Sexuality: laugh or cry ?
Thierry (R) and participants (Q).
Q: (a joke attributed to God): "I made you a brain and a sex organ in perfect working order but you’ll never have enough blood pressure for both of them to work at the same time..."
R: The joke makes us laugh,
but the reality behind it can also make us cry. Let’s talk about it... The
sex drive is at the roots of the most intense emotional agitation and
suffering. The world seems more or less openly involved in the sex race to
which people have tried to add a touch of lightness but which in fact remains
one of its most painful forms. There are highly sensitive questions which even
honesty and the conscious look avoid exploring too closely. The sex drive
really is one of those burning issues.
What we call sexuality is a drawer full of ill-assorted items. At the base, there is an aspiration to absolute well-being, transcendency. In reality, however, although at the time the experience was able to produce a few memorable moments, we have to admit that the act or its quest is never quite as fluid as in our sweetest or wildest dreams. The marvellous promise of sexuality seems to have engendered more frustrations than real awakening. Like any reality, it can provide us with a lesson. But the ground here is particularly slippery. The appeal of the promise is so strong that moral or spiritual arguments have little lasting impact. More than mere words are needed to invite the Witness onto this playing field where he is rarely welcome. Suffering comes essentially from the fact that we try to control this energy in order to make something different out of it than what it actually is. Those with an "obsession" would like to accomplish their intrusive desires more often or find something to control them with. Those with a "blockage" would like to forget the question or find something to "liberate" them. And, as in other aspects of life, the problem is created, then managed, and finally ends up in a vicious circle. There’s no absolute secret, but it might be helpful to note that the two common ways (rejection and unbridled consumption) call for a middle way which is that of consciousness. "Experiencing the sex drive consciously" (like anything that may find its expression through us) is the sexuality of the Presence, the Witness. Painful identification (the fact of being submerged) is symptomatic of the absence of consciousness. From the conscious and affectionate way of looking at what represents an earthshaking experience, it’s possible to discover a different sexual life which is not necessarily the same for everyone.
Q: I’d like someone explain me why all religions point their finger at the problem of sex !
R: Religions don’t show sexuality as a problem. All they have done is to move in on the ground where people suffer so much from it (even if, for most of the time, they pretend that it’s something light) to attract them towards God. This is strategic spiritual marketing. If you’re really at peace with "sex", what’s to stop you from seeing that such is not the case with the immense majority of people? Let’s be honest about this. Sometimes the ego is indulging in a little game when it says "Oh, I’m beyond that!", somewhat like young college girls who say publicly that they hate a boy while in secret crying over him on their pillow. The hour of truth is the moment when everything is liberated. This is not schoolyard recreation.
Q: (...) Why always talk of sex? So much ink has already flowed on the topic!
R: We have never brought up the issue of sexuality here. I feel that when you say "so much ink has already flowed on the topic", this is a little over the top and could be symptomatic of a certain uneasiness on the issue. The fact that you don’t see how dominant the ego is in this matter seems to me like a desire not to see. There are few human activities where the notion of giving is as absent as it is here, even if, so as to reassure oneself, it’s good form to say otherwise. But it is above all the (for the least) slightly "distant" tone you use that set off a little bell inside of me. Expressions such as "I don’t understand why it’s taboo", "why all the fuss" or "I don’t see what the problem is" are often ways of keeping a personal pain at bay, more than testifying to an expression of freedom. If you are free, and you recognize your humanity in the suffering I’m describing, you should be able "to find in yourself" (and thus intimately understand, we’re all the same) the reality of sexuality in the world and how it is the catalyzer of the shortcomings of "living through the ego".
Q: If man didn’t have this passion, the world’s population would take a demographic nose-dive !
R: That’s what we might call a "striking short-cut"... which would have us believe (or those of us who want to) that "passion" is really slaved to the birth rate.
Q:
But perverted passion that has become sin because it goes against the divine
grain is always preferable to completely eradicating such passion.
