Sexually Incorrect

Introduction to Sexually Incorrect
by Marc Gafni

The following article is still under construction. It is an expanded version of the article Spiritually Incorrect found in that section of this website.

This article raises some initial questions in regard to our politically correct assumptions about what is Sexually Correct. It then moves to suggest the beginning of an alternative vision of sacred sexuality and Eros. It comes from a place which honors the feminine, even worships the feminine.

It is from that place that this writer is deeply disturbed at the violations of the dignity of the goddess which are being inflicted by the victim feminism which dominates the contemporary feminist classroom. I will elaborate on this in a full-length book entitled tentatively, Sex, Ethics and Power.

One important, if limited point, however, needs to be made at this time.

In universities across the United States, the next generation of leadership is being educated about the relations between men and women. That education takes place in gender studies courses and women’s studies courses, many of which are becoming required in the core curriculum.

Women’s Studies today is―as I will show in Sex, Ethics and Power―dominated almost completely by Victim Feminism. The tenets of victim feminism seek not to deepen the love, respect, and affection that exist naturally between the sexes, but rather to aggravate the gender wars by mischaracterizing the natural tension and confusion between the sexes as a virtual holocaust in which men―as a class―are called predators and abusers, and women―as a class―are labeled as victims and survivors.

This description of victim feminism speak is sadly not an exaggeration. I have collected dozens of examples of this type of invective. Victim feminist speak of this kind violates both the dignity and sensibilities of men and women alike.

I will try and show in Sex Ethics and Power that the underlying dogma and vicious jargon of victim feminism is a profoundly anti-sexual attitude. This anti-sexual disposition explicitly and implicitly views sexuality, and particularly heterosexuality, as―in and of itself―a profound violation of the feminine.

The initial notes in the article below are just that; some initial jottings of a response to this position which in the opinion of this writer violates the sacred nature of the masculine and the feminine as well as the natural gorgeous attraction and love between men and women.

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Sexually Incorrect

Okay so let’s just say it straight. Once and for all. Something is wrong with this picture. Either God is more then slightly sadistic with a significant interest in teasing and even torturing us through the ordeal of sex, or in some mysterious way IT is the essential key to this whole life journey.

Those seem to be the two choices we are presented with if we look at reality with even a little discernment.

You see it’s like this. Hardly anyone is really happy with sex. If they are, it’s only in the first wave of the erotic encounter when the passion is high and the egos are low. After that, most everyone feels like they are not quite getting enough, getting it right, or getting to move on when they are ready. And if they are getting some, they suspect it should be better than it is. Most everyone is quietly convinced that it is so much better for everybody else.

And, as if rampant dissatisfication produced by the great tease of sex which is virtually never fulfilled were not enough―sex is also a big-time killer. Masculine shadow has men killing men over sex as well as men killing women in domestic violence scenes, murdering them after having their way. Men use sex in war to break down the social order and humiliate their enemies, and gang rape occurs all the time, every day, leaving irrevocable damage in the lives of husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers.

But don’t think that women are off the hook. Feminine shadow has women killing men over sex. {The female cluster fuck in it’s worst form}. Gang rape in the form of the rape of name. A group of women who feel rejected and hurt, finding out as one feminist spiritual writer Jessica Roescehemier wrote, “that they are not the only one” get together and use false or distorted accusations of sexual misconduct to kill a man. Of course the most ulterior motive of all is the ulterior motive of piety and so as feminist writer Prof. Dahpne Patai points out, the spiritually correct guise is always honoring the feminine, “protecting other women” or some other politically correct formula used to cover up, wounded ego, genuine pain, mixed with the often strange bedfellows of sheer malevolence, self interest and self protection.
Sexuality leaves so many mortally wounded in her wake. So much pain from that which is supposed to be the source of so much pleasure.
We are confused about sexuality. And that confusion is the source of much of or pain.
Let us give two examples of the modern manifestations of this confusion.
What are the appropriate boundaries. In a wonderful evolution of spirit in the last twenty five years, Sexual harassment regulations prohibits using the authority of the employer to harass his or her employees. It is in both it’s legal and conceptual root, a law against discrimination based on sex. It does not however in any way prohibit consensual sexuality in the work place between employer and employee. And yet is being increasingly being used, by a strange coalition of fundamentalists and extreme feminists, to support a kind of creeping sexual facism whose goal is not to remove harassment from the work place but to regulate and ultimately censor sex from the work place. And as an increasingly vocal group of feminist writers are pointing out, it is being used a weapon by various groups of angry people, what one might well label a kind of sexual facism is running rampant, the paradoxical “abuse of sexual abuse”.

