The Two Loves

Sexual arousal, whether experienced with the participation of another person or enjoyed alone in the presence only of oneself and one’s fantasies, alters consciousness. The state of arousal itself manifests God’s pleasuring himself in the creative act whereby the universe came to be—full of beauty and full of embodiment for each of us. The desires of the flesh, the myths warn, can lead us away from God, but they can also be divinized by understanding them as promptings of life seeking its own vibrant enjoyment. And as Saint Paul—of all people—recognized, attraction metaphorizes the relation between God and the world, between spirit and matter.

Attraction, sexual and nonsexual, between a woman and a man witnesses to the interplay of opposites which generates the world. Chinese philosophy calls these primal forces the yin and the yang, dark and light, receptive and creative, passive and active, feminine and masculine. Female and male are special cases of these polarities. The attraction between male and female manifests the duality that stirs creation.

In the same way, attraction, nonsexual and sexual, between two men or between two women witnesses to the ultimate unity of the world beyond duality. Monistic philosophies have seen that beneath the apparent swirl of polarities, ever growing, ever changing, clashing in conflict and cooperating in love, lies a deeper stratum in which all is at rest in a self-mirroring perception that all is one and that the opposites are illusory. The attraction between same-sex individuals manifests the identity that precedes the duality.

Especially in dealing with the tradition-violating styles of sexual behavior that modern society seems to be moving toward and that the churches have long condemned, we must seek to understand the signs that guide our wandering. The condemnations may provide signs for some, but not for others. The signs can never be taken only at face value. Choosing one’s own sexual style—deciding not to get married or to pursue a variety of partners or to come out as gay—breaks with tradition. In such a life the position of the tradition may assist growth, because it forces deep personal retrenchment and self-evaluation in which the individual grows ever more conscious. The dilemma posed by the old morality that must be overthrown can drive the mind beyond the superficial rules into a state in which one sees that one must take responsibility for one’s own experience and so let go of morality as an outside force and integrate it into one’s own personal code of behavior. Violating taboos, the Tantrics of both Buddhism and Hinduism have discovered, can be spiritually compelling and enriching.

Of course, it is not necessary that taboos be violated, but it probably is necessary that the sometimes confusing and disturbing, yet always alluring and compelling, sexual feelings be placed in a context which divinizes them. The universe can be seen as dual; it can be seen as unitary. God is the lover seeking his complementary opposite in the world, and the lover beholding the goodness in his/her own reflection. God is the solitary pleasuring self, the adventurer playing joyfully in the world, and the mother giving birth. All of the styles of sexuality can be divinized.

The Second edition (1992) added this material—which then includes a kind of theory of sex: 2 edition

Modern psychology, especially body-work-oriented psychotherapy, has discovered that sexuality has other functions in human beings besides reproduction.

Paradoxically, engaging in sex outside the reproductive context has been called indulging our animal nature. It is precisely the opposite. Animal nature is to copulate instinctively only to produce progeny. As Jacob Bronowski observed, what is natural for human beings is certainly not behavior that is found also in animals, but what is different and unique to humans. Human beings, of course, feel the instinct to produce progeny, but that is only part of our sexual experience. (Our over-populated world proves we needn’t fear that condoning non-procreative sex will threaten racial survival.) Precisely the way we differ from animals that have rigid sexual cycles and less involving and less orgasmic intercourse is that human sexual contact involves consciousness and volition.

According to Reichian and neo-Reichian body-work therapists, the whole body is involved in psychological processes; consciousness and intelligence are not merely in the brain. They have discovered that traumas, fears, negative conditioning, and the like result in tightness and restrictions in the body that distort both psychological and purely physical processes. These can result not only in neurosis and mental illness, but also in psychosomatic disorders, cardiovascular disease and perhaps even cancer.

