Why it’s so hard to enter into the territory of “Sex IS Ethics”? Why is it so taboo?
Sex is used in such crazy and debilitating ways. People can be degraded and use sex as degradation. People take the worst forms of sexuality and then in their mind, what emerges, is their belief of what sexuality really is. People have within themselves a very powerful and primal set of fantasies about sex that derive from some of their earliest conditioning, their earliest wiring and earliest experiences.
Most human beings, both men and women, have a set of sexual fantasies. And these fantasies are not the way they want to show up in the synagogue or church on the sabbath morning. We have this whole world of sexual beings each with a set of hidden sex fantasies. Then people get afraid, they think that their fantasies indicate that they are somehow fucked up in some essential way and they just manage to hide their fantasies from the world. Because people think that if the world only knew who they really were, that everyone would treat them very VERY differently. We need to be aware of that in an utterly profound way and realize that people are operating from this enormous sense of pain and fear, that somehow they are going to be exposed and unmasked. That is the underlying fear of expressing our desires and fantasies.
Underlying this fear of expressing our desires and fantasies are people’s general sense that they are in control of their lives and that they are healthy good people. Often, people’s sexual fantasies have something to do with coercion or domination/submission. Which has something to do with dimensions that involve full loss of control and full regression to our primal nature, and no one wants to regress to be an ape. So we need a framework of understanding and creating visions to know why the fear surrounding our sexual desires and fantasies is inaccurate.
“Fuck” is at the core movement of the universe and the core movement of reality.
“Fuck” is the driving force that is evolving consciousness and what brings us together to create higher forms of beings.
And it’s happening all the time.
The line (masculine) is penetrating the circle (feminine) at every moment and it’s what I like to call “polarity” and the living tantric principle of the inner marriage that is inside of us all. It’s in the binary aspect of basic computer programming (zero-one), it’s in every dimension of personal relationship, of economy, of physics. The entire world is based on this attraction/repulsion.
When one thing is attracted to something else, we call that “Eros”.
Quarks are attracted to each other and then they become atoms. That principle of “fuck” makes atoms become molecules…molecules into cells, cells into more complex forms of life and so on. And it happens at every level of our existence. It creates communities, it creates economies. This consistent movement of attraction, of wanting to enter into the moment, to receive the moment. This penetration/receiving is actually happening all the time.
“Fuck” is happening all the time. And inside the realm of “fuck” is the realm of sexuality, the actual act of sexing, the verb tense of “sex”, and is the model for everything, a model for the whole story. “Fuck” was placed at the center of reality because it is the great wisdom teacher.
There is a choice here. Either I can enter it from the perspective of… this world is a lovely place or a horrible place… there is this horrible thing called “fuck” which we have to keep under control, or know that the world is this wonderful thing called “fuck. And a place where we learn to widely engage “fuck” is in sex. Is the core movement of reality, truly, “fuck”?
YES!
What does sex is ethics – fuck is ethics mean? It means that it’s more than relationship, more than love. Relationship always has an aspect of penetration and of receiving. Moving forward and of taking in of the other. We need to liberate “fuck” from it’s doldrums of contraction and perceptions of wrong doings. When we say god is love, it’s not a hallmark card. Sex is ethics doesn’t give all encompassing sexual license, doesn’t suggest promiscuity in the negative sense of the term. It gives meaning to ways that are about the essential movements of our evolution. Isn’t that what the traditions meant when they talked about the divine marriage? It doesn’t mean they got married and then went shopping or got married and had dinner. Why did god create the world? Because he didn’t want to have dinner alone. What it actually means, is that god didn’t want to sleep alone.
There is this a desire for merging the concept of “sex is ethics” with our human existence of reality. The big bang is god “fucking” the world open into existence. Sex is ethics, is a core driver in the world, a core driver towards consciousness, a driver towards greater and greater love. As reality emerges and unfolds, it unfolds into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher levels of love. But that core driver that moves it forward, that force of attraction, that force of allurement, which is “fuck”. When you get that “fuck” is the throbbing force of reality, you realize how actually beautiful it is. Then, more importantly, you get to begin to realize that sex, which is the realm that fuck appears in most readily, is, at its best, a model for all wisdom. It teaches you about everything, you learn everything from there. For example…radical control and radical giving up control at the same moment. You learn and learn and learn and learn….