What about teachers and students. Is every sexual engagement between teacher and student an” abuse”of the teacher student relationship. Perhaps. Perhaps not. If it is, then we can all think of scores of spiritual teachers, leaders and professors who should own up and stop teaching. And just who is a student and who is a teacher? Is a woman who heard a few lectures considered a student and therefore forever not allowed to engage her

” teacher” in an amorous relationship? Do teacher and ostensible student have a right to make a covenant before the teaching process begins that they want to explore the possibility of dual tracks of relationship including both study and sexual exploration.

And if such a relationship does unfold is it always the fault of what vicitm feminists have termed, the Lecherous Professor. Is the power always in the hand of the Professor so that a truly consensual relationship is by definition impossible as the standard politically correct line would have it. Or as others have argued, directly or by implication, including feminist writers Jane Gallop, Valerie Jensen, Bell Hooks, Daphne Pattai, Katie Rophie, Camille Paiglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, Laura Kipnis, Consensual amorous relationships WHICH ARE NOT ABUSIVE are indeed a genuine option between teacher and students in particular contexts and circumstances. Indeed in many universities have maintained, consensual amorous relationship between adult students and faculty are a given and not subject to regulation. Is it true that a woman is weak and powerless in relation to a Professor and therefore cannot give ture consent. Or is the myth of asymmetrical power relations which make a woman’s yes meaningless just that, a myth. Perhaps in a world in which Paula Jones and other women band up with Ken Starr in paralyzing a nation and demonizing and impeaching the already complex figure of Bill Clintion, we might want to argue that in a post feminist world power is distributed in far more mutual ways then the old feminist canard of the lecherous professor preying on the innocent graduate student. And if a woman’s yes is not yes do we not then also suggest that her no is not no. A dangerous suggestion indeed. Pattai points out that we need to be careful of the jargon of victimization, where holocaust associated words like “survivors” are commonly employed. Other words like “mentor abuse”, men as “predators” aboud and seek to cast all decent and loving interactions which a professor may have had in the past with a student claiming harassment or abuse, as “Grooming”. That is to say the predatory man was not being decent and kind but was grooming his prey for the kill. While this may be occasionally true it is more often not the case and the suggestion that it is true demeans and degrades men. Then of course there is the tendency to try and paint men as “serial abusers”, again the implict link to sereial murder or rape, linking unrelated events over a string of decades in an attempt to suggest a “pattern of abuse”. The stock word to describe the experience of the alleged victims is virtually always “devastation”. Traumatic stress syndrome, the catch all phrase of the victimization movement in the United States is invoked with boringly predictable regularity. However internal voices of criticism within feminism are already realizing that all to often such language actually covers up the infliction of devastation and abuse by those very people claming to have been abused!

Or another question; is their room for privacy in the lives of public figures. Clearly a teacher who crusades against homosexuality but is actually a closet homosexual is more then problematic. But what of teachers who teach in the conventional world but live somewhat post conventional lives. A description which fits many spiritual teachers.
Do they {we} have a right to request privacy or is the very request for privacy in and of itself problematic.

There is much important talk about victims of harassment and abuse speaking out and claiming voice. That is good.

And yet in that claiming of voice how often are other no less important voices, repressed and silenced. “Does not the alleged harraser to often become the victim? This is the question that growing numbers of feminists, angry with what they perceive as victim feminism, are beginning to pose in tones of ever increasing urgency. Is not the victim feminism so in vogue today not a violation of the dignity of the Goddess?

And how is it that requests for privacy are retroactively translated into being “sworn to silence” when in fact, all to often it is the frivolously or falsely accused who are often denied voice and dignity.

And of course watch out for DEMONIZATION. The demonization of the teacher. After one murders someone or participates in murder it is only the de-humanization of other accomplished through the most vicious forms of demonization that allows one to sleep at night. The love, the goodness, the sacrifice, the dedication and the overflowing light that a teacher might try and provide driven by a deep love of other and love of God is reduced, twisted and somehow made ugly. The teacher is called to Sacrifice Isaac. To be willing to be case as a murderer of children in a time when he spend his whole life preaching against child sacrifice. The sure sign of demonization is when action, public statements are made, murder is committed without bothering to speak deeply to both sides. Underneath all of the high sounding rationalizations is a fear. A fear that if we really talk deeply we will not be able to commit the murder. Fear and Ego, the small petty and pathetic ego that shrivels our soul and dies our love; that is what drives these kinds of scenarios that are all to familiar in the International Spiritual Scene of the Human Potential movement.

