ESSAYS ON SEX, RELATIONSHIPS, ROMANCE, AND CELIBACY
Why Sex Is Inappropriate for Most People
Masturbation: Fantasy Rescue by the Parents
If the Healthiest People Remain Celibate What Happens to the Future of Our Species?
Being in Love is a Disturbed Ideal
Homosexuality: A Chance for Human Evolution
Relationships: What Lies Underneath Them
Gandhi: A Damaged Man Ahead of His Very Damaged Time
Why Sex is Inappropriate For Most People
People who are not fully enlightened have sex because they are on a misplaced search for the nurturance that only deep emotional healing provides. They may dress their motives for sex with societally acceptable terms such as "pleasure" and "biological drive" and "experimentation" and "need for release" and "love of intimacy" and even "recreation" and "physical exercise," but no one who ventures deeply below the emotional surface is fooled long by these façades. Healing is the deepest human hope, and in sex we cannot help but fantasize its possibility.
But sex doesn’t heal anyone. Sex lacks the boundaries necessary for healing, and instead breeds the volatile and dangerous defense of projection. People project the potential healer onto their partners, who in turn project the same onto them. This may work for a time, but ultimately it causes more damage than it undoes. Sex is like tofu: it soaks up the flavor of whatever you cook it in. And if you cook with toxic ingredients, which everyone has percolating in their beings until you fully resolve your unconscious traumas of childhood, you’ll end up in a toxic stew of anti-healing.
A rare few – and no one I’ve ever heard of or met – are ready to fully handle the emotional side of sex. As the saying goes, “sex is simple, you’re not.” As long as people hold onto fantasies about who they are, and primarily who their parents are, they’re going to unconsciously want their partner to rescue them, and this can never happen. People must heal from within, and sex, even masturbation with the mildest of fantasies, is attempting healing from without.
So what then should people do with their sex drives? The only answer is that people must heal at their deepest core levels. They must become enlightened, through and through. Until they do they will have no choice but to act out through sex - act out unconscious childhood dramas of every variety. Their other option is to repress their sex drive, but this is equally as dangerous as acting out, because repressed drives act themselves out in other destructive ways.
But healing is hell. It’s much easier to act out – at least for a time. But acting out always catches up with the actor. Acting out is nothing more than a replication of unhealed childhood traumas – and a step toward death. Healing on the other hand expresses life. It is painful, it is heart-wrenching, and it is full of doubt. It is lonely, it is solitary, and it is tormenting. But it is honest. And it leads in the right direction. Although you have to sleep alone at night, at least you open the doors to the potential of having a real relationship with yourself.
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Masturbation: Fantasy Rescue By the Parents
Masturbation is risky for anyone with unhealed psychological wounds – that is, all of us who are not yet fully enlightened. Although our biology plays a part in motivating us to express ourselves sexually, our unresolved emotional issues push us far more strongly. People are emotionally motivated to masturbate by a craving to play out unconscious dynamics of parental rescue in an attempt to bypass the healing process.
Healing is ugly and painful. Masturbation is pleasurable. Healing is protracted and seemingly never-ending and invariably frustrating. Masturbation is time-limited and has a definite end. Healing keeps you up all night in the most unpleasant discomfort. Masturbation puts you nicely to sleep, lulling your unresolved childhood traumas back into their little repressed caves in the unconscious. But healing ultimately saves your life, whereas masturbation ultimately leads you nowhere – and keeps you stuck in your misery, and keeps you repetitively acting out the worst of your childhood history.
But the answer is not simply to avoid masturbation through burial of the sex drive. Repression is dangerous and contrary to healing, because it deprives you of your feelings, which you need as a roadmap to find the deep truth within you. This, ironically, is why the most backward people advocate repression – and pathologize masturbation. They don’t want you to know. If you knew you might just tell the truth about them.
To be fair, however, there are more dangerous ways to act out sexually than through masturbation. Unless you are fully enlightened it is healthier to masturbate than to engage in sex with a partner. The dynamics of interactional sex are exponentially harder to sort out consciously and heal from, because unlike in masturbation now there are two unhealed psyches at work, both pumping out their own versions of unconscious parental rescue fantasy onto each other…with an expectation of resolution.