R: That’s one way of thinking... Can you confirm whether you sent in this question to make us laugh ?
Q: Why wouldn’t the body which heightens the level of our partner’s well-being, so as to share a common level of well-being, be a gift?
R: Above all, that’s a nice turn of phrase (maybe you could also say the same phrase without the tinsel). I know of few people who, looking at their real intentions when it comes to the sexual act, have really felt interested in the other person’s well-being. At such a moment when, as you say, "we let go", it’s more often than not the animal that takes over the reins. And he’s not concerned with philosophy or altruism. Now, I also know how unacceptable this vision may be. But what is unacceptable gains by being Seen. If the sexual impetus is motivated by a need to appease the drive, a desire to possess the other or be possessed, a search for intense pleasure (I do not formulate any judgments about these realities), it is more approriate to accept that we are dealing with the lone animal rather than the altruistic sage at that precise moment. And why can’t things be seen that way? It’s also in the answer to this question that we can find something which concerns us intimately (but to hear the answer within ourselves, we must really hear the question, go beyond immediate reactions and the nuances the mind would like to tone the issue with and which swell up en masse when you read what I’m saying).
Q: What sprang to mind just now was "Why does everyone talk like that about something which is so beautiful???".
R: Again, the fact that something is so beautiful for you does not prevent it from being different for others. The "why" is a curious way of reducing a universal reality to an occasional personal experience which you’ve had (an egocentric experience). Your way of putting things is absolutely fine but it hides a certain form of "centering on your little self" and above all a taste for illusion and utopia which seems somewhat removed from the reality of "what is".
Q: Is a day foreseeable when men and women might free themselves from their sex drive so as, in the first place, to be just beings with a loving relationship and thus share marvelous moments together without expecting anything from the other but love?
R: Maybe... but it’s up to you to See whether you say that because you prefer to flee from reality as it is or because you foresee this as the appropriate way for things to evolve... Take your time before you answer.
Q: I don’t really understand what you mean, Thierry. If we can’t speak of giving, of a gift from a sexual point of view, there is at least the possibility of total surrender. Isn’t this also a form of giving oneself ?
R: When I suggest that reading or listening must be conscious, I refer to the fact that "tricky topics" necessarily concern visions, beliefs and certainties which appear vital to us, which will remain so as long as we want them to be vital and which will always constitute a filter for our "receivers". Most messages which are sent in to me on this issue hardly refer to "what I say" but to the fears which my words have unleashed. From where "I stand", this is striking. Can you see it from your’s? In my words, there is no rejection of the "animal part" or the "sexual act". But maybe your answers (which drive in the same nail more or less) betray a fear that what one has regained with so much difficulty may be prohibited (are not religion and spirituality in the collective conscious anti-pleasure, anti-sex? Is Thierry going to return to the attack?! ). This is to some extent a gut reaction and if you accept going beyond the burning fire of this issue, you’ll doubtless see how you’re protecting a "property" rather than profoundly envisaging a new way of looking at things (which I haven’t yet proposed, however!) that might be without compromise and stripped of Reality’s tinsel. Your answer puts forward formulas ("finding unity and the simplest of shared happinesses", "tender feelings mingle with desire and end up in total pleasure") which seem to offer a poor definition of sexuality as expressed by the majority of people. As for total surrender, I have never, out of the hundreds of people to whom I have spoken, met anyone who has truly experienced it... even if, to begin with, they presented things that way to me. It’s clear that if we’re to go further into this question, there are some barriers which need to be overcome.
Q: What about obsessional thoughts ?
R:
One day, I received a man who was somewhat desperate and deplored his
obsession with women’s breasts. A hidden, (inaccessible) breast was the
cause of all his suffering. Summer was a sort of torture for him, persecuted
as he was by the excessive amount of temptations in cups. "The sight of a
breast drives me crazy!" he confessed to me.
I asked him:
"Is
a breast a sexual object, an organ for breast-feeding or just what you "make"
of it?"