Andat the same time perhaps any sexual engagement between any teacher and any student is a violation of the what might need to become the categorical imperative of Eros, the ethos of Eros if you will; which might be something like; “Does this sexual engagement serve the highest good of both parties”. This is a deceptively simple but powerful and demanding formulation. Of course it is one which opens up as many questions as it answers. Who determines what the highest good of the other is…and what is the good anyway?

But putting all of that aside it may well be that when a teacher is involved it is never in the highest good of either party. If this is the case then for the sensual to be spiritual valid it must not merely be con-sensual in the usual legal or even moral sense of the term. Rather it may be that in the case of a teacher it can never serve the highest good of both parties and therefore legal and moral con-sensuality not withstanding —spiritual con-sensuality is not possible. Or maybe it is.
What ever your position murder is never be allowed!

Our goal here is not to stake out a position but merely demonstrate that beyond the tired and righteous clichés of the spiritual and politically correct are issues of far more substance and complexity.
If we are to engage all or any of these questions with spiritual integrity we need to resist the impulse to demonize. It is hard to do. Generally those who demonize or act from a self righteous place have their own complex sexual histories and their own communal positions, self image and legacy interests to protect. So they explain to themselves, “Well he did that, but I only did that”. For political conservatives, George Bush Senior’s extra marital sexual liaisons are somehow okay while Bill Clinton’s are not. Or for liberals Martin Luther Kings amorous relations with students and staff are excusable while those of some figures the political right are not.

One of the tell tale signs of demonization is when we refuse to engage in real conversation. We refuse to hear all perspectives, the proverbial both sides of the story. We work hard to justify our own sexual histories or those whom we have a vested interest in supporting because of what that support does for us. Outside of the very clearly defined areas of true sexual violence there is an enormous amount of gray. It is in those gray areas that we find ourselves confused, caught between liberation and Puritanism, often repeating dogmas and conventions whose source is unclear to us and which we have never actually thought through or challenged in any real way.

We act from a place of feigned self righteousness, trapped in our self interested perspective often refusing even to hear the other perspectives. Demonization suggests Daphne Pattai is one of the key features of the sexual harassment conversation in modernity. Pattai’s compelling explanation: It is sometimes only by demonization that we can justify either our own sexual complexity, or actions and initiatives that we were party to or endorsed that may have wrought enormous destruction. Sometimes it is with the convenient shadow of demonization, the ultimate shadow projection on other, that allows us to look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning without being disgusted.

But it never really helps. In both the mystical Buddhist and Kabbalistic traditions whatever more the sacred might be, it is never less then depth. Deep living is the stuff of Great literature and the stuff of Great life.The first rule in reading great literature is Complexify, do not simplify. Let everyone look for the place in the contribution system in order to move to healing instead of letting ourselves off the hook with easy heroes and villains of the grade b western variety

And we have not even begun to explore the territory of monogamy, the myth of the white picket fence, polyamory, open marriage, betrayal in it’s many forms the great controversy surrounding ,”recovered” memories, post fact re-interpretations of old sexual experience and the list goes on and on.

And anyone of course who God Forbid does not quite want the same kind of sex that the majority approves of is in big trouble. Same sex couples struggle, transgendered couples struggle and anyone with any kind of alternative sexual drive has a rough start even before the pleasure actually begins and ends.

Bad news on all sides this sex stuff is. I mean, Jesus, was Helen of Sparta that good that she was worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Trojans to make her Helen of Troy.

So given all of the above —the very fact that our yearning for great sex is so desperate and central in our lives, it stands to reason that the divine designer who set up this ultimate tease must be a flaming asshole.

Or, possibility two; the divine designer totally and absolutely rocks. He/she is so gorgeous and beautiful; loving us so much that she wanted to place the deepest wisdom necessary to navigate our lives with power and passion — right at the center of our experience — just to make sure we did not miss it.

I personally have to say that I prefer the second option. It just makes you feel good and feeling good opens up the possibilities of working with this koan. That is the secret of the Good the True and the Beautiful. That which is true ultimately makes you feel good and opens you up to the beautiful.

If you stop to think even for a short moment, you realize that sex really is the great mystery of our lives. Two groups however suggest very different approaches to sex and oddly enough both of them are wrong. One powerful group of forces is arrayed in culture to prevent us from getting it. They tell us that sex is somehow wrong, immoral or sinful. They are quite potent. Even when we think we have gotten free of them they pop up again inside our hearts or heads, wagging their fingers disapprovingly. And of course they remind us constantly of all the trouble sex has gotten the world into — from the Trojan war to the Clinton/Lewinsky drama. Not to mention the trouble it has gotten you and me into — emotionally, psychologically, personally, professionally and physically…all because of sex. You have to admit that the sexual renunciate conservatives have a point. If you want to keep life simple, clean, and orderly, forgoeing or limiting the sexual experience might be an excellent choice. If you like spiritual exercises – and you are up for it – take a few minutes and just list all the times sex got you into trouble in any or all of the above areas.