Let’s look at some examples. What are other examples of what we might mean when we say “Sex is Ethics”? In what way does the sexual model ethics? In sex, on the one hand, you lose yourself in it and on the other hand, you totally are paying attention at every moment. A funny paradox, isn’t it? You are totally aware of every flutter, of any physical movement; totally aware of how everything feels so your body is radically sensitized and enlivened. If you are actually connected, you can feel into an experience somatically, exactly how your partner feels. That tells me that sex is that place in which sex models radically paying attention, radically alive. Fully aware and cognizant of the other. Just that is “sex is ethics”, because in order to be a good lover, the good lover is one that is fully aware, who almost anticipates their partners desire. We say “almost” because you can’t ask people to be magicians. Who almost anticipates their partners’ desire.
How can we practice “Sex is Ethics”?
1. Radical Paying Attention – Fullness of Presence
Sex models paying attention and fullness of presence as a key prerequisite to success in gifting to the other. I can’t give a gift to the other unless I have the sense of paying attention and being present in place. Sex models this notion as the key to gifting the other. Only if I’m paying attention will I know what gifts to give, when to give them, how to give them, to what measure and to whom. Erotic enrapture allows me to see what needs to be seen.
2. Responsibility For Our Own Arousal
Enter into arousal, into the field of arousal, and begin the process of losing yourself. Lose yourself in the sensation, in the subtle energy, in the fragrance and in the aura of the whole thing. And as you lose yourself, you realize you are losing your small self and you are recovering your actual larger self, your wider self, and your deeper self.
2. Would You Rather be “Right” or Be In Relationship?
People make love in a particular way and sometimes develop patters in sexuality. What happens is that people fall into their comfortable position. How do you do it? This is the way I do it! Or people just flutter around quickly from one position to another without locating their pleasure. It becomes a free for all without any kind of depth. In life, you have to take a position to find a place where you are comfortable operating and then be able to give up that position to genuinely explore other positions. You can work this as a sexual thing and then investigate how it applies to other aspects in your life. You have to have a desirable position for yourself or else you enter into sex asking “what should we do”? “What do you want to do”? “I’ll do what you want to do”! Having to negotiate it over and over again, then you are kind of dead in the water. You need to have a default position but that position cant be blocking you off from the other, which could be an even higher possibility. You can only be what you are willing to become. You can only become if you are willing to shift positions. You need to be able to hold a position and be able to give up that position in order to be open to greater possibilities for the discovery of pleasure and maintaining relationship.
3. The Receiver Is Always Right
Looking for what’s actually true is not a minds construct. The first person perspective of the receiver trumps the intention of the deliverer. Let’s say we are having an argument, and I tell you that you shouldn’t have another bowl of ice cream. My intention is to help you because you asked me last week to help you lose some weight. But somehow you completely feel hurt and insulted. It’s not that you are right, it’s that you are insulted because you did ask me to help you a week ago. What it means is that I need to take into account your experience before I recalibrate and continue. Minimally, it means that I have to stop and listen to your feedback and take that seriously in some way. Then from our conversation we might decide to continue as we are, to shift tracks, but the first thing I need to do, in the first person of the receiver needs to be taken into account, to be protected. The receiver is never an object, never just the object of my penetration, but always needs to be honored as a separate independent subject. Therefore in sex, when you are trying something and the person says “I don’t really like that”, you don’t say that “you should…because actually, it’s good for you”. That is a bad thing to do. “Isn’t this what you asked for?”, “you used to like this yesterday, why don’t you like it now?”, “why don’t you do it for just a couple of minutes?”. There is an immediate responsiveness, and the response doesn’t say that the person is right or wrong, its not about being right or wrong. You have to step back and respect the first person experience of the receiver in all dimensions of life, even in the face of logic. A person, first persons experience, is holy. It’s not always right but it’s holy. The first steps is to kind of step back, desist, honor the independent autonomy of the other and from that place decide how to proceed. Staying in the conversation with them.