He
said he could see what I was getting at and he had to admit that, as far as he
was concerned, a breast was exclusively an object of sexual desire.
So,
then I asked him:
"Can
you say that a breast is objectively a sexual object?"
"No,
intellectually I know that it’s also what you said in your question!"
"Does
it give you a desire to drink milk?"
Mimicking
disgust, he answered sharply:
"Oh,
no!"
"And
yet this is certainly what you would have felt just some 30 years ago!"
He
didn’t say a word.
"Are
breasts really the cause of your torment?"
"I
don’t know any more..."
"You
know that once there was a time when "a glimpse of stocking was looked on
as something shocking"...?"
"Yes"
"... and that men were "driven
crazy" at the sight of it?"
"Hmm..."
"It’s
all in the mind, my friend..."
"But
is this attraction to breasts as a sexual object natural?"
"Sure,
provided they don’t torture you or drive you crazy!"
"So
what can I do?"
"Take
the desire as it comes, calmly. When you observe how the mind builds things
up, how the ego outmatches natural desire, just return peacefully to square
one. And you’re not going through anything special, just take the drama out
of things! Everything’s OK!"
He smiled for the first time during our talk...
Q: It’s as if whatever the object of desire is, it has a mission which is beyond its control...
R: For
the ego, the goal of its quest has become the object of its desire (I’ll be
happy when I’ve met a partner). But the call which drives him towards this
object and the goal he thinks he will be attaining there are not reduced to
this single object (I’ll only be happy when this meeting I’m looking
forward to so much comes about). And yet there’s no doubt about the
existence of the mission. It’s Divine. (I’m seeking what "I am",
nothing other than what I am and nowhere else than where I am). But this can
only reveal itself as such to those who accept going beyond "basic
programming". The Call is that of the re-union, of the One who is in the
other... who, thereby, is no longer an other. The desires for
unification, communion and sexual union are programmed forms of this call. But
for those who don’t experience the Call for what it is (the movement of the
Divine encountering Itself), there seems only to be the basic programming (desire
for unification, sex drive) which appears to be self-sufficient, but only appears.
For those who persist in vesting most of their quest in the basic programming,
suffering and frustration act like an alarm signal.
For some, the sexual act is recognized as a
compensatory act which provides gratification or personal appeasement. When
profoundly identified, this need for compensation is a quest for Unity. Each
personal desire may be linked to the nostalgia of being. The ego reclaims the
natural sexual instinct to perpetuate the myth of duality and pleasure refuses
to give way to joy, the wrench of duality doesn’t give way to communion. But
this is generally unconscious because desire (I am looking for the other
person who is my complement and source of happiness) is deeply linked to the
notion of "individual life". Letting go of this belief means taking
the big leap, abandoning the notion of complementarity, for there is no one,
no one other than the Divine Him/Her who "makes love unto Himself/Herself"
at every moment. And that for the ego spells death.
Unity
regained is the act of Sole Love. Soul love. We have a vague intuition of this
in our quest towards the other but programmed belief always brings us back to
the wrench.
But
when we see this programming expressed, as if we didn’t want to believe in
anything else, as if it were impossible to deprive us of something so vital as
the quest, as if all we were was just a cry disguised as an intellectual
argument, experiencing a "salutary tip-over " is possible.
If
we deliberately nourish the justification for the quest, all the progress we
might have made beforehand is pointless, because it shows that we only adhere
to the spiritual provided it doesn’t upset our "little man/woman’s"
applecart and its basic programmings. If we become aware of the game which is
being woven within us, then we open ourselves up to the field where "everything
is possible".
In order for this tip-over
to come about, we must beforehand identify the tension which the ego shows
when Reality intrudes into its universe of division and pain (when a "counter-programming"
message strikes it in-depth). The ego’s folly is justification. The "intelligent stupidities" it can come up
with when Surrender looms on the horizon are legion.
Everything’s a game. We can choose ours consciously, right here, right now.