Lots of organized religion and conventional moralists and mythmakers fall into this category. Religion wants to affirm love and passion as virtues but divorce them entirely from sex. So moralist religion works hard to erect boundaries that will protect us from the pitfalls of sex. And yet while we all know that sex certainly requires a dimension of discipline, context and commitment count for sure, most of us know in our hearts that the moralists are wrong and that sex is ultimately – and overwhelmingly – good. And not merely a side benefit of- or good technology towards, achieving loving relationship.

It was perhaps the 14th century Zen master Ikkyu who captured othis spiritual sensibility best.
With a young beauty, sporting in deep love play;

We sit in the pavilion, a pleasure girl and this

Zen monk.

Enraptured by hugs and kisses,

I certainly don’t feel as if I am burning in hell

Which brings us to the second powerful coalition of forces talking about sex. This group tells us ‘Sex is wonderful — if liberated, the panacea of all ills, if repressed the source of all dysfunction.’ Freudians in disguise, along with many other schools of modern psychology, sexual revolutionaries and a host of other intelligent folk are working hard to strip sex of anything remotely spiritual or even emotional. They want to liberate sex from love, from Eros and from the myriad of existential and emotional complexities.
Truth be told, Freud himself was the most influential modern cheerleader at this party. Rooted in a hydraulic model of the psyche, which slightly confuses human beings and steam engines, he taught us that if we would just find a way to release sexual tension in a balanced way, we would be healthy and happy. And yet many of those who achieved this vaunted balance were shocked to find that the same feelings of alienation, depression and emptiness still plagued them. Okay — hydraulic equilibrium achieved what are we supposed to feel when the sexual revolution failed to bring us any closer to liberation. Indeed we remained mired in suffering just as before.

Uninhibited sex is available in infinite variety in almost every imaginable social or commercial context, and yet we do not seem any better for it. So much sex and so little pleasure. So many orgasms and so little satisfaction.
A few decades ago a sociologist named David Reisman called sex the last frontier. If this is true then we have crossed it and found it wanting. Psychologists report that patients rarely complain about sexual dysfunction or repression anymore; what seemed to be the most common complaint in the days of Freud. Rather the malaise of our time is the lack of feeling or passion; the disconnect between sex and spirit. Sex is all around and yet it is hard to tell whether anyone is truly enhanced by it. Indeed no one even seems to be really enjoying themselves.

It was T.S. Eliot who summed it up best in his epic poem, “The Waste Land”,

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass;

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone

(III:249 — 256)

These two approaches, each in their respective worlds may be spiritually and politically correct but they just do not address our deepest knowing and yearnings. We all know that. So we have turn to the hidden wisdom. The Wisdom of Spiritually Incorrect. The esoteric traditions of all the great systems of spirit. Kabbalah in Judaism, Ikkyu in the Zen tradition, the Tantric masters of Hinduism and Buddhism, Rumi and Hafiz of Sufism and Mary Magdalene and the heretical Cathars of mystical Christianity. Veiled in every great tradition there is a hidden subversive mystical teaching. In each of their traditions they are ignored, killed, crucified, or re-interpreted to avoid the full implications of their radical and spiritually incorrect teachings. These teachings understood implicitly that embedded in the sexual, in all of it’s gorgeous and graphic detail, is all that is holy, all that is wise, all that is sacred. The masters of Spiritually Incorrect viewed the sexual act itself as a great sacred mystery which reflects all the deepest truths of the spirit.

In a world torn apart by fanatic fundamentalisms and insipid liberalisms we need a new teacher which all of us can recognize and take home.
Contrary to conventional religion and much of psychology, the post conventionalspiritually incorrect tantric masters insist that sex is integrally related to love and Eros. There is no disconnect. And not because it is nice, secure and comfortable if your are able to love the person you are sleeping with. But far more powerfully and this is the Secret of it all, because the sexual is the ultimate model for eros and love. In every ethical sexual encounter one can create an energetic container for the sacred, for opening up fully and absolutely into the love and grace which is already there. The sexual in all of her intricate detail is the most potent teacher, ripping us open if we will but let her, to the radical fullness of the divine who seeks our pleasure and goodness.
One 13TH century kabbalist said it most dramatically, “Whoever has not desired a woman is like an ass and even less than an ass, for it is from the sexual one understands divine service.”

Or in the language of Zen master Ikkyu;

Rinzai’s disciples never got the Zen Message,

But I, the blind donkey know the truth:

Love play can make you immortal.

