After we understand that the body can affect our thoughts and emotions as much as thoughts and emotions can affect the body, we can learn to use physical exercise as a religious ceremony for mind and soul. Martial arts, lifting weights, and running are some of my rituals of choice. For a little while, they free me from any excess of thoughts and mental heaviness. They allow me to fully embrace my animal nature. These are not simply ways to work out. Through them, I celebrate the pure, unrestrained joy of the muscles tensing as they put on the line the last ounce of energy they have. What we are worshipping here is raw energy, vitality, and the primitive powers of which life is made.
Seen in this light, weights stop being just something you lift to build muscle; they turn into tools for meditation. The same goes for running or martial arts. I find it much easier to center myself when my body is fully engaged. I love to sweat in the heated competition of combat sports, when everything but you and your opponent disappears from your consciousness. I crave intense activities challenging every last fiber in my body.
Maybe it's because I'm a barbarian, but I have a hard time meditating by sitting down in complete stillness. Despite my rough, uncivilized tendencies, however, even I can appreciate that there are more delicate ways to relate to the body. Yoga and Tai Chi are beautiful forms of mediation in motion. Something as simple as starting the day with a brief yoga routine such as a Salute to the Sun is a surefire way to wake up balanced and energized. Receiving a treatment by a first-rate osteopath also rates as one of the most spiritual experiences I have had. One moment I'm lying on a table awaiting treatment, and just minutes later, I pass out completely. By the time I wake up, I feel reborn, centered, happy, in love with life. By working on the subtle energies in my body, she helped me reach a state of consciousness that is very difficult for me to achieve on my own.
But let's not get too attached to specific examples. There are hundreds of ways of working through the body. It's up to you to figure out which ones work best for you. The point remains the same: using the body to reawaken the senses and expand your awareness. Once your senses are brought back from the lethargy most people let them slip into, everyday events become more intense. The ordinary suddenly appears extraordinary as color, shape, texture, taste, sounds, and scents come to life. Those who pay little attention to the five senses have no idea how damn amazing the world can be.
When speaking of physical energies changing our perceptions and shaking us to the core, we cannot forget about what is possibly the most powerful of them all: sex. I can almost hear the horndogs among you suddenly waking up, and deciding that this chapter may be worth your attention after all. Sorry to disappoint you, but we are not going there. Don't despair though. This is too juicy a topic to dismiss in a few lines, so hang on: a whole chapter dedicated to it is coming up.
In an effort to prevent you from abandoning me before the end because you are too busy flipping to the sex chapter, I'll cut this short. Just hang with me for a few more lines.
All these examples point to the same conclusion: the notion that the body is the enemy of the soul is a silly superstition we need to finally shake off our collective consciousness. The idea that the mind is superior to, and works independently of, the body is an equally dangerous pitfall we need to avoid. Too much is at stake here. This is no secondary issue. It's at the core of the way we perceive the world and relate to it. Listening to the voice of muscles and tendons is an art that needs to be taught in school. Let's be suspicious of any religion that doesn't encourage us to sweat.
From an author's perspective, writing about sex is risky, because if you write well enough, evocatively enough, vividly enough, you make the reader want to put the book aside and go get laid
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—Tom Robbins,
Wild Ducks Flying Backwards
I don't want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery
.
—Ibn Warraq
Let's lower the lights, break out the wine, and play some music—maybe Marvin Gaye's “Sexual Healing,” or, better yet, Ben Harper's version of that song. Candles, perhaps? A log in the fireplace? Whatever helps you get in the mood, I'm game. The time has come for
us to switch gears, bid goodnight to laughter and pleasant conversation, and open the door to something more primal, raw, visceral—something that unleashes our natural instincts, drives sweaty bodies on a collision course with each other, hardens the nipples, and simultaneously sends a tingling to your groin and to your soul. Entirely beyond logic and sober rationality, it speaks a language made of juices, tongues, muscles, and skin. As Marvin Gaye, the bard of lust himself, would say, it's time to get it on.
