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For sexuality in our lives, its purely material understanding – its truncation – almost always leads to disaster in the end. The suppression of its spiritual part is the cause of the suffering that sooner or later sets in.
The unconscious background for the urge towards the opposite sex is first of all, as far as the erotic stage is concerned, the drive, which in humans is pleasure-orientated. If this predominates, which happens often enough, i.e. without tenderness, security, feelings of acceptance and affection, then sex is animalistic and merely removes the libidinal pressure. The Islamic wisdom teacher Rumi puts it very crudely and very aptly as follows: ‘Our spouses only relieve themselves in our vagina.’ (The Matnavi V, 3392). Sex is then understood as an exclusively natural event and as a moment of pleasure; the general choice of words is ‘fun’. This human egocentrism cannot be expressed more clearly.
However, sex is also and above all a cosmic event and therefore not just a libido goal. Sex is also an instrument for a spiritual objective, namely as a symbol of union on the path to the unity of God and man (see the parable of the Prodigal Son) and in this respect not only in a physical and not only in an emotional form:
Unity refers to that form of existence in our lives that recognises its deeper, actual unity behind the external differences, such as the fingers on a hand. The separateness of the fingers on the surface conceals (see Maya in later chapter 23) their existential unity, because without the common bloodstream the fingers would not exist at all, nor would the organism as a whole. This touches on the subject of the unity of all being, which is unknown to most people. The connection between fingers and blood flow for the concept of unity contains an inaccuracy, as it depicts both on the same material level: But on the other hand, it shows clearly enough the spiritual truth in question.
To the question of why there is the marvellous aspect of the emotional love of affection (philia) of human life at all, which the animals do not know, a provisional answer is that the orgasm is truly a spark of the gods and points beyond the worldly level.
The next higher level of love after libido (eros), the level of sympathetic attraction between partners (philia), is the emotional energy of connection between two individuals who seek each other for support, complementation, enrichment and possibly maturation, on the one hand for the division of labour, child-rearing, etc., and on the other hand primarily for the satisfaction of sexual, intellectual and emotional needs. The striving for connection with the right counterpart and its realisation is the phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘love’.
However, this philia level of love remains on the earthly level: it does not go ‘upwards’ to the spiritual level (agape), i.e. not to those who ‘love one another as I have lovedyou’ (John 15:12). Jesus thus makes a clear distinction between ‘preferential love’ (see chapter 1, paragraph 7; Leo Tolstoy: Resurrection) in relation to partners, children, parents, friends etc. and, on the other hand, his indiscriminate love; this is illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan or in his forgiveness of the torturers during his crucifixion. The latter is difficult to find because the human ego largely prevents this, i.e. agape (see chapter 17), from entering human consciousness.
People’s experiences with their halved love are disastrous across the board. In everyday life, instinctual sexuality, which has no spiritual connection whatsoever, is predominantly practised for the purpose of self-gratification, often as an ‘act’. The (female) body is not worshipped, but predominantly used. Purely erotic sex is basically mutual masturbation. The higher devotional extension is predominantly lived by the woman.
Men love incompletely and with the wrong orientation. They don’t want to give, they want to have. With every touch, they do not primarily love their partner, but primarily their own feelings. The Beatles sing about mutual self-gratification in an unabashedly self-centred way: ‘And when I (!) touch you, I ( !)feel happy – inside.’ And Georg Christoph Lichtenberg etches:
“We only feel for ourselves. …We love neither father nor mother, nor wife nor child, but the pleasant sensations they give us…” (On external objects)
Most people experience the failure of this stage of love, both in themselves and in others. However, they do not react by looking for a way out, although it would be obvious and although the wisdom texts of all religions show it.
Even the everyday experience of orgasm actually suggests the search for more. The orgiastic bliss, the all-encompassing peace for this brief moment and the equally brief absence of evil in our otherwise good-evil world, shows the ‘kingdom of God’ – in Christian terms. It is the moment of a consciousness that resembles Buddhist nirvana, i.e. the absence of the earthly good-evil consciousness.