The autumn breeze of a single night of love is

Better then a hundred thousand years of

Sterile sitting meditation
And just in case he was being to subtle and to avoid being piously misinterpreted Ikkyu continues.
Stilted Koans and convoluted answers are all monks have

Pandering endlessly to officials and rich patrons.

Good friends of the Dharma, so proud, let me

Tell you,

A brothel girl in gold brocade is worth more

Than any of you…..
Enter a brothel and great wisdom will

Explode upon you.

Manjushri should have let Ananda enjoy

Himself in the whorehouse…

Now he will never know the joys of elegant

Love play

Sex stands as the ultimate symbol, both signifying and actually modeling the sacred wisdom which needs to animate and guide all areas of life. The goal of life is to live erotically in all facets of being, and sex is the model par excellence for sacred erotic living in all of the non sexual arenas which make up most of our lives.

Eros Everywhere

The sexual is in the hidden teaching of the spiritually incorrect masters, is the ultimate spiritual master. Thus, deep understanding of the sexual is the ultimate guide to accessing the spirit in every dimension of our reality.

We are not talking about sexual technique. Sexual technique, even when important, is technical at best. Sexual technique can never make you a great lover. To be a great lover in all facets of your being, you must listen deeply to the simple yet elegant spirit whisperings of the sexual. Nietzsche got something right when he said, “The degree and kind of man’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.”

Sex is the Answer

Is there anything else that so grabs our rapt attention, incessantly pursues us, occupies our daydreams, fantasies and yearnings? The mystics are just stating the obvious, God is trying to GET OUR ATTENTION. HELLO ..OVER HERE…PAY ATTENTION.. Now I am not talking about the God who sends good people to burn in hell because they slipped up on one of his impossible demands. Nor even the Grandfather in heaven who hands out chocolate to do-gooders. Forget that God. The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. Rather, the God that exists for us is the personal erotic life force that courses through reality. The God we believe in is the vitality of eros. The God we believe in is the force for healing and transformation in the world. The God who knows our name. That is the God who so clearly calls out to us that sex is the answer.

When religion splits us off from our sexuality, we correctly intuited that something is deeply askew. But sex is not a panacea. Sex is not a drug that will soothe away the lurking feeling of ennui that this cannot be all there is. Good orgasms will not a good life make. Rather, sex is the answer as a model and not as the sum total of all eros holiness and wisdom. Sex, if we will but listen, is a great master of the spirit — better than any guru, psychologist, rabbi or priest. Sex can teach us how to reclaim the erotic in every non sexual aspect and element of our lives. For Eros is not sex. The Sexual models the erotic, it does not exhaust the erotic.

The core of the Spiritually Incorrect tantra is the realization that the sexual is more than a force to be merely controlled or merely indulged. Rather the sexual in all of its intense pleasure is the model for all spiritual wisdom. The goal of spiritual living is to become a lover and to engage all of life erotically. Sex is our most important guide, offering glimmerings of guidance which pave the way to illumination. Illumination, is achieved when one lives erotically in every facet of being. It is the sexual when lived ethically, in it’s ultimate fullness that teaches us how to do that. In their ultimate expression the erotic and the ethical are one.

Eros Everywhere

The sexual is in the hidden teaching of the spiritually incorrect masters, is the ultimate spiritual master. Thus, deep understanding of the sexual is the ultimate guide to accessing the spirit in every dimension of our reality.

We are not talking about sexual technique. Sexual technique, even when important, is technical at best. Sexual technique can never make you a great lover. To be a great lover in all facets of your being, you must listen deeply to the simple yet elegant spirit whisperings of the sexual. Nietzsche got something right when he said, “The degree and kind of man’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.”

The spiritually incorrect mysteries – which we will unpack explicitly in this column – teach you how. It is this spiritually incorrect tantric system which was the hidden core of the mysteries in Solomon’s Temple.

In what specific sense does the Erotic model the sexual….subject of another article

What does it means that the sexual models the Erotic?

And clearly when we talk about the erotic sexual we are not talking about the merely sexual. The merely sexual involves a few pathetic grunts, maybe an occasional kiss and nice word, the titillation of the narrow section of the genitals for a few minutes at the most and a brief fleeting please at climax.

If you are lost in mere sex then your will never receive and never be penetrated.
Every person needs to find their true form of intimacy, their way of opening as love to God through sex…- and you can choose to have a loving intimate relationship without any sex at all…Whatever form of love you choose commit to love without limit…giving yourself entirely

But when sex becomes a stand in for utter openness — when you are afraid of losing love- then you bind yourself in clinging, enclosing love, in the cult of two, engaging your lover in contract of fear..when a relationship binds you in fear of betrayal. Then it isn’t an offering of love it is a trap”

At one level of consciousness, referred to by the Baal Shem Tov as Hachna’h submission, the urge for this momentary release and pathetic pleasure which none the less shimmers with higher promise, drives all of being. At this pre-conventional level of consciousness, we submit to this drive that Freud called libido; it very literally drives everything we do.