I interrupt this introduction to let you know that my computer just ate a piece of buffalo jerky. It fell on the keyboard in the gaps of the buttons, and, before I could retrieve it, the computer promptly swallowed it up and burped satisfied. I hope it gives this machine the energy to carry on, since the topic of this chapter will require its best efforts. What we are playing with here, in fact, is sex.
I can almost hear the neurons in the heads of my readers who were about to doze off suddenly jumping up, fully awake and ready to give me their undivided attention. If it is true that religion ranks in the top five in the hit parade of humanity's interests, sex is certainly there to keep it company. Time, place, and cultural context matter little: in all times, all places, and all cultures, sex has the power to captivate minds and make heads turn. People can deny it or embrace it, but at the end of the day sex is hardwired in their very DNA.
Perhaps out of jealousy and fear of a tough competitor, religions have often done their best to bring sexuality under their control. Sometimes, they have openly waged war against it. Sometimes, they have tried to domesticate its power through a million rules. But hardly ever have religions been in a position where they could afford ignoring it. If you ignore sex, after all, what's left? So, before we get to the juicier parts of this chapter, let's warm up by taking a quick look at what world religions have had to say about sex.
Go back to the dawn of civilization, and you'll find Mesopotamian temples set on fire by steamy sex rituals. Despite the limited evidence we have, ceremonial sex celebrating fertility, and symbolically uniting earth and sky for the welfare of all that live, was a staple throughout much of the ancient Middle East. Still millennia later, before the monotheistic version of Judaism eventually stamped them out through a bloody civil war, Jews practiced similar rituals as part of the cult of the goddess Asherah.
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But this promising intersection of sex and religion has largely been forgotten, buried under centuries of theology going in the opposite direction. So, let's keep our story simple and to the point. What do modern mainstream world religions have to say about sex?
Asian religions don't seem overly concerned with pushing a single official view of sex. When it comes to sex, they tend to engage in the curious habit of arguing one thing and its very opposite at the same time. If we wanted crystal clear coherence (damn, do I like alliterations or what?), we'd be better off looking elsewhere. Taoism is a perfect example. The philosophical roots of Taoism seem to almost require a very sex-positive attitude. For example, take the Yin-Yang symbol. It may not be graphically sexual, but what it lacks in explicitness it more than makes up for in other ways. After all, the Yin-Yang is about a celebration of opposite energies playing with each other. Rather than being separated by a puritanical straight line chaperoning the meeting between the feminine essence (Yin) and the masculine (Yang), and telling them to keep their hands to themselves, the symbol of Taoism follows a curve allowing the two essences to joyfully merge into each other.
In case you are not into symbols, Taoism spells out its worldview even more clearly by inviting us to follow our natural instincts. So
it would seem quite counterintuitive for Taoists to want to stifle sexuality, which is one of the most powerful natural instincts within our bodies. But among the Taoists, we find ultra-puritanical sects advocating celibacy and detachment from the senses as a path to enlightenment as well as those who approach sex with enthusiastic indulgence. The former may seem at odds with the foundations of Taoist philosophy, and may be influenced by neo-Confucianism and Buddhism more than by the Tao Te Ching; and yet they are nonetheless among the existing variations of Taoism. But even if we discount them as aberrations and only look at those who reject celibacy, the picture would still be murky. Currents of Taoism viewing sex as a beautiful part of life to be enjoyed live side by side with others teaching a cold-hearted form of sexual vampirism aimed at absorbing the energy of one's sexual partners in order to increase one's own vitality and longevity.
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And to add yet more confusion, some sects devise super-complicated techniques to have sex without ejaculation because they consider any loss of semen as extremely dangerous, while others view this as an unnatural obsession. (Incidentally, this same bizarre, mostly medically unsound concept also exists among Hindus, Buddhists, and followers of other religions as well.)