Partnership, even with good sex, usually ends in routine and desolation. This is because on the material ego level, the dominance of the desire to have leads to an intensification of the feeling of lack, which is what led to the desire to have in the first place. Above all, however, this partner love cannot fulfil the unconscious search for perfection, for unity – both horizontally with the partner and vertically with the inner sun – which can only be achieved spiritually.
As far as sexual union is concerned, it is not possible in the physical world for two bodies to be in the same place. But all couples unconsciously take at least the steps in this direction, which become increasingly closer: First there is rapprochement via eyes, voice and the feeling of a stream, then touch via holding hands, hugging and kissing. This connection on the body can then only be increased through the connection in the body. This greatest possible union of two individuals on the material level through sexual intercourse also contains the only moment of spiritual experience in orgasm, i.e. outside of good and evil – even if it can only be experienced individually.
Completion of the union only occurs at the spiritual level. This begins to work when one of the partners during the sexual encounter focusses their consciousness on their own spiritual identity (likeness) and at the same time on that of the other person.
This means that it overcomes the earthly view of a person on a person: ‘God does not look at the person.’ (Acts 10:34; Romans 2:11). Then it is a matter of material sex with spiritual consciousness. This union of the entities – swimming against the current of instincts – can be recognised by the partial suspension of thinking and feeling. This ‘sexual agape’ means the mastery of lust and is an important instrument for spiritual ascent, just as this form of sexuality contains the basic pattern of human meaning in general, the triad of death of the consciousness of material identity, rebirth of its spiritual orientation and thus vertical initiation as elevation to a new higher form of life, as shown in the parable of the Prodigal Son and thus the goal of creation, the perfected, because spiritualised human being. This ascent from material consciousness to spiritual consciousness is demonstrated by the liberation from earthly suffering – the parallels between Buddha’s Eightfold Path and the Sermon on the Mount, between Sura 2 of the Koran, about 150 ff. and verse 13 in the Tao Te King or between the Ten Commandments and the Bhagavad Gita are obvious.
In the question ‘Do you want to give or have?’, having wins. This is why our environment is so overflowing with sexualised content such as advertising, films, raunchy jokes, strings of one-night stands, increasingly abnormal pornography and so on. In this respect, the ego’s love for itself is the effective realisation of anti-unity, which is the cause of all suffering on our planet. However, it can be overcome by true love – including sexual love – at the spiritual level.
The concrete consequences of the human version of love, even beyond the pressure of instinct, are known to everyone who has been in partnership(s). They are blunting, insidiously disturbed sexual behaviour, infidelity, jealousy, fear of abandonment, oppression, possessiveness, appropriation, mutual dependence, addiction to control, etc. (If only the couples still in love knew that.) The high divorce rates are telling enough. But even in the marriages or partnerships that still exist, sooner or later what everyone knows and almost everyone experiences prevails, i.e. sexual emptiness, epidemic cheating or, of course, the destructive separation wars. Another characteristic of widespread pathogenic sexuality can be seen in the womaniser, who is not looking for a woman, but for love, which is a giver, but which he cannot find due to his ego programmes, which are only a taker. The same applies to women when they use sex instrumentally, only wanting to satisfy their partner through devotion or to bind them to themselves.
The suffering of men under these manifestations is endless. Of course they try to avoid them or fight them bitterly. But they do not even dream of questioning the meaning and purpose of this widespread suffering in the gender war (see chapter 13). Of course, there are plenty of examples of men who, after their third divorce, come to the realisation that they should probably refrain from doing this or that in their next relationship. In any case, although all people are aware of these dramas, not even the slightest fundamental consequence is drawn from these problems, which of course rules out the path to sustainable liberation from suffering.