At a second level of consciousness, which the Baal Shem called Havdalah, distinction, we domesticate this drive and pleasure. At this conventional level of consciousness we deploy law, culture and taboo, to sublimate the sexual and then redirect it’s force to support our committed relationships. We further invest its power as the animating force in our cultural creations. At this level of consciousness we feel the correct need to construct vessels of commitment which are sufficient to hold the raw anarchic power and seductive beauty of the sexual.

At the third level of consciousness however, the sexual transcends itself into the model of Eros and all that is holy. Deeper still, at this third, post conventional level we realize that the Erotic and the Holy are one. At his level of realization, what the Baal Shem referred to as Hamtaka, Sweetness, we experience the sexual itself, when manifested as spiritual practice par excellence, as it’s own self validating and self containing vessel. It is in the very breaking of boundaries that the vessel is created. Not merely the boundaries of convention; that would merely be the first level of pre-conventional consciousness, a pathetic submission to the vagaries of desire, but rather the shattering of the boundaries of the superficial, the breaking of the boundaries of the skin encapsulated ego which sits apart and against all that is not self. It is the full and open sexuality of this level three post conventional consciousness, of the infinite sweetness that course through and is all of reality- it is this sexuality that models the erotic which is the holy.
So again we ask, what do we mean when we say the sexual models the erotic?

What is the consciousness of Hamtaka?

Interiority:

It is in the sacred positions of the erotic sexual entered and received as the highest form of practice, embraced as surrender to love, that all the false positions we covet in life are revealed as the paltry fare of pseudo eros. A fare which leave the soul parched and desperate for true nourishment.
It is in the erotic sexual that we are most obviously invited to fully abandon the superficial games of fractured ego and fragmented identity, enter the interior castle of reality. It is only on the inside of reality that your heart is set free and you are able to see deeper then the flatland of surface vision. Eros is Interiority modeled by the sexual.

Presence:

The erotic sexual invites us to a realm which we do not recognize easily in our daily struggles to prove that we exist. In the erotic sexual existence is a given. We feel beyond feeling to the deepest feeling where our existence simply is radiant and alive- obviously not in need of explanation. It simply and joyously is. Eros is our opening to the fullness alive —alove presence, that always is, always will be and always is. This opening is modeled by the sexual.

God is Shekinah. Shekinah in many Zoharic passages means Presence or Eros. Eros is Presence. The Shekina is always present alive in and as everything. Most people never enter the healing expanse of the Shekinah which is all around and in them because they are contracted into false hopes, building edifice complexes to the survival of their brand and lost in the superficial pleasure which his just sex. One can have sex one’s entire life and never ravished open to Shekinah. So people settle for a family and white picket fence not as manifestation of shekina but as protection against the emptiness of a life in which they are never lived by God. One can either die open to God, to Ayin, to Sunyatta, in the fullness of the erotic sexual and in every minute of existence or spend life running from your petty death which can never be outrun. Life means to be fully present without clinging to past, resisting the present or grasping for the future. In such a life eternity is realized.

You can either be present as love or be absent and suffer. In Hebrew mysticism, exile is called Egypt, Mitzrayim, literally means the place of narrowness, the place where you heart closes. When you close you suffer. Israel is called Merchavim, the wide place, the vast expanse, the place where you open. Redemption is opening in love. It is the sexual that models this opening for us. There is really only to choice open and live or close and die.

If you close, if you clench your first to hold on to your comfort you will be betrayed. Everything you know as your life will one day disappear. To have is to close. To be is to open. To be or not to be is to open or to close. To be a human having or a human being. To be always and ever alive or already dead.

Can you feel it as you read. You can, can you not. The love and openness pouring through you, arousing you to cry out in rapture. And you must do this even as you suffer and at some point the suffering will yield to tears and then to bliss. I am open, take me God. Take me now. Let yourself open all the way and know that only then, in your radical openness and vulnerability are you safe. Protect your balls and they will be crushed. Again the sexual models the erotic which is the holy. If you get lost in Egypt, in the narrow images of your constructed reality you will never touch joy and never experience rapture. You can either die to Shekhina in ecstatic pleasure moans of ecstasy or whimper, die and rot in the earth. Teaches the Hassidic master the Maggid of Mezritch, late in this life, revising his earlier ascetic dharma, ‘If you only feel the Shekina in the arousal of your sex then you are already dead. If the arousal of your sex ravishes you open to God you are being born’. Sex models he fullness of presence. The lover in Psalms, says to the God who is the all, in what for the kabbalists is understood as a blatantly sexual moment, “Open for me your gates… I will enter them… I will moan your praise.” The sexual models the erotic. Love is beyond limitation. Limitation is death and love is death to be born. Love without limitation and be surrender absolutely and your will be born to your true ecstatic nature.