The story doesn't get any clearer if we switch to Hinduism. The many traditions that make up Hinduism can't agree about sex any more than they can agree about anything else. Hinduism has produced elaborate sex manuals like the Kama Sutra, created temples covered in erotic sculptures, like the Khajuraho Group of Monuments and the Konark Sun Temple, and given birth to torrid mythological tales about the sexual escapades of gods and goddesses.
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At the same time, some branches of Hinduism exalt celibacy and extreme self-denial as essential spiritual practices, believing that the
world of the senses is an illusion keeping us from enlightenment. The more puritan, orthodox forms exist side by side with schools of Tantrism that consider physical pleasure as a stepping-stone toward enlightenment.
In more recent times, partially due to the influence of Muslim and Christian invaders, and partially because of changes internal to Hinduism itself, many modern Indians seem to be more comfortable with Victorian standards of morality than with the pages of the Kama Sutra.
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And most forms of Hinduism have always endorsed the most classic sexual double standard: female sexuality is severely repressed, while men are considerably freer to do as they please (as long they don't set their sights on women who “belong” to other men).
Despite being born in opposition to orthodox forms of Hinduism, Buddhism follows the same confusing script in regards to sex. What Buddha actually thought on the topic is largely a matter of speculation. One of the few points everyone more or less agrees on, however, is that growing up as the son of a king, Buddha spent his youth having an inordinate amount of sex with hundreds of beautiful concubines. After well over a decade of this, being a bit extreme and unable to find lasting fulfillment, Buddha made a 180-degree turn by taking up the most severe forms of self-mortification. Enlightenment, however, continued to elude him until he adopted a middle path between indulgence and self-denial.
Here is where the story gets complicated. Some Buddhists believe that sexual energy inevitably creates attachment and distracts us from the spiritual path. In their view, avoiding extreme passions and whatever ties us to this world is essential, so they argue that sex and enlightenment are incompatible. True Buddhists—according to
them—are to be celibate, for only in this way will they develop the energy and focus to work for the benefit of all living beings.
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This antisex take on Buddhism seems to have become more extreme over time.
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In direct conflict are Buddhists who believe that the essence of Buddhism is manifested through insight and compassion, and that these qualities can be developed without having to sacrifice one's sex life.
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Enlightenment is not some mystical, remote dimension, but something to be discovered and embodied in the midst of the passions of ordinary life. Much like in the case of Hinduism, Buddhism also includes in its ranks some versions of Tantrism that believe sexual energy can open the doors to enlightenment.
The golden rule bringing peace among these competing interpretations of Buddhism is found in the principle of non-injury: as long as a certain action does not hurt any other living being, it doesn't need to be censored, and it is a matter of individual preference. This is why Buddhism usually allows a high degree of free choice in regards to sex. Even when it endorses seemingly strict rules, it tends to leave plenty of room for exceptions.
The opposite is true for Confucianism. Despite the fact that Confucius said next to nothing about sex, later forms of Confucianism elaborated a strict code of conduct looking down not only on sex, but also on any type of public displays of affection. The rules changed once you were in your own home, though. Confucianism never condemned sex per se—at least for men. The familiar patriarchal formula endorsed by Confucius' fans allows men the freedom to have sex with their wives as well as concubines and prostitutes. Women, on the other hand, have to follow an entirely different set of rules, since they are required to be 100 percent faithful to their husbands, and otherwise forget about sex.
Moving from East Asia to the domains of Western religions doesn't change these double standards one bit. Scriptures don't even bother raising an eyebrow when they tell us the patriarchs of Judaism had sex with multiple wives, slaves, and prostitutes, while also regularly threatening any woman who is as free with her sexuality with death. Adultery is grounds for capital punishment.
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But for a woman, adultery means having sex with anyone other than her husband; for a man, it means having sex with any woman who is the “property” of some other male—which leaves one's own slaves and prostitutes as fair game.