Allo Friends and Reader… I wrote this a few months ago, while in the USA.
What a day ! I am in the US and I am watching. What is happening here? I have the good fortune to be fairly plugged in. I meet many well respected and well informed writers and teachers and speakers. I teach at Esalen (Beyond Tantra…ah ah…we haven’t’ even started!)
I write teaching programs about bliss the awakening and the balance of the inner masculine and the inner feminine, the yin yang of ecstasy. Tantra and the Pathways to Bliss…. I am looking for ways in which Tantra could spread beyond the bedroom…But when I look around, besides a few privileged enclaves, I don’t see bliss…I see that the anti ecstatic current seems to be growing.
I saw young gifted people promoted to six figures salaries working for big corporations which suck their life juices night and day 24/7. And they come home dead, or so obsessed by their job that their sexual energy is out the door.
I see desperate mothers, who happen to also be brilliant high powered financial officers. And their boss sends them (important) assignments by iPhone even on Sunday while they (can’t even admit) that they are taking their kids to the zoo….I asked : “Don’t you have a right to have a day off ?” “No” they answer. This in the US doesn’t exist. Did you know that there are no (days off) in America, in the corporate world ?
Yet, my friends in Marin seem happy and creative. We all go dancing at the Open Floor dance on Sunday morning. I meet an old and dear friend there. Years ago,we had many adventures together…
He was a paragon of health. A man who was a top health consultant for the international power elite. Yet I find out that he is being treated for throat cancer. Amazingly, while he is receiving chemotherapy..(you know that’s the phase when they pump your body with poison to kill the cancer), he comes to the dance still. And he dances beautifully. I am happy to see that. I am proud of him. But then we go outside and take a break and he tells me this : He and another friend got the throat cancer because of being the victims of a transmissible sexual disease called the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). It shows up as microscopic pimples on the surface of the cervix, in women, inside the vagina, and, presumably on the penis, in men.
How can that become cancer ? Why in the throat ? I ask my friend .
Unprotected oral sex, he answers.
I am amazed. You mean, you kiss someone’s sex, you have a great time, yet you catch HPV ? You live with it, without knowing, no symptoms, for years…and all of a sudden bingo…you get this cancer in the throat. What happened?
Well , my friend says, it may be released, suddenly, because the person’s internal bio-chemical milieu is too acidic and not alkaline enough.
But, I answer, you had a perfectly alkaline milieu in your blood and all ! So what ?
It could be that an operation at the dentist called for certain drugs….and I became acidic, who knows ?
What I know, says my friend, at least the doctor said so, is that more than 60-80 % of people here have this HPV and many don’t even know it. We all carry it.
Gee, I thought to myself, when is the last time I went for a gynecological check up ?…. Visions of a stethoscope sliding up my secret garden while the doctor peers inside. … And what can they see in there ? How will they see those microscopic pimples ?
I am soo glad I had such a great and free sex life starting in 1961… so long ago, so clean, pure, yet wild and ecstatic. The real deal. Mad with pleasure and laughter unleashed. No guilt whatsoever.
So now we are forewarned. No more mouth to sex unprotected kissing with different partners. How do the poly-amorous crowd do it ? You mean we have to do it through saran wrap ???
Yes.
Just imagine…I can’t imagine…
Too late. The cancer has come for my friend. And so many others around here. Too late.
Maybe not. Maybe they can heal. Many have.
So what to do about it all ?
Last night I was invited to a lecture by a great up and coming new teacher who looks and feels enlightened and calls himself a mystic.
His name : Thomas Huebel. He is Austrian. His story : he was studying medicine and dropped out to go to the Hymalayas where he meditated and studied the writings and teachings of the great mystics for four years. Then he had an awakening.
His wonderful conference was about the importance of being awake and being in relationship as awake beings. Indeed.
(Margot listen to the tape)
He mentioned tantra, briefly. And yoga. As possible spiritual vehicles in relationship. Stepping stones to awakening.
So I asked him to comment on this question :
“There is a mystical dimension in Tantra that teaches that the lovers scan pluck the energy of orgasm and channel it through their Inner flute” a central channel which moves through the chakras. Until this energy merges with consciousness at the crown and beyond and transforms into light and a feeling of oneness with all that is. Is that so ? Or is it an illusion?”