In the erotic sexual we show up in ways we barely even imagine possible in the routines of our daily pettiness. Every gesture, every caress, every shiver of our body, every fleeting touch is invested with the infinite love fullness of alive presence.

Wholeness:

In the erotic sexual we realize that we are so much more then pathetic egos encapsulated in skin which will one day rot under the earth. We realize that invisible lines of connection weave of in an awesome and gorgeous tapestry of wholeness which is holiness. The wholeness of reality expressed in the interconnectivity of being glimmers in the fabric of our sensual couplings. Subject and object laugh when they remember their apparent alienation and in the sensuality of their laughter which embraces all paradox and nullifies all illusion. Wholeness is achieved as subjectivity and objectivity dissolve into oneness which is love. Eros is the realization of wholeness modeled by the sexual.

Yearning:

In the erotic sexual we are invited, even driven to taste of the sweet nectar of this wholeness which heals all of the painful splits through the magic of yearning. We yearn to merge with other knowing that it is the union that full rapture and ecstasy wait. Eros is the participation in the yearning force of being seeking to realize itself for the sake of itself… modeled by the sexual.

These are the four faces on the chariot of Ezekiel, the four elements and the four noble truths of Eros. From these four qualities of the erotic modeled by the sexual, interiority, fullness of presence, wholeness and the yearning force of being, flow eight other major qualities of Eros, all incarnate in the erotic sexual practiced as spirit’s dance and play.
In Hebrew spirit this might be the eight days after the birth of a baby which lead to the birth of human consciousness in the human being. In Buddhist nomenclature we might call this the eightfold path of Eros.

Pleasure:

In the erotic sexual returns we are invited to the sanity of pleasure; to the realization that the world is not indifferent to us but actively and even desperately seeks our deepest pleasure. To be sane is is to know reality; insanity is a rupture with reality. The erotic sexual re-members us to the infinite pleasure which is the truth of all that is. Love is the only way to live that is not insane. Everything in your life will always betray you. The only way through betrayal is to totally surrender to be lived by God as God. It is not enough to be loved by God. God’s love still leaves us lonely. It is only when we are lived by God that the crisis of our identity is solved. There is no place devoid of the divine. God is the place of this world appearing as all and in all and through all. Anything less then total surrender is a painful denial of reality. Not to surrender is not only brutally painful. It is insane. It is just this very erotic surrender that is modeled by the sexual.
Pleasure is not comfort. Comfort is pseudo eros. The false homes we hide in and the castles we build on the shifting sands of pain and betrayal. Seeking comfort comes from fear. We seek to be comfortably numb so that we can forget our death. The only way to realize pleasure is to let go of comfort. To die to fear until your know in your heart that your pleasure is so much larger then your fear. The Buddhist called it big Mind. The kabbalists called it big pleasure. It is so big that you cannot even feel where it stops. You need to feel farther then your small pleasure to enter large pleasure. Infinite bliss and grace is already here. The sensual opens us to die in that bliss and live in that grace. How pathetic and sad it is when we get lost in the several pathetic thrusts of sex with the spastic release they offer instead of breathing through sex to into the endless love that is always there and desperately awaits our presence. So often we use relationships not to crack us open but to hide in comfort and the illusion of safety and protection. Relationship is merely another form of bondage if you love is not larger then your cult of comfort. Most people call commitment that which is only a contract of fear.

For it’s own Sake: In the erotic sexual we need no reason or rationale to reach for summit of fulfillment. We act not to gain some vaunted empty prize, rather we act for “it’s own sake”. For the very sake of the erotic sexual itself. There is no distinction in the sexual between means and ends. They collapse into one in distinct realization that they were actually never distinct at all.

Giving and Receiving:

In the erotic sexual giving and receiving cease to be two separate movements. Giving and received are revealed in all of their wondrous glory to be one and the same. The mystics sometimes called this the secret of the kiss, for in the kiss the false dichotomy between giving and receiving, indeed between giver and receiver, is exploded in the rapture of ecstatic union.

The greatest gift is the fullest openness of receiving. In the erotic sexual we receive other so deeply that our heart is touched opened wider then widest expanse we could ever feel.