4. Staying In The Game
What if there are many roads to heaven? There are many roads to heaven, many roads to nirvana, so if the road you are working isn’t working, try another one. But don’t get mad at the police office when they tell you that you cannot go this way and then go home and sulk and then don’t go. Often we try a life path, and life slaps us, we get a cold douse of water from life. So, what we do is that sometimes we try another path and then when we get another douse of water, we just stop. Ok, clearly this isn’t want the universe wants. But, actually, that might not at all be true; the universe totally wants you to get there, just not through those two paths. So if you really feel into the strange attractor of full sexual fulfillment, which keep you going? What is it that keeps you going? What keeps you in the saddle? What keeps you from packing up your bags and going home is that you want to have that experience and you want to give your partner that experience. You have this driver, this attractor that pulls you into the inside of the experience. In life, you have to feel the same attractor, the same erotic attractor alluring you which says to you that you want to be living this value driven, this purpose driven life and if the first way doesn’t work, try another way, and if that doesn’t work, try another way. But, Don’t go home, staying in the game and keep trying with every way possible to move forward.
5. Imagination and Creativity
How does creativity/imagination happens. Creativity doesn’t happen by just starting to build a house. First you need an attraction, a compulsion, an allurement, a fantasy to build a house. You feel the pull of creativity. Second, you imagine how to do it; you have a picture of the house in your minds eye which gets re-evoked time after time and you begin to draw the picture that’s in your head, until ultimately you build the picture in you head first. This is all about the importance of imagination and fantasy. It’s the imagination and fantasy that builds reality. In sexuality, what half of the game is, is imagining. Imagining what the sexual interlude might be like, picturing what it might be like and your imagination is what draws you forward. Imagination is the key to creativity. You would never enter into the creative process of a relationship if you didn’t have a vision or a picture of what it might be like. Having a vision draws you towards it. Which means I need to develop my faculty of fantasy. I’m never going to be able to heal hunger in the world unless I imagine how to do it. Or on a smaller scale, I’m not going to be able to solve a problem in my community unless I imagine how to do it. So we need to re-access the faculty of imagination. Imagination is a big deal and we are good at imagination in sexuality but really bad at it in lots of other areas in our lives. Accessing the power of imagination is an important thing. That is a teaching that sex teaches us because sex doesn’t work without imagination, they are inextricably bound up. When you enter into the world of imagination, you enter into the world of sex.
6. Desire
What does sex tell me about desire? Sex is driven by desire. What does desire do in sex? What is the experience of desire? A loss of control, insanely motivating, shameful but let’s stay on the positive side. What is the experience of desire? When you are in desire, its like all the space is filled up. You aren’t in the space of wondering what the purpose of my life is. You are in the desire and the desire justifies your life. When you are seeking to fulfill desire in a raw sexual way and you are moving towards your gifting and your fulfillment; do you say to yourself “what is the meaning of life?”, I don’t think so. It’s not that you say to yourself that, that breast is the meaning of life, although it might be. But that isn’t what you are thinking, the question just disappears and that tells you something. Desire is purpose. Desire means that I want to get someplace, I want to get somewhere, I want to do something, I want to reach toward something, and I want to merge with something. And that really is the inner nature of reality. Reality is desire, meaning reality is moving someplace, it wants to get somewhere, it has direction. When you happen to feel into the inner core of reality you realize all of reality is going somewhere. All of reality has purpose, animals want to survive, that is a purpose, a desire. As we move up the evolutionary chain, our desires get more subtle, more complex. I want to know, I want to learn, I want to grow, I want to expand, I want to deepen, I want to evolve, I want to love. They are all expressions of the same “reaching towards”. And what sex tells you is, that desire is holy. Desire is self validating because when you are in desire you feel in align with the inner movement of the cosmos, because the cosmos is desire, the cosmos is moving towards more and more fulfillment, towards more and more realization, always moving in a particular direction, evolving, there is a story of evolution, a narrative of desire. Quarks want to become atoms, atoms want to become molecules, and molecules want to become cells. There is a desire, an allurement, a movement to higher and higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union and embrace. That is the core movement of reality. So sex models the core movement of reality and by aligning with that movement on the highest level, I’m aligned with life. When I’m aligned with life, I have no more questions about the meaning of life because life just is. Sex models life. Sex is desire and life is desire and the best word for both of them together is “Eros”. Eros is that movement of attraction whose purpose is to hold and bring everything together. Eros is the quality of the universe, self-organizing to higher and higher levels of reality and consciousness
Sex is ethics… Sex is wisdom itself. That’s why it’s at the center of reality. And as the reality principle, the divine principle, the god that knows our name, places sex in the center of reality…is it to tease us? The sadistic god vision? Or, because it actually has all wisdom?
Everything is there!
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