The separation of material love from its spiritual dimension is crucial for our lives. This also applies to sexual encounters.
The unconscious background for the urge for the opposite sex is first of all, as far as the erotic level is concerned, the lustful drive. However, if pure sex predominates here, which happens often enough, i.e. tenderness, security, feelings of acceptance and affection are missing, then sex is animalistic and merely removes the libidinal pressure. The Islamic wisdom teacher Rumi expresses this very crudely and very aptly: ‘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’. The 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 goal as a symbol of union, not just in physical form. In answer to the question of why this marvellous aspect of human life exists at all, which animals do not know, a provisional answer is that orgasm is truly a spark of the gods and points far beyond the carnal level.
The next highest level of love after libido (Eros), the sympathetic attraction between man and woman (or between same-sex partners), the level of Philia, is the emotional connection energy between two individuals who seek each other as a complement and perfection, firstly for the division of labour, child-rearing, etc., and secondly above all emotionally. The striving for connection with this suitable counterpart is the phenomenon 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, i.e. to those who ‘love one another as I have loved you ´(John 15:12). Jesus thus makes a clear distinction between ‘preferential love’ (see chapter 1: Leo Tolstoy) and his indiscriminate love, as illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The latter is difficult to find because the human ego prevents such a thing, 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, 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. (A devotedly sympathetic extension is predominantly lived by the woman).
People love wrongly. They don’t want to give, they want to have. With every touch, they do not love their partner, but 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.’ Most people experience the failure of their love, both for themselves and/or for 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, is the ‘kingdom of God’ – in Christian terms. It is a state of consciousness, a consciousness that resembles Buddhist nirvana, i.e. the absence of 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, partner love cannot fulfil the unconscious search for the other ‘better half’, for unity.
As far as union with the goal of unity is concerned, it is not possible in the physical world for two bodies to be in one and the same place. But all couples at least unconsciously take the steps towards an increasingly closer connection: first there is contact over a certain distance via eyes and/or voice, then touching via holding hands, hugging and kissing. This ultimate union of two individuals on the material level through sexual intercourse also contains the only moment of spiritual experience in orgasm, even if it can only be experienced individually. (A complete fusion on the physical level is that of sperm and egg, but of course remains unconscious). A complete unity, as shown in the first creation story, i.e. the story with the rib, only exists at the spiritual level, i.e. when both partners – not only during sex, of course – simultaneously direct their consciousness towards their own likeness and that of their partner during the encounter.
When it comes to 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 hardcore pornography, etc. In this respect, the ego’s love for itself is the realisation of anti-unity, which can only be overcome through true love (spiritual level).
Without the selflessness of spiritual love, no true union can be achieved. Everyone who has been in partnership(s) knows the concrete consequences. They are blunting, insidiously disturbed sexual behaviour, infidelity, jealousy, fear of abandonment, oppression, possessiveness, appropriation, mutual dependence, addiction to control, etc. The high divorce rates are telling enough. (If only the couples who are so much in love knew that.) Sooner or later, what everyone knows and almost everyone experiences, i.e. sexual emptiness, but often also disharmony, prevails above all in the marriages or partnerships that still exist. Another characteristic of widespread pathogenic sexuality can be seen in the womaniser, who is not looking for a woman, but for love, which is giving, but which he cannot find due to his ego programmes, which are only taking. The same applies to women when they treat sex as an instrument, only wanting to satisfy their partner through devotion or to bind them to themselves. The lack of the third stage, the lack of the spiritual part of sexuality, is responsible for all the problems associated with sex. No matter how wonderful the eroticism and no matter how loving the affection and attachment, which nevertheless remain on the surface of the material world, they do not replace the deep joy of fulfilment through a higher I-Thou union in consciousness, which, if not absolute unity, at least brings about the greatest possible unity.
In Islamic Sufi wisdom, Rumi describes this 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 (!) the same essence in the other is true love, it is that of the spiritual soul (see Chapter 1). This spiritual third is the highest part of love and of course also of sexuality. It is the consciousness of unity like the fingers on a hand. While earthly sex with Eros and Philia is the highest possible level of material, i.e. earthly union and therefore one individual remains separate from the other individual, the spiritual level achieves a degree of fusion that can be illustrated by the aforementioned unity of the fingers; for it is the common bloodstream that makes the life of the individual possible at all and also shows their causal unity. Reaching this dimension during an intimate encounter – usually only with a partner – moves mountains in everyday life. The main experience consists of the fact that this unity consciousness spreads out from the relationship between two people and passes on first to neighbours and then to strangers. If I then no longer recognise any enemies in my consciousness, I no longer have any around me, I can no longer have any. It is possible to try this out immediately with the following two-step: 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 my self-awareness as an inner being of light with infinite potential. Jesus tries to illustrate this connection with the admittedly somewhat daring comparison of a mustard seed and a mountain (Mt 17:20).
In contrast to Eros and Philia, spiritual self-knowledge, also in sexuality, is the only and decisive characteristic that distinguishes humans from animals.