Giving:

It is in the erotic sexual that we learn that love is giving and that flames of passion emerge from the depths of giving.

Surrender: It is the erotic sexual that we not only are aflame and alive with love which is giving, but we also understand that to give is to give up control. We loosen the reins which we once thought would fix everything that is so painfully broken as we realize that everything is already fixed, that grace is always alive and available and that everyone is doing what they need to do.

To truly give is to give up control. In the erotic sexual we do not settle for the paltry comfort of a shivering clitoral orgasm. Rather we reach for full and radical openness. You must be willing to open your entire being, to surrender your heart as your entire soul is given over to be ravished by God.

There is only one thing that a man or woman truly want, underneath it all and after all other wants have been filled. The human being wants to taken by God. The Hebrew mystics teach that when man and woman merge in the full radical consciousness of total opening to the God they make love not merely with each other but experience the ultimate penetration as well as the infinite embrace of the Shekhina. When we make love we spread our partners’ heart open to God through the depth of our own surrender. It is this opening of her total being to God through the joys of flesh that is man’s basic obligation to woman according to the Hebrew mystic. A woman loves a man who opens her to God. A man loves a woman who opens him to God.

. “Come may darling that I may die with you” writes mystical poet John Donne. Only if we are willing to die open to bliss and infinite pleasure do we find ourselves in the ultimate surrender modeled by the erotic sexual. To love is to give yourself totally and give up everything. It is only when you give up everything that you realize that everything is you. The only freedom is in total surrender.

You can only be truly alive when you let go of everything. It is only when you surrender everything that you receive anything. To give it all up to God is to receive it all in return. You must penetrate fear so completely that you are willing to let go even of your life. In Hebrew the word for intimate and sacrifice are the same. Intimacy, modeled by the sexual, is only realized when your sacrifice yourself to the unlimited unbounded and infinite. You only find personal love when your give yourself up to the largest of loves. Are you willing to “die wide open as love”. If you are then you will be born again and again and again. How do you feel when you die into love. You are alive, shivering and shimmering with pleasure, pulsating with God’s heart beating wildly in your breast. You scream to God. Take me take me take me now.

You say to God;
Here I am ..

I am yours…

Do with me as you will
I come empty.. I surrender…

My heart is in your hands
Even if all is taken from me

In my heart

Your voice is heard
From the pain

You will raise me

Filling me

With your Love.
When you give all of yourself to the Shechina she throbs inside you filling you with a pleasure beyond all boundaries. To be filled with the divine phallus and received in the divine garden is to be pleasured open into bliss. It is this surrender that is modeled in the sexual. In the free fall of utter surrender all claims of ownership must be relinquished. The primate impulse, sanctified in the conventional to proclaim ownership over other through an exclusive contract of control on their genitals is for many doomed to failure. Whenever we rely on the contracts of fear the Shekina can never truly be present.

Time:

It is in the erotic sexual that we are released from the deadening clock of biological time and initiated into times that stands still and holds us in her embrace.

It is in the sensual that we meet the timeless time and placeless place

In the erotic sexual we know that this moment is “as god as it gets”. We realize that only place we can sink deeply into the embrace of home is the infinitt of the moment in which we rest. The present moment is our only home.
Unless you surrender to the divine ravishment in every moment life will always abandon you and you will never feel like you are home.You can ravish the moment open in the same way you ravish a man, a woman. In Hebrew time means literally invitation. The moment waits to be split open into eternity by the thrust of consciousness that breathes the living force of love into it’s heart. The present moment is beyond and the source of all time and all place. Mordechai Lainer of Izbica teaches that to be a lover is to receive the invitation that is issued anew and different in every unfolding moment. There is no certainty out of the moment. In Hebrew the word for moment is Rega. This very same words also means deep peace and tranquility born of the radical certainty of one’s own infinite worth adequacy and dignity. Radical certainty is only available in the infinity of he present moment. All healing derives from the present moment. We are sick because we are never present in the moment which always contains all the healing we require. The sexual models the erotic embrace of eternity in the present moment.

Fantasy: It is in the erotic sexual that we realize that we are not merely homo sapein but also homo imaginus. We understand that every deep crisis we face is at it’s root a crisis of imagination. We access the quality of fantasy and imagination modeled by the sexual to imagine a world into existence in which every human being is alive and alove to his own infinite specialness even as she melts into the great one which is all.
Masculine and Feminine:

It is in the erotic sexual where the rupture of the primal masculine and feminine is healed as line and circle once again penetrate each other to create worlds of goodness and beauty. It is in the sexual that we recreate the big bang, the ultimate divine erotic act from which flows forth all that is good. And God saw that it is good.