness generated by conscious, controlled lovemaking arise not from vulvas or penises, but from the unseen currents flowing between lovers. The late Rudolf von Urban MD referred to these potent complementary currents “bio-electrical streams”.

Surprisingly perhaps, lovers have even tapped this nourishing exchange without genital participation.

Case study

[Mary had been terrorised as a twelve-year old by her stepfather’s rape attempt. As a result, she feared contact with men. In her mid-twenties, a young doctor fell in love with her. Fred promised that if she would marry him, he would not try to make love with her. Here the excerpt begins.]

After six weeks of unconsummated marriage Mary’s love for Fred was no less passionate than his for her. It was then that they spent their first night together in one bed, naked body to naked body. Fred’s was a superhuman task. … The best way to do this, he found, was to concentrate all his thoughts and feelings, all his awareness, on those parts of his body which touched Mary.

They lay close together, entirely relaxed, delighting in this bodily contact. And then, after about half an hour, Fred told me, something indescribable began to flow in them, making them feel that every single cell of their skin was alive and joyful. This produced in Fred rapture and delight such as he had never before experienced. (This delight was reduced if both had not taken a bath before lying down together.) And Mary, he said, felt the same.

He had the impression that all these million sources of delight merged into one and streamed to the skin of those parts of his body which were in contact with Mary. His body seemed to dissolve; space and time dropped away; and all thoughts disappeared, so consumed was he by a voluptuous rapture which he could find no words to describe. Mary’s words for it were “superhuman”, “divine”.

They both, he said, lost at that moment all fear of death. This, they felt, must be a prevision of the afterlife; they were already on the bridge between the material world and the spiritual universe. They had tasted heaven. This ecstatic experience endured throughout the night.

Resetting

But, after seven hours, a feeling of suffocation set in. They had to separate immediately. If they attempted to ignore this feeling, they became antagonistic to each other. But if they took a shower, or a rubdown with a wet towel, they could go back to bed and re-enter their state of superhuman bliss without difficulty. …

The next day they were both extremely happy and relaxed, full of life and energy, strangers to all forms of anxiety, pettiness or anger.

In comparing the kind of satisfaction he had previously known in normal intercourse, with this new rapture experienced with Mary, Fred said that the difference was that between earthly and celestial love. Compared with the continuous, lasting and superhuman happiness induced by his new experience, the temporary delight, during spontaneous ejaculation, was hardly worth mentioning.

Mary changed from a self-centered, anti-social, cold-hearted girl to a woman, warm, thoughtful and kind. They were both as deeply devoted to each other as they had been at the beginning. That was the story of Mary and Fred: fantastic, but I have no reason to doubt a word of it.

I have passed on to other couples what I learned from this one; and, when all the conditions have been fulfilled, the results have been the same.

Bio-electrical streams

It is this body of experience which has convinced me that Platonic love is, more probably, something of this kind than a purely spiritual relationship, or even Karezza. The words in The Symposium seem to indicate that the “something they know not what,” which the lovers are longing to obtain from each other, is that exchange of bioelectrical streams which enables their bodies to become entirely relaxed.

That means that their sublime feeling is induced, to use prosaic words, by nothing other than their full liberation from tension. The more a person can relax another from the tension induced in him by his bio-electrical streams, the more is that person desired by the other and the more passionate is their mutual love.

When I studied Indian philosophy I was never able to understand why Nirvana is regarded by the Hindu as so desirable. How can a state of Nothingness be the aim of Life? But the experience of Fred and Mary led me to see that the cessation of bodily tension can be so supreme an experience that no other pleasure on earth can be compared with it.

That means that when the tension in our body ceases, we reach a state of relaxation so absolute that it is as if we were bodiless. This form of “nothingness” may easily seem akin to that happiness which Easterners call Nirvana.

Wholeness and spiritual perception

What the author calls “liberation of tension” could also be thought of as the mutual easing of sexual desire, such that the lovers experience a profound feeling of completion or wholeness. A deep, bliss-producing sense that nothing is missing.

Did Mary and Fred’s profound sense of effortless fulfilment make possible their heightened or expanded (i.e., “spiritual”) perception? Might exchanges of selfless, loving current – not for physical gratification – generate the deep, defenseless feelings of wholeness that align lovers with the oneness of creation’s dynamic current?

Alas, this couple’s subsequent story suggests that intentions play a key role. The pursuit of material plane (ego) goals ultimately appears to have imprisoned them within limited, material-plane perception.

Since then a new chapter has been added to the story of Mary and Fred. Mary’s maternal instinct awoke. She was now thirty-seven years old and had been married for fourteen years. …

Then, for the first time in her life, Mary had normal intercourse with Fred. It was some time before they could learn to direct their streams to their sex organs. But, even though Fred at last secured a normal reaction, his potency was still weak and did not last long enough to bring Mary to full satisfaction.

Deeply disappointed they wanted to return to the beautiful sex life they had enjoyed before. They tried, but could not. The gate to that paradise was closed.

The delivered streams in their bodies now flowed automatically to the sex organs, instead of directly to each other. No amount of will power could stop them. Thus they repeated the story of Adam and Eve and their lost Paradise. When we read the third chapter of Genesis with this in mind, we find surprising, symbolical meanings…

Mystery of continent union

The spiritual mystery of union without sexual gratification – represented by religious yin-yang symbols – as well as more dramatic portrayals such as this one depicting the power of this sexual practice to eradicate the ego and supply spiritual nourishment – shows up in Western tradition as well. For example, the early Christians’ agapetae tradition seems to have rested on this same practice of loving sexual continence.

Agapetae (“Beloveds”) were Christian women, often clerics, who lived with male clerics in couples. Both had taken a vow of sexual continence (i.e., sexual self-control without pursuit of physical gratification). This put them in much the same circumstances as Fred and Mary spontaneously discovered above.

Scholars know this early Christian practice as syneisaktism (spiritual marriage). Alas, Church authorities eventually condemned it. Instead, they worshipped celibacy and procreation. Church authorities then worked to eradicate syneisaktism, which was “dangerous with a kind of heavenly daring”, as author Charles Williams put it almost a century ago.

In the process, might Church policy have obliterated the same central mystery that gave rise to Taoism and Hinduism? Did the West thus lose the active tradition of continent loving union as a “way of the soul”?

Irrespective of dogma, it looks like partners who can place their love for each other above their desire for physical gratification can tap this mystery. Mary and Fred did.

So, what about genitals?

At best, genitals are optional where blissful wholeness is the goal. Whether or not they connect genitals, loving partners would probably do best to focus on sensing the unseen streams of energy flowing between them.

Synergy practices can be a safe way to include genital union if the lovers are conscientious. But genitals alone cannot generate feelings of oneness. Those feelings arise from the exchange of unseen currents. And genitals are not compulsory.