People only ask why it happened to them or why it happened to them of all people or why it happened to this particular partner. No one asks the question behind these questions, firstly why these deeply painful manifestations of human life exist at all and secondly where the solution is. Suffering is seen as natural, so to speak, even though every wisdom teaching, without exception, wants to persuade people to find a way out of this suffering – and also describes it in more or less detail. While Jesus, for example, lists almost all the relevant conditions in the Sermon on the Mount, Buddha’s entire teaching consists of just one major goal: to achieve freedom from suffering.
The reason for this incredible blindness – some wisdom teachers refer to it as sleepwalking – is neither stupidity nor unwillingness. Rather, it is a special blockage that Hindu wisdom calls Maya, the goddess of concealment. (For more details, see later chapter 25.)
Maya (Goethe’s Faust uses the term Mephisto) is a sub-programme of the instinct of self-preservation that prevents people from asking about the causes of their suffering; as a result, they cannot turn it off. For example, when a murder victim is found in a criminal case, the investigators use the evidence to trace the perpetrator. They also investigate the motive. Whether it was jealousy, revenge or robbery, in each case such motives only play a role in the sentence in court, but the cause of the motive in question remains unquestioned. As a matter of course, the fact that it is the instinct of self-preservation, the egocentricity of the instinctive soul, which is the motor of any misdeed – apart from karmic legacies – is not mentioned and remains completely outside the awareness of all those involved. If its direct opposite, the preservation of all others, were the driving force behind human behaviour, there would be no more misdeeds. This is the reason why Jesus speaks in blatant terms about loving one’s enemies and why all other great prophets and religious founders show nothing other than liberation from all this infinite suffering.
A further characteristic of Maya is the deception of people’s consciousness in such a way that it successfully suggests that the appearance, i.e. the surface, is the truth: Maya declares the earthly person to be a human being as such. Maya declares the human instinctual soul with its self-preservation programme to be the entire essence of the human being and tries extraordinarily effectively to conceal the existence of the spiritual soul within – as conscience, gut feeling, intuition, etc.
A classic example of the behaviour of this software is the aforementioned Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, who does everything he can to sabotage Faust’s efforts to find God as far as possible. He does this with the means of seduction to material pleasures and the ruthless, deceitful, mendacious and seductive methods associated with it.
Homer has attempted to expose the trick of disguising the background by the surface through the image of the Trojan horse.
The fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (La Belle et la Bête) is an apt illustration (see image above) of the human drama and the method of defeating it – especially in sexuality:
Beauty makes a conscious decision to sacrifice herself for her father’s life, despite the clarity of losing her own. She therefore decides against self-preservation, against her ego.
She is led to the castle (richly endowed on planet Earth), where a monster reigns, a two-legged creature with an animal head and tusks (the human ego-animal soul: ‘more animal than any animal’; Goethe’s Faust: Auerbach’s cellar).
However, due to her modest and loving nature (influence of her spirit soul), she spends a pleasant and joyful time there and falls in love with the monster. This is because she increasingly recognises the divine being behind the hideous surface and her unity with it. (The depiction of the human ego as a monster can also be found in Homer’s Odyssey as the Cyclops Polyphemus and also as the Minotaur in the legend of Theseus).
Through its spiritual radiance, the monster surface is dying. Her spiritual (!) love destroys his ego.
The beauty even ‘kisses’ it: the fairy tale thus refers to Jesus’ demand in the Sermon on the Mount to love one’s enemies: Of course, based on their life experiences, earthly people would never in their lives think of hugging and kissing their enemies, for example, and that is not meant in an earthly way either. Jesus did not do this either (Luke 23:33). Rather, with the soldiers who nailed him to the cross and mocked him (Lk 23:34), he ‘did not look at the person’ but at their divine nature, so he “loved” them ‘as I have lovedyou’. He recognised their impulses and therefore asked that they be forgiven.
Kissing symbolises the union of two individuals, or at least the path to it. Of course, there was no earthly unity between the crucified man and his torturers, nor between the beauty and the monster, but there was on a spiritual level, i.e. between their spiritual souls behind the surface of the persons. The Beauty has recognised the inner connection between the fingers of the hand, their common substance:
“Count a hundred apples or quinces: they do not remain a hundred, but become one when you make them into syrup [refined stage]. The essence knows no division …” (Rumi: The Mesnevi, verse 685 f.)
