"The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love."
...Anais Nin
From the book: Sex With Spirit
To discover the mysteries of sacred sex is to embark upon a journey of joy. The ancient path of ecstatic sexuality, leading to a state of enlightenment and bliss, has long been traveled by followers in many different spiritual traditions. Each tradition has developed distinctive ways to cultivate and harness the potency of sexual energy, affirming the vital connection of body, mind, and spirit.
Sacred sex harmonizes the dual energies within each of us - whether we call them God and Goddess, Yin and Yang, or darkness and light - using passion and intimacy to combine and direct those forces both within and between ourselves. Through this process we break through the limitations of the personal self and experience a sense of oneness with creation. Infusing our sexual relationships with spirituality, we take our pleasure to a new dimension, transforming our sexual drive into spiritual energy, transcending the physical body, and entering a state of heightened consciousness.
Sex with Spirit introduces the beliefs and reveals the lovemaking secrets of a number of sexual-spiritual traditions, including Tantra, Taoism, Wicca, and Sex Magick. You may be inspired to investigate a particular path further, or to weave the practices into your own belief system, or simply to expand and clarify your thoughts. You can work straight through the book as a guide, from the preparation of body and mind through to advanced postures and techniques, or you can pick and choose interesting ideas and alternative approaches. These are offered as suggestions, to be adapted and altered as you feel comfortable, or used as a starting point for further exploration.
Many of the exercises in the book can be practiced on your own. Getting to know your own body and your sexual responses profoundly enhances your sexual and emotional confidence. Some energy-raising and moving exercises are best practiced without a partner, and there is a long tradition in Buddhist Tantra and in Sex Magick work of solo cultivation. Understanding, expressing, and fulfilling your own sexuality is a process that is inherently life-affirming, and it forms a solid base from which to explore sexual bliss with future lovers.
Sacred sex is a path of love and acceptance that is open to everybody, whether you are straight or gay, single or in a long-term relationship. The focus on harmonizing male and female energies does not confine it exclusively to heterosexual couples. We all contain both polarities of energy, and gay singles or couples can play with these energies just as effectively as heterosexuals. Where exercises refer specifically to male and female partners they can, in almost all cases, be adapted for same-sex couples.
Sex and Spirituality
In most mainstream religious traditions, sex has long been regarded as an obstacle to spiritual progress, something to be overcome and transcended. Earthly desires are seen as sinful, and sexual restraint - even celibacy - is thought by many to hold the key to spiritual knowledge and experience. However, there are two Eastern paths with a refreshingly different perspective. Tantra and Taoism both take the approach that one should not only not reject the body and its desires, but actually embrace them on the road to enlightenment. They share the view that sexual intercourse can be a sacrament and a means of spiritual transformation.
These ideas can also be found in the West. The pre-Christian pagan traditions of Europe celebrate and honor sexuality, regarding the act of love as a way of worshipping the Great Goddess and her consort; and the present-day practice of Sex Magick recognizes and harnesses the natural power of sexual energy in ritual.
Tantra
Love, enjoyed by the ignorant,
Becomes bondage.
This very same love,
tasted by one with understanding,
Brings liberation.
Enjoy all the pleasures of love fearlessly,
For the sake of liberation.
- Cittasuddhiprakarana
The ancient cult of Tantra originated in India's earliest tribal societies, long predating the first Tantric texts, which were probably written in the sixth century CE. The Sanskrit word tantra is related to the concept of weaving and expansion - it derives from tan, meaning to expand, spin out, and weave. We weave the disparate strands of our nature into a unified whole, and so grow and expand into joy. Tantra can also refer to those teachings in the sacred Hindu texts that are generally presented in the form of a dialog between the god Shiva and his consort Shakti, whose joyful coupling creates and sustains the universe.
Unlike Western religion that polarizes the sacred and the profane, Tantra regards our physical senses as vehicles of liberation and enlightenment. Its goal is the reintegration of body and mind. It sees the macrocosm - the realms of heaven and spirit - reflected in, and accessible through, the microcosm of the Earth and the human body.
Tantra is a spiritual science that works with action, in which every aspect of worldly existence is approached as an act of worship. Enlightenment can be found in all forms of activity, including sexual intimacy, and the practitioner's aim is to transform the everyday into the divine. In Tantra, all the senses are harnessed, and the experience of ecstasy is sought as a spiritual tool. Desire is mastered, not through the flight from pleasure, but by total immersion in it.