And he answered : “yes, it can indeed be a true spiritual practice and lead to this, an awakening. But we have to pay attention because in many cases, this high energy generates visions that are like movies in the mind and these are not spiritual awakening. But in other cases indeed this transmutation is an awakening. But this is just the first part. It still needs to be embodied.” I suppose Thomas meant that it needs to be actualized. That it needs to carry over into one’s life.
About this, Oscar Ichazo, another great mystic and the founder of the Arica school of mysticism states that, according to him, this practice is rarely achieved in a couple situation because it requires a high level of training by two beings who already are at the same level of spiritual practice.
I am convinced that a couple who would regularly practice the pearls of Skydancing Tantra, such as Riding the Wave of Bliss, would be able to reach high levels of awakening together. I know a few who did.
But the current obstacle here is our current life style. We are more than ever running around in a stress and a chaos because the corporatocracy is sucking our juices and demanding more and more money, more and more work to pay more and more taxes. Everybody here, me included, we are all busy with this. I entered the system. I owe debt on my credit card. Gee….
No time for sex….no time for intimacy….where did the tantra go?
Well, there is something else too.
Did you know that the major religions such as Catholicism and Buddhism are secretly organisations that propagate the joys of being or becoming gay ? Nothing wrong with is, in principle.
Yet, when a young man enters into the seminary and becomes a priest, no one in the church is there to teach him what to do with his boiling libido and his raging hormones.
In Bhutan, in India, in Nepal, it is said the the young monks who join the monasteries at 4 or 5 years old, have sex with one another. They all do. Its part of the process of growing up as a monk. « You’ve got to put it somewhere…
A high and well known Rimpoche in Dharmsala once told me that “We don’t want any babies running around, so we can’t do it with the nuns”…
Conclusion : through the anus nobody procreates.
How does it feel to realize that all those so called holy men and wise teachers are gay and that women don’t have much room in their lives…Imagine the Pope in the Vatican : surrounded by only men. An entire kingdom of just men, where nuns just hold menial jobs, mostly serving. What a world ! And I / we are taught to honor those saintly people who represent what exactly ?
Remember the Inquisition ? It is said that 30 million women were burned at the stake. By the Church. For ridiculous reasons. It was a massacre.
Well, did you know that the film who won the Oscar for best film in 2016 was called « Spotlight » ?
This film shows how a group of journalists for the Boston Globe uncovered the burried and hidden scandal of 90 priests which were pedophiles abusing the children in their parish. They were regularly transferred to other parishes every 3 or 4 years so their abusing tendencies would carry over somewhere else.
The story came out. It showed how this abuse of young innocent children, mostly boys, but sometimes girls, has spread in epidemic proportions. These priests cannot control their sexual energy.
249 priests and brothers were accused of sexual abuse within the Boston Archdiocese.
The number of abuse survivers is over 1000 people. It was proven that cardinal Law, knew about this epidemic of pedophiliac abuse of children in his archdiocese. As a result, in Dec 2002 Cardinal Law resigned from the Boston archdiocese. Unbelievably, the mother (mother ???) Church, reassigned him to the Basilica de Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome one of the highest ranking roman catholic churches in the world. The church has a unique way of rewarding its well deserving men!
Meanwhile, major sexual abuse scandals have been uncovered and documented in some 200 cities and locations all over the world. And it is said that some 6 to 10 % of the catholic clergy worldwide suffers from pedophiliac addiction. That’s a lot of people.
I once travelled on the plane from England to New York, sitting next to a very nice Jesuit priest.
When he found out that I wrote the Art of Sexual Ecstasy, we got to talking about sex, we did not stop talking practically the whole way.
And I remember him telling me that he genuinely loved God and joined the Church because of this love. But that He suffered immensely throughout his years of priesthood, because there was no one there to guide him and teach him how he could channel his sexual energy.
Would it not be so much better if all spiritual institutions developed and taught their own form of Tantra to their clergy ? A tantra that holds sexual energy as a sacred expression of life. A tantra that honors and respects others : whether adults, or children. A tantra that teaches how to channel sexual libido to the highest chakra and experience it as a blissful meditation ? This can be the androgyny path and does not require a partner. Why don’t priests and monks practice this ?
Much more to say. But I’ll stop here.
Margot