Another Choice

Our sex

Corporeal humans, physical creatures half-animal half-divine, we all are bound to the sexuality of the species, our individual bodies are sexed, the sexual energy – desire, attraction and consummation – invades and occupies us physically and is active in our organism from childhood to old age. The brute urge to satisfy the sexual impulse; the need to cultivate one’s sexual appeal and knowing, to develop the language of pleasure and refine it; or the need to orient and direct and channel sexual energy into a creative activity such as a quest or the practice of an art; and the need common to all to reach a viable balance between all these different modes of energy passing through our bodies and our physical consciousnesses: these needs mobilize us all at varying degrees and cannot be stifled, lest their suppressed pressure may cause great turmoil and harmful disorders. In the infinite complexity of our common humanity, the individual’s corporeal isolation is the indispensable condition for one’s personal progress, but at the same time a sort of punishment: physical solitude, the diffuse and constant ache of separation and distance that are even exacerbated by all the rules and customs of decency and good-behavior, are worrying and gnawing at us all the time – these are our demons which must be appeased.

***

Most religious and moral traditions exhort us to conform to these age-long practices which aim at ensuring at once the perpetuation of the species and the social cohesion: the institution of marriage and the foundation, then the safeguard and prosperity of the family, of the familial entity.

Most spiritual traditions, as for them, extol the virtues of renunciation and enjoin converting sexual energy into energy exclusively consecrated to the acquisition of superior realizations.

Between the two, other traditions invite us to practice the sublimation of sexual energy and of its poles as a means of opening our physical consciousness to paranormal capacities and faculties.

219