Reichian therapy consists of practicing better and more complete releases of tension through crying, screaming, vomiting, and coming to orgasm. Learning to allow spasmodic release and emotional catharsis helps prevent deformation of the nervous system. The surge of energy during orgasm can break open the blocks and keep the system clear of restrictions to the vital flow. The role of orgasm in the human being then is more than just ejaculation or reception of genetic material. The aim of “total orgasm” is not simply to get a narcissistic satisfaction, as suggested by many critics of the California-based fascination during the seventies with bigger and better orgasms, but to activate an important self-regulating mechanism in the mind-body system.

Orgasm is protrayed mythologically—kundalini in Tantrism, for instance—as a conscious experience of cosmic energy. Orgasm is certainly an experience of neurological dynamics. It has no content. Like a dream it is forgotten almost as soon as it is over.

Perhaps the function of sex and orgasm in human beings has been not only to clear the individual nervous system but—and consequently—to affect the way the nervous system itself has evolved. Human beings are sexually motivated differently from almost every other species on our planet. Because women’s sexual interest is not restricted by an estrus cycle, human beings are sexually and psychologically available and motivated all the time. We engage in sexual foreplay beyond instinctual seduction rituals. We experience orgasm more completely, it appears, than other animals.

Indeed, our females have orgasms, something not particularly needed for the continuation of the species (as, sadly, generations of women suffering religion-induced frigidity can attest). And, at least among land animals, we alone have developed sophisticated language and complex brain functions. Perhaps our sexuality is in some ways responsible for, or at least intrinsic to, our evolution of intelligence and conscious thought.

In discussing the role of the spiritual aspects of consciousness, I’ve been suggesting that perhaps the ability to experience wonder, to feel curiosity, to develop myth, and to ask questions forced open the neural pathways that directed the path of survival up toward consciousness and humanity. Similarly, sexuality can be understood as the experience in the flesh of what in the mind is wonder and curiosity. Sexual attraction is the desire to know another’s body, to feel the flesh, to experience the rhythms of the other’s movement. It is the drive to enter into relationship with the other, to try to see from the other’s perspective, and so to add complexity to one’s own experience of life. And within the act of lovemaking itself, sex is the experience of joy in being embodied and of the body being caught up by a deeply primal, transpersonal force.

It is not surprising that one consequence of such an experience of wonder should be genetic transfer and reproduction of life through time and through evolutionary advance. Sex as experience of the life force perhaps precedes sex as a tool for reproduction. Our sexuality, far from being a distraction from God, can be understood as the instrument by which God created us and continues to manifest Godself to us.

Particularly in the sense that all of us are manifestations of the One Self, our experience of loving another person is our participation in the divine love for creation. And our experience of being loved is our perception of God’s love for us. Indeed God has no way to demonstrate love for creatures except through the creatures’ love for one another. This love for creation is not some curious will that creatures overcome their corporality. The flesh is the mode of creation. God’s love for us and our love for God is experienced in our flesh.

We are blinded to the holiness of the flesh by fear and desire, by the tendency of the senses to get stuck, to delude us into believing we are just egos, by our failure to see the whole, to see life in context, by our failure “to see the forest for the trees.” Of course the importance of sex can be exaggerated and desire can get out of hand. But we will not develop vision by fleeing the flesh, by condemning our sexuality, by making other people wrong for enjoying sex, by refusing to love God’s manifestation in the flesh. A positive attitude toward sex can help bring us into touch with the resurrected body we carry, so unconsciously, along with us all our lives.

Isn’t this positive attitude, this affirmation of incarnated human life, what is meant by the saviors’ embrace of the human condition—even of sin and suffering? “God so loved the world…”

Amazon.com links:

The Myth of the Great Secret, first edition

The Myth of the Great Secret, Revised edition:
An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell

The Two Loves

Articles and Excerpts:

Gay Consciousness

Enlightenment

Gay Spirituality

Mystical Vision

The Hero's Journey

Seeing Differently

The Vision

People

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

The Two Loves are:

Joseph "Joe" Perez

Toby Johnson

Harry Hay & Will Roscoe

Edward Carpenter

Michael Sigmann