Sex quickly falls flat as an act of consumption, and that is the rule. However, it contains the possibility of experiencing love itself through the spiritually (!) conscious union with the beloved partner. The sexual act – maximum union on the material level – can be understood as growth and a lead ‘upwards’ to unity on the spiritual level (amor ascendens: love that goes beyond philia, ascends and thus completes itself). 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).
This can be done by thanking the two divine souls for the union during the caresses. It means supplementing the foundations of drive-orientated Eros and loving Philia with the decisive element of Agape, i.e. completing the maturing 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 the physical, emotional and now also spiritual completion of love in partnership, its essence: ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16).
As in all other areas of life and love, sex always contains the decision situation between self-human and spiritual orientation towards agape. The former serves primarily one’s own material satisfaction, whereas true love reduces egocentric self-preservation to what is necessary and finds its actual fulfilment in the preservation of others.
Anyone who wants to experience true love must expand the forms of earthly love towards the spiritual part of the soul, ‘ascend’ (ascendens). This is partly at the expense of physical lust; the size of the parts can be changed. When Christianity emphasises that no one can serve two masters (Mt 6:24), this is expressed in sexual encounters through the awareness of one’s own likeness and that of one’s partner on the one hand and through the reduction of the proportion of physical lust on the other – which can be consciously controlled. The various ways of dealing with this circumstance in practice is left to the partners, but in any case it is always a form of sacrifice, namely the sacrifice of the ego (libido): ‘Sacrifice is the law of the All.’ (Bhagavad Gita III, 15)
However, this shift has nothing to do with so-called platonic, i.e. sexually abstinent love: The shaping of the respective parts depend on the conscious control of the partners. There is no such thing as spiritual sex without sacrifice, i.e. with limited pleasure, because the spiritual energy takes away parts of the pleasure, but not 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: ‘No satisfaction.’ 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) is by no means related 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 seemingly contradictory co-operation between material pleasure and spiritual joy can be easily experienced and practised, for example when eating. If you give thanks before taking 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 is reduced by the taste and more or less gives way to spiritual joy, which then pulsates through you – albeit in a very restrained way – at least after a certain time.
In this respect, a divine impulse takes on material form and transforms everyday life in the direction of ‘paradise on earth’, not only in the hereafter, but already in the here and now. (This practical this-worldliness is unknown to the churches; they refer to the perfection of love in the hereafter, always ‘post mortem’. In contrast, Jesus emphasises in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘They will inherit the earth.’)
The price for the endeavours of spiritual sexuality is high from an earthly point of view, because this ascent reduces the usual earthly pleasure mania such as partying, gluttony, abnormal pornography, frequent changes of partner etc. through the increasing identification with one’s own divine essence. The original orientation of life towards self-preservation is reduced by the orientation towards devotion and sacrifice, also and especially in sexual encounters. The material person thinks in terms of sensual criteria, and always under the sign of self-centredness, to which sexual behaviour is also subordinated. Spiritual ascent, however, is characterised by sacrifice: Egocentricity is severely damaged by the addition of the spiritual viewpoint in the sexual encounter and the deep pleasure associated with it. Self-preservation cannot cope with the expansion of giving at the expense of wanting to have. There is no such thing as spiritual sex without the sacrifice of selfishness. However, anyone who surrenders this during sex and looks through the surface of the person to their spiritual soul – which is practised in meditation – sets 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 consists of the reduction of sexual self-centredness (of the man) and furthermore the maturation of spiritual orientation (‘in the woman … recognise God’).
| The fact that human sexual intercourse is not primarily for procreation was plausibly explained by Vladimir Solovyov in his essay “The Meaning of (Sexual) Love” (another title: Philosophy of Love) in the first part of the first essay. In his discussion with Schopenhauer, who sees love purely as a lure for the preservation of the species, Solovjov develops an idea that begins with our common experience, the “idolization” of the beloved. In this idealization, he recognizes the preliminary stage of being able to penetrate beyond the outward appearance to the essence of the beloved person, i.e. to understand their beauty and attractiveness as a reflection of God. Everyone who has been in love knows this, namely looking beyond all the disturbing external features or character traits of the partner. (In practice, of course, it turns out that transcending the external doesn’t last too long because the ego soon draws attention back to the foreground). Solovjov also looks at the evolution of mammals and compares the power of reproduction with sexual attraction. He states that as the level of development increases, the power of reproduction decreases and that of mutual attraction increases, with love being the greatest in humans. He goes on to say that man and woman – equally one-sided and therefore incomplete – can approach perfection if each recognizes the divine core not only in the idealized partner, but also and above all in themselves (!). (Author’s note: A suitable form of practice is the permanent imagination of the aura that one radiates oneself). This leads to a gradual restoration of the unity between person and soul that was destroyed by the Fall. With the material idealization, i.e. idolization (in the sense of spiritualization!) of the partner, the realization can be continued on the higher spiritual level. The love of the sexes for each other therefore reveals the meaning of love, namely the gradual spiritual recognition of oneself and one’s neighbour (love of one’s enemy) and thus the conscious reunification of man and God. |
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