Love of the enemy therefore has nothing to do with the term ‘love’ as it is colloquially understood, such as with feelings on an emotional level. It is naked realisation of the invisible. The consequences in practical everyday life are eminent. Those who look at their enemies spiritually and behave accordingly with restraint and correctness will experience miracle after miracle. In sexual encounters there is no question of enemies, but the principle of penetrating the person to their essence is the same: the spiritual view of the partner leads to a substantial higher development with its then again worldly harmonious consequences.
The Beauty realises the transcendence of the surface. The Beast then transforms back into the prince that was in him, with whom she enters a fulfilled material future. She is now ennobled as the king’s daughter: ‘You can only see well with your heart.’ This is the station of all the daring who have chosen the spiritual path.
The beauty expressively brings out the essence of the human being, the hand in the glove. In addition, the two central parts of man are shown, firstly his ego as a person with the animalistic characteristic of the survival instinct and secondly his spiritual part of being as a ‘prince’, as an inner voice, as the ‘father in me’, as Jesus says. This spiritual soul is the only difference between humans and animals.
ffIn the same way that Jesus expressed the overcoming of the ego through death, resurrection and initiation – i.e. elevation to a higher level of life – through his life’s journey, Gandhi ended the mutual murder between Hindus and Muslims after the British tyranny through his two spiritually induced fasts to the brink of death and his return from a coma, thereby raising the lives of the three hundred million Indians to a new level.
In doing so, he also showed humanity as a whole the structure of the spiritual stations of salvation. Their sequence is expressed in all human cultures and religions: death, rebirth and vertical elevation to a higher level. This can be seen in Jonah’s whale’s belly and is also the basic principle of the entire Gospel.
Even on the purely material level, it can be observed time and again that, for example, when parents have lost their child to a certain illness, they then, after coming to terms with the suffering of the event, establish a foundation with new energy, for example, which deals with the promotion of previously ignored problems.
The two poles of the instinctual and spiritual soul – between which Jesus oscillates in the Garden of Gethsemane – apply to human life in general and even more so to the area of sexuality. The lack of the upper half, the lack of the spiritual part of sexuality, is responsible for all the problems that exist in connection with sex. No matter how wonderful the eroticism, no matter how loving the affection and connection, they are limited in time and remain above all on the surface of the material world. This is why they are defencelessly at the mercy of earthly limitations, i.e. maya, egocentrism (even if women in particular often allow themselves to be guided by their gut feeling and thus by spiritual influence). Almost every purely human love, no matter how deep, becomes routine and leads to blunting, to increasing irritation in cohabitation and then to the typical living apart – at least inwardly. Maya also successfully ensures that no man gets the idea that the problems during sex are due to the deep programme of self-preservation, to his ego. If he were to focus his entire sexual behaviour on doing everything for the well-being of his partner, the path to solving the problem would at least have been taken. The same applies to the woman, of course, but to a much lesser extent.
But then the second step is still missing in order to achieve lasting sexual freedom from suffering and fulfilment, because as long as even an anti-ego course remains on the earthly-material level, it will sooner or later be inconspicuously cashed in again by Maya. That is why it is existentially important to raise your consciousness to the spiritual level during the sexual encounter. This is very difficult because Maya now unleashes all her powers to preserve the survival instinct (ego), which is deeply and firmly embedded in the human being and is now under attack.
But there is no alternative: the secret of the path to redemption lies in realising your own divine identity (see Chapter 1) and then also that of your partner. This is the death blow for Maya, but this initial spark must be practised for months and years in order to achieve fulfilment and freedom from suffering. Because Maya never gives up, even if she becomes weaker and weaker.
