By the same acts that cause some men to burn in hell for thousands of years, the Yogin gains his eternal salvation. – Tantra

For a thousand years, the Western Judeo-Christian, authoritarian male-dominant strategy for handling the emotions, the body, pleasure, and our most basic instincts, was to keep them well in check, and generally disavow as best we could any feelings below the waistline.

Freud said that empires were built on the resulting sublimated energy, but the game is over. It turns out there’s nothing unspiritual about pleasure, and it’s good for your health. It is instructive to ask just how we ever came to feel so bad about even thinking about feeling good. The passions are so overwhelmingly powerful that religions have been warning you away from them since the dark ages. The heightened intensity of the sexual experience soon persuades us that it is the most important one in the world. People get carried away, and begin to believe that the next great orgasm is the only important thing in life. People use each other for lust. The most extreme instance is called rape. When we can’t handle our attachments, they enslave us and we enslave others. Yet, ironically, through no other human activity, save dying, is the opportunity for ego-loss, transformation and transpersonal realization so prevalent and powerful as in conjugal love-making.

On the direct path of conscious awareness – The Path With No Obstacles – sexual union naturally also means the union of the continuing practice and its realization. This is what the west has come to refer to as Tantric love. (Ultimately, tantra means more than embracing your physicality: all action, thought, and realization becomes spiritual liberation itself.) The high art of making True Love is mystical and miraculous beyond comprehension. It inundates your entire being. It delivers you – body and soul – to unimagined heights of ecstasy. The discovery of the key to the union of spirituality and sexuality is at once a path to, and a gift of Enlightenment.

The ultimate consummation of physical love-making is complete transcendental Union. It bestows upon the lovers the experience of a spectacular breakthrough to the Infinite – beyond, but concurrent with our everyday existence. What begins as duality and polarization within time, climaxes as a shared soul-merging experience of Eternity. A transformation occurs which evolves from desire and passion to a level of total and perfect bliss, otherwise rarely known in human existence. Spiritual merging in love is the elusive prize that everyone seeks when they lay down with another, whether they know it or not. Lust is only a call to love, and many have yet to answer it. We may think we are content giving and taking personal gratification, yet all the while the heart seeks nothing less than to lose itself absolutely in love, and be consumed in ecstatic union with the beloved and the Universe.

How to achieve such divine deliverance through one of the most common “animalistic” functions we perform is the secret known to enlightened lovers as the direct path of Love. It transcends the trap of the ego-self: In effect, the world’s greatest aphrodisiac is selflessness.

No one is better than the Bodhisattva in bed.

The point of giving her sexual pleasure is to awaken the bliss that she will then combine with meditation on emptiness in order to attain enlightenment. – Miranda Shaw, Ph.D. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism – (Princeton University Press)

SURRENDER
The paradox of sex is that the same act can both liberate and imprison, depending upon one’s intent, state of mind, and conditioning. Sex can drive you either towards or away from Enlightenment. The great enigma is, how can we transform the trap of addictive physical appetite to the ecstatic realization of Divine Union?

It all depends on your true and underlying purpose. It calls for constancy and commitment to the ultimate goal of Enlightenment. Why is the divine gift of lovemaking so often little more than a desperate groping for glandular stimulation in dark rooms, accompanied by feelings of hunger and shame? Ironically, and all too often – when people use each other uncaringly – this most universally accessible mystical experience of orgasm is debased into something dishonorable and dirty. But anti-sex admonitions in turn only give rise to guilt, when – despite heroic efforts to curb our “lower appetites” – we find ourselves indulging in what is, after all, the single most compelling human urge after breathing and eating. We might even say that repression of this primal biological imperative creates rapists and pedophiles.

Shame is taught by “authorities” who can embrace neither their animal nor their spiritual nature. They fear one and fake the other, and call this “correct.” Certain religions contend that sex must be solely for insemination and procreation, or it is devil-worship. By that logic, one should certainly refrain from using one’s hands (not to mention lips and tongue), and get it over with as quickly as possible. Obviously the Good Lord made this procreational pleasure-drive far more powerful than most individual’s (and any church’s) power to control.

A truly relevant and realistic religion would teach us how to consecrate our sexuality, not deny it. We need to unlearn our guilt about wanting sex, even as we realize what a guilded cage it could very well become. Of course men and women compromise their morality and good judgment all the time for sex (although probably no more than for love, money, power, or fame). But the inherent dangers are hardly reason to avoid the experience. Respect for that very danger should make us take care as we take pleasure. Let us celebrate and make sacred our natural, innate sexuality. Copulation as high communion? Is there any better way?

SEXUAL SPIRITUALITY
Many in today’s generation are beginning to re-learn the sacred approach to lovemaking, as in indigenous tribal customs, mystical rituals, Sufi and tantric couples practices, and post-sexual-revolution “high monogamy.” Cultures much older than ours have evolved ways for seekers to include their physical bodies within the context of spiritual practice and the enlightened life. Meditation, invocations, breathing exercises, incense, candlelight, ceremonial objects, rituals, music, and potent libations have been used to create a special environment and mind-state in which to sanctify sexual union. Such careful preparations tend to quiet the neurotic mind and increase sensitivity and sensuality, while at the same time engendering the proper reverence.

The essence of this conscious sex approach is to transform the very energy of your appetite for personal pleasure into one of cosmic realization, by harnessing your own desire to the happiness, the thrill, and the total fulfillment of your partner. Thus you achieve Unity through duality, by making her (or his) ecstasy your own. Giving and taking merge, and you two become One. The transformation from ordinary mechanical, confused, guilt-ridden sex to the profound gift of natural/spiritual lovemaking depends upon a broadening of one’s focus from the genitals to the heart, from passion to compassion.

Spiritualized sex opens you at all centers at once, animal to divine. Transcendent love is a religious experience. Every touch is The First, and time stands still. The senses are magnified a thousand times. Your partner becomes a Goddess or God, whom you worship in awe. You notice everything, and it all conveys tremendous meaning and potency. Foreplay is truly playful, breathtakingly tender. The pleasure is immediately and continuously perfect, the passion intense and profound. Time itself disappears and the Holy Universe becomes self-evident. Opening all your centers, engaging all your faculties, the animal/emotional/spiritual crescendo of love lasts forever, and the climax is an exquisite release of the body, the heart and the soul in a spectacular shared revelation of the Universal Self. The after-glow of such a cosmic physical union endures for days.. weeks. The experience is healing and unifying in every way.

HOW TO MAKE ENLIGHTENED LOVE.

• Consecrate the setting. Make it Holy.
• Wait for the perfect moment.
• Purify yourself in body and mind.
• Meditate.
• Dedicate the experience to your highest purpose.
• Invoke the Goddesses of Love.
• Begin motionless and in silence.
• Gaze into each other’s eyes, long and deep.
• Breathe together.
• Fall in love. stay in love. die into love.
• Listen for Inner Guidance.
• Reside always at the beginning.
• Move in slow motion, with reverence.
• Worship your lover. Touch only in awe.
• Trust your body’s deepest impulses.
• Give voice to your feelings.
• Make love with your whole being.
• Transpose taking and giving.
• Decelerate until time stands still.
• Abandon all gain and control.
• Die as a personality. Be born as pure Love in the Universe.