Tantra offers a radical shortcut to illumination, holding that it can be attained in a single lifetime by tuning directly through ordinary awareness and conventional thought patterns. The everyday world of illusion coexists with the eternal, and enlightenment is achieved by realizing that each level of reality contains, and interlaces with, the greater transcendent whole.
Tantra's non-hierarchical, non-judgmental, and all-accepting approach toward experience was a challenge to both Hindu and Buddhist cultures. The view that enlightenment could be achieved by all men and women, regardless of their backgrounds, was revolutionary in caste-bound India. Many of its followers came from the lower castes, and much of its practice was specifically designed to break down barriers and taboos. Buddhist Tantra arose outside of the powerful Buddhist monasteries in the eighth to twelfth centuries CE, as a protest movement, initially championed by laypeople with the aim of creating a more accessible and inclusive religious system.
Many of Tantra's magical rites were deliberately rebellious and non-conformist, designed to shock in order to break through prejudices and so leave the adept open to the experience of Oneness. While some Tantric methods of transforming energy to aid spiritual evolution - such as visualization, sitting meditation, and breathing - could be performed entirely as an internal practice, the "left-hand path" embraced sexuality as a gateway to transformation and liberation. It allowed men and women to pursue enlightenment together through a series of ritualized expressions of intimacy that would transform the energy of their physical passion into spiritual ecstasy.
The central Tantric ceremony, known as the Five M's, highlights its convention-defying nature. This takes place at night, and is attended by a number of couples who ritually enjoy the five pleasures ordinarily forbidden to high-caste Hindus: madya (wine), matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), followed by mudra (parched grain), and culminating in maithuna (sexual intercourse).
Tantra, particularly the Tibetan Buddhist schools, uses the rapture of sexual union as a basis for meditation. By maintaining a clear realization of emptiness in the midst of passion, it becomes possible supreme bliss. Sexual arousal is used ritually, as a sacrament, to weave together the inner and outer realities.
Buddhist and Hindu Tantra shared an emphasis on feminine, goddess power, and on women as embodiments of female divinity. The universe was considered to be generated by the primeval female energy of Shakti, and men were required to honor and worship their female partners. Female Buddhas started to appear in religious iconography for the first time, along with symbolic images of Buddhist deities coupling in sacred union.
In Hindu Tantra the sacred union of opposites is epitomized by the cosmic dance of Shakti and Shiva. When they embrace, love ripples through the universe. Shakti is the creative force behind all existence, whom all women embody. She is depicted by a range of deities who represent her various qualities, such as Parvati, goddess of beauty, Mohini the temptress, and Kali the destroyer.
Shiva is the male energy of pure consciousness who needs Shakti to give him form, just as she needs him to give her consciousness. In this way they act as complementary forces, depending upon each other in order to be whole. Their union is the union of energy and consciousness, which creates bliss, and the entire physical and transcendental world is continuously created by their interplay. Men also have the feminine principle within them, in the form of Kundalini energy - the individual's latent store of energy , visualized as a coiled snake at the base of the spine. Tantrics seek to awaken Kundalini energy and direct it upward to unite with Shiva energy in the crown of the head. To experience the dynamic balance of consciousness and energy, all individuals must achieve an inner marriage of their masculine and feminine natures.
Tantric couples worship each other as embodiments of the divine male and female principles. They make love as Shakti and Shiva, and use spiritual, psychological, and physical lovemaking techniques to heighten and transform their sexual energy into the bliss of liberation.
Neo-Tantra
Tantra has always adapted itself to suit its time and place, and this is no less true of its migration to the West in the 1960s. The form that developed there dispenses with many of the culturally specific beliefs and rituals of traditional Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, and as such it is more properly known as "Neo-Tantra." It found a ready audience in the Sixties generation: the sexual revolution, overseas travel, an interest in mysticism and all things Eastern, and minds opened by psychedelic drugs, had all prepared the ground for spiritual sexuality.
In the 1970s the Indian guru Osho (formerly Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) further popularized Tantric sexuality as a viable path for Westerners with a special fusion of Tantra and psychotherapy that bridged the cultural divide.
Elements from psychotherapy also feature in many Neo-Tantra programs taught today. These workshops and seminars tend to concentrate on the quality of the relationship, and apply Tannic techniques, removed from the original framework of Hindu culture and religion, as a way of developing and enhancing a couple's intimacy. In traditional Tantra, by contrast, intimacy is achieved in sexual union through the creation of a shared visionary universe, and the goal of the relationship is enlightenment.