The gagging of the animal ego behaviour programme is the central theme of the gospel, it is the theme of ego surrender. This applies more or less to all wisdom writings: ‘Sacrifice is the law of the All.’ (Bhagavad Gita III, 15) This sacrifice (see Jesus) means giving up the animal instinct of self-preservation step by step in the direction of ‘YOUR will be done’ in favour of the preservation of all. It is about reducing this survival software of self-centredness to its minimum level – as far as it is still necessary in terms of health, work, family etc. – and directing all intellectual and intuitive powers towards the preservation of all. But the reality on our planet is different and is described (again: see chapter 1) by Leo Tolstoy as follows:
‘As in every man, so in Nechljudov there lived two men, the moral man, who sought his good in the good of others, and the animal man, who sought only his own good and was ready to sacrifice the whole world to this good …’
(Leo N. Tolstoy: Resurrection; Volume I, Chapter 14)
For people, the content of the formula ‘Thy will be done ’ is a foreign concept because, even if they know the Sermon on the Mount, they know no means of implementing this admonition in everyday life, i.e. to make the turnaround in consciousness, to find the constant dialogue guidance with question and answer through their inner voice and they ‘seek their good in that of others.’ All evil and suffering in human life would immediately come to an end. That is why there are the wisdom writings of all religions, whose teachings call for nothing other than precisely this reversal (love of enemies). Although it would currently be utopian to expect this collectively, it is very realistic to expect it individually. How difficult this is, however, because the ego is so deeply rooted in us, can be seen drastically in sex, among other things.
As far as the search for the ‘good of others ’ is concerned, it is only possible on a spiritual basis (keyword: love of enemies in the Sermon on the Mount). For many people, the scope of their love is limited to their more or less immediate surroundings, their professional environment or their neighbourhood, especially in the family sphere. But even here there are focal points of egocentric behaviour in relation to the bad neighbour, nasty boss, scheming colleagues, unfaithful spouse and one’s own lapses. And this applies all the more to sexual encounters with the profound problems described above.
As far as sacrifice in general is concerned, sacrifices, for example in the form of financial donations to aid organisations etc., are beneficial – also karmically – but more important is the targeted loss of earthly consciousness, giving up anger, envy and fear and stopping all possible impulses and actions that are in any way connected with self-centredness. Jesus exemplified this with the washing of the feet, among other things. Hindu wisdom names this ranking very clearly and lets God Krishna speak:
“Higher than the sacrifice of earthly goods
is the sacrifice of your heart, hero.
Consecrate to me thoughts, will, mind,
that is the highest sacrifice!”
(Bhagavad Gita, IV, 33)
The reason for this emphasis is obvious: while material sacrifice – even without hidden investment motives – remains on the horizontal-material level, only the deliberate loss of ego brings about increasing liberation from suffering. The entire gospel shows nothing other than the overcoming of the qualities that serve the ego. This also applies to sexuality:
1.) Its first spiritual stage is the sacrifice of the desire to have, the ego. It is about reducing one’s own egoistic drive satisfaction and raising awareness for the well-being of the sexual partner.
Many women in particular have long been able to do this, but since this direction of energy expenditure remains on the material level, this quality has its limits of strength and time.
2) This is why the second point is also important: in addition to the willingness to sacrifice one’s own ego well-being – which, on the contrary, leads to undreamt-of abundance (see Chapter 12) – there is the ability to see spiritually (see Chapter 6), i.e. to look through the surface of the person (matter) to the divine core (spirit), to the spirit soul (see Chapter 1).
Concept of spirituality, meditation, energy, friendship, love.