Partner sex is a psychic set-up for failure and emotional destruction. Few can do much healing while in a sexual relationship with another, and past a certain point it becomes impossible. The dynamics are simply too intense and too emotionally laden. Most people have sex to avoid healing, which is exactly why society pushes it. Also, interactional sex often makes people into parents, which is the best way to seal their fates as non-healers.
The way to deal with normal sexuality in a healthy way is to keep on healing. To grieve. To feel. To learn your internal stumbling blocks. To know yourself. To devote yourself mind, body, and spirit to resolving your deepest emotional conflicts through unearthing your buried traumas and untangling their hidden webs. To build a strong core of a true self, a connected relationship with the best of you in your inner breast, and then to confront your perpetrators either in person or in your own private psyche. This is to heal. Perhaps this healing process will involve masturbation somewhere along the way, though as it progresses it becomes much less likely. Healthier people do not like to act out. It hurts them.
If you do masturbate, do so as consciously as you can – and recognize this as a still partially troubled step along your path to enlightenment, not unlike being on the nicotine patch. It’s better than smoking, but it’s no healthy ideal. If you masturbate, see if you can’t use it as a stage in the healing process. Study your masturbatory dynamics, learn the patterns of your fantasies and the truth underneath the metaphors, and trace them back to their historical sources in your childhood, where they invariably lie. But proceed with caution. Masturbation is inherently addictive, as are all routes that bypass healing.
If you feel shame from masturbating, search out the historical roots of your shame. Sexuality is not inherently shameful, and need not ultimately be so. Shame is not something you were born with. It is something that was foisted on you, probably by your parents. See if you can discover the roots of your shame.
If you are celibate and do not masturbate and feel much emotional discomfort with this, know that this is healthy. It is torture to change your inner patterns, especially when they were once very sick. Trust it, but be gentle with yourself. It takes true strength to do what you do, and there’s a reason so many cannot. Learn from it. Grow from it. Study the roots of your urges.
If you do not masturbate and feel you are repressing your sex drive in any way, study this too. You can learn much from your patterns of repression. Your inner soul holds the best college curriculum around – one designed purely for your own education, all there for the taking.
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If the Healthiest People Remain Celibate then What Happens to the Future of Our Species?
It is ironic that many people, when I speak of celibacy as an ideal, argue that following my lead would drive our species to extinction. In our overpopulated world of nearly seven billion people - who are driving us to the edge! - can we really fear celibacy and the path to enlightenment so much?
The person on the road to enlightenment is a gift to humanity. If he becomes celibate he passes his gift along not to descendants but laterally to all who hear his message. He is the progenitor of something radically new, and he offers the world something far more vital than yet another unformed child.
The greatest gift any child can give to the world is to become fully conscious and fully connected with the truth within, and if a parent is mature he can wish no better future for his child. But if a parent is the most mature he has no children and devotes himself to parenting the burgeoning consciousness of the inner child within his own self. This route is terribly painful, which is why most bypass it.
The enlightenment seeker incriminates his parents for having had him. He grows to understand their pathologically selfish motives. He realizes how much they failed to give him and how much they blocked his progress. Had they been healthy they would have done life’s healing work themselves and spared him the trouble. But they cheated, and his existence is the result. Because of his self-examination he knows it, and does not want to perpetrate this same cheat on innocent others.
The seeker is inherently fair. He knows that until he reaches full enlightenment there is no way he can reproduce without passing along some self-hatred to his children. This is the ugly law of the repetition compulsion.
Yet oddly, when he does reach full enlightenment, he will have no need to reproduce, because his soul will have already reproduced a million times over.
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Being in Love is a Disturbed Ideal
Although society and most people – and of course popular music – hold being “in love” as the ideal state of human existence, they are all deluding themselves, literally. Being in love is little more than the state of transferring onto some new person – your “love object” – all your repressed childhood hopes that your parents will finally come to rescue you. This hope, which is the root of all addictions, is so intense that if you actually believe that it can be fulfilled it sends you into the deepest emotional orbit, more intense even than heroin. No wonder most people desperately strive for it.
You might ask, though, what about the eighty year old married couples who are still “in love” after fifty-five years of marriage? My reply: What about mild addicts – functional alcoholics, let’s say – who manage to stay pickled on their four daily martinis up through ninety years old – and even credit their booze with keeping them alive for so long? (And they’re probably right – the booze probably did prolong their “life,” if you could call that a life.)