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Although this expansion of consciousness leads to a change and partial reduction in genital pleasure, this can be an advantage for men and, above all, is somewhat controllable. This reciprocal behaviour is therefore ultimately a decisive step towards higher development – including physical satisfaction. The Islamic Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi writes:
“When man beholds God in woman, then … he beholds him in his own self … and out of his ego, for one can never behold God detached from sensual matter. … The contemplation of God in women is the most effective and perfect …, [for] the inner being is God.” (The Wisdom of the Prophets Chapter II: Muhammad)
In another Sufi wisdom, Rumi describes the spiritual fusion in his inimitably poetic way:
Someone knocks on the door of a friend. Through the door, the friend asked who was there. The man replied: ‘It’s me.’ The friend turned him away with the words: “Get lost! There’s no room for rough lads in my house.” The man left and stayed away for a year. The pain of separation burned inside him. He was purified by this fire.
Eventually he came back and knocked again. His friend asked again: ‘Who’s there?’ The man replied: ‘It’s you at the door!’ The friend opened the door: ‘Since you are me, come in!’ (Mesnevi I, 3065-3075)
Recognising (!) one’s own essence in the other (likeness) is love in perfection, it is that of the spiritual soul (see Chapter 1). This spiritual upper half is its highest part and naturally also applies to sexuality. It is the consciousness of unity like the fingers on a hand. Earthly sex with Eros and Philia is only the stage of material, i.e. earthly union; therefore one individual remains separate from the other; and afterwards the ego regains the upper hand in them. In contrast, the spiritual level reaches a degree of fusion that can be illustrated by the unity of the fingers, which are only separated from each other on the earthly level: For it is the common ‘blood’ stream that makes the life of the individuals possible in the first place and furthermore shows their causal unity. Reaching this dimension of consciousness – usually only with a partner – moves mountains in everyday life. Jesus attempts to illustrate this result with the admittedly somewhat daring comparison of a mustard seed and a mountain (Mt 17:20). But such examples are not in short supply on an earthly scale and do not necessarily have to have such a global dimension as Gandhi, who led three hundred million Indians to liberation from the colonial tyranny of the British Empire.
Spiritual unity consciousness in the relationship between two people spreads and first spreads to the neighbourhood and then to strangers. If I then no longer know any enemies in my consciousness – because I recognise their instinctual soul control, to which they are at the mercy of – then I no longer have any around me, can no longer have any. Because they lose their opposition or (more often) disappear from my personal field of vision.
It is immediately possible to try this out in everyday life by taking the following two-step approach: Realise that the most evil neighbour or the nastiest boss is attached to the same spiritual bloodstream as myself and that this bloodstream is nothing other than the divine life energy. The test of the example, i.e. practice, always decides what the truth is.
In sex, this can be done by thanking the two divine souls for the union during caresses. It means supplementing the foundations of drive-orientated Eros and loving Philia with the decisive element of Agape, which looks through, i.e. completing the ascent of love up to the spiritual level; the latter consists of recognition and understanding. The physical experience of love, now completed with agape, is then the physical, emotional and now also partially depersonalised completion of love, its essence: ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16).
The spiritually (!) conscious union with the beloved partner is growth and an upward journey to unity on the spiritual level (amor ascendens). Ibn Arabi formulates this in concrete terms by saying that the man’s aim is to ‘recognise God in the woman’. Lao Tse means the same thing when he says, ‘Affirm Tao in your neighbour’ (Tao Te King II, 54).
As in all other areas of life and love, sex always contains the decision situation between a selfish-human (and therefore superficial) or a spiritual, looking through and self-sacrificing orientation towards agape. The former serves primarily one’s own material satisfaction, whereas true love (see chapter 17) reduces egocentric self-preservation to what is necessary and finds its actual fulfilment in the well-being of others. This is partly at the expense of physical pleasure, although the size of the shares can be consciously changed.
As far as the spiritual life is concerned, nothing comes for free. The general liberation from suffering must be paid for dearly. When Goethe has the chorus of angels recite in the final scene of Faust II (Bergschluchten): ‘We can redeem him who always strives!’, the emphasis is on ‘always’ as well as on “strive” and also on ‘endeavour’.
To get straight to the point: This striving consists of two parts.
(1.) On the one hand, it is the abandonment of self-preservation in the form of self-centredness. This is the main problem with sex. It is not surprising that this relates more to the man.
(2.) Secondly, it is about ‘recognising God in the woman’ during the sexual encounter. The dimension of instinct (Eros) and that of loving earthly love (Philia) is thus supplemented by that of spiritual ‘love’ (Agape).
Anyone who can at least begin to look behind the surface of the material appearance, i.e. the person, during sex should realise that the first step is to start with themselves.
The catch with spiritual sex is that (1.) doesn’t work without (2.): Sacrificing ego behaviour cannot be switched off as easily as perhaps a lamp. It requires preparation, is exhausting, is associated with setbacks (because Maya does not remain inactive) and takes a long time to become stable. One success would be to introduce this element of consciousness into the act of love at least for a moment – ideally at the beginning (‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all things shall be added unto you’). Mt 6:33) This spiritual endeavour is extremely demanding, but is richly rewarded, because of course – Buddha sends his regards – it leads to freedom from suffering, which then means sustainably fulfilled sexuality for the first time.
The addition of the spiritual level of consciousness in the sexual encounter severely damages egocentricity. Self-preservation cannot cope with the change of course towards giving at the expense of wanting to have. There is no such thing as spiritual sex without the sacrifice of selfishness. However, those who surrender this during sex (amor descendens) and look through the surface of the person to their spiritual soul – which is practised in meditation – also set karma in motion, but this time the positive boomerang: ‘What you sow, you will reap!’ In relation to the sex theme, it means that the one who gives is given to. In this respect, spiritual sex goes beyond the reduction of sexual self-centredness (of the man) and turns inwards to one’s own spiritual guidance, to intuition and furthermore to that of the partner in order to, as said, ‘recognise God in the woman.
However, this shift has nothing to do with platonic, i.e. sexually abstinent love. Spiritual sex does not exist without the sacrifice of continuous physical pleasure, because the spiritual energy takes away parts of the pleasure, but this does not affect the intensity. Those who practise this spiritually induced sex are surprised to realise that their need for love could never be completely satisfied by their previous consumptive sex. And he learns that this love leads out of egocentricity and that the ‘highest happiness of the children of the earth ’ (Goethe: West-Eastern Divan) does not at all relate to one’s own personality, but consists of devotion to the other. Goethe continues: ‘All earthly happiness is united/ I find it only in Suleika’ (Suleika/Hatem).
The alternation between sexual pleasure and spiritual devotion can be experienced and practised in various areas, for example when eating. If you give thanks before a bite (preferably before the first) and concentrate on the spiritual nourishment provided by the ‘Father in me’, you will realise that the sensual, aromatic pleasure of the taste is significantly reduced. But at the same time, joy flows through you, even if it is restrained. It depends on surrendering to your own intuition (‘You can only see well with your heart!’) and also on the level of communication with your inner voice, your gut feeling, your intuition. It also depends on the associated ability to observe and live the principle ‘Thy will be done! ’. Because the most important commandment in the Bible, ‘To love God with all your heart.’ (Mt 22:37) is the basic principle of all religions, although the term ‘love’ is misleading, because it is not at all about the level of feelings, it is about knowledge and understanding in relation to the union of the spiritual soul with that of the other person. This leads to liberation from suffering, as in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Other religions formulate this more clearly, such as the Gita:
“He who, completely immersed in me, only me
consecrates himself and always knowsme within himself
and puts all his trust in me,
is closest to salvation, friend.” (XII, 2)
“Give up every lower faith
and seek your salvation only in me.
I will deliver youfrom guilt and suffering
then completely, hero. Be without care. (XVIII, 66)
In this way, individual everyday life becomes paradise on earth, and not just sometime in the hereafter, but already in the here and now, see Job or the Gita again:
“He who by his actions consciously honours him,
who once gave birth to beings
and whose power carries the worlds,
has reached perfection here!” (XVIII, 46)
The churches, on the other hand, point to the fulfilment of love in the hereafter. In contrast, Jesus emphasises in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘They will inherit the earth.’
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