My second reply: Do those couples really love each other so much, or are they more just attracted to a fantasy of whom their partners are? From what I’ve observed, when you scratch below the surface of such couples you find that they really DON’T know each other that well, and are just interacting – and being “in love” – with a fraction of their personalities. And they want it that way! If they knew each other too well it would shatter their illusion. No surprise that as the increase in expectation of marriage partners being “best friends” – that is, more emotionally intimate – has gone hand-in-hand with the skyrocketing of the divorce rate.
As I close, let me differentiate between being “in love” and actually loving someone. In many ways the two are polar opposites, even if sometimes people who are “in love” can behave lovingly toward one another. Allow me to make a list:
1) Being in love is projecting that someone will rescue you; loving someone is nurturing and caring for the best in them
2) Being in love comes from the false self, that still damaged side of us, and wants a false image of another to rescue us; loving someone comes from the true self, and nurtures the true self of another
3) Being in love is generally full of disrespect, both of one’s own and another’s self. It doesn’t honor the true boundaries of another’s truth. The extreme of this happens when really troubled people fall in love with complete strangers and go so far as to believe these strangers have returned this “love.” Loving someone, on the other hand, is inherently respectful. It respects the boundaries of who they really are.
4) Really loving someone truly grows over time. Being in love gets weaker over time – and when it grows it tends to be a sign that the “in love” person has a penchant for more extreme forms of delusion.
5) Being in love brings only a limited sense of fulfillment, and often leaves people feeling crushed and rejected. Really loving someone brings deep fulfillment – to both involved.
6) Being in love gets all mixed up with romance (and often sex). Loving someone deflates romance – and opens the door to something so much more rewarding.
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Homosexuality: A Chance For Human Evolution
Gay people who have come out of the closet have one main evolutionary advantage over straight people: they have experienced a basic pattern of breaking from the family system, and this creates in them a template for truth-telling that can apply to all other areas of life. At some level they know firsthand what it feels like to be rejected and pathologized by the worst of the family, and because they know how to define a part of their identity in spite of it, they take one step closer to enlightenment.
Much as some modern parents disguise it, parents do not want gay children – for a variety of reasons. A gay child is both a threat to rigidly heterosexual social norms and a fly in the ointment of the spiritually blind status quo. Parents often consider a gay child to be a humiliation, taking his homosexuality to be a reflection – distorted or otherwise – of their parental errors or imperfection. A gay child is also less likely to create children, and thus is less bound to perpetuate the denial of the family system. This puts parents at risk, because a child who does not procreate breaks an infinitely long intergenerational pattern and thus lives that much closer to looking them in the eye and calling them on their lies and depravity.
But many, if not most, gay people fail to seize their opportunity to break away and tell the truth, and in so doing serve the lying norms of society. They spend their lives pretending to be straight, jumping into gay relationships that might as well be straight, adopting children, or often even consciously denying that they are gay at all and getting married to members of the opposite sex – and actually procreating. It is no surprise that many closeted or pseudo-straight gay men become such pillars of our troubled society, and are even sought after as husbands by many stunted women: they are the poster children of dissociation! Their arrested development is not their homosexuality, but their dissociation from their homosexuality due to the traumas they faced in a family and society that hated their difference.
Other gay people squander their gift by acting out the worst of their traumas. They disappear into soul-numbing addictions and into the deadly mazes of S&M, promiscuity, exhibitionism, and other sexual compulsions. This sets the stage for society mislabeling their trauma-based perversions as the essence of homosexuality itself. They become caricatures of their potential and mistake self-hatred for self-love. Society, in its own twisted way, secretly applauds this self-abuse because it gives the norm a group to despise and a group onto which it can project its own disavowed shadow.
Yet all of this denial of self by gay people masks a desire to finally be loved and witnessed and accepted by the rejecting family. But of course this will never happen, and it’s not because of sexual orientation, which is just a cover issue. It’s because the family, wherever it is in any degree of denial, cannot love anyone fully. The sick sides of the family will only love – in a tainted way – those who have a false self that reflects back the family’s lies.
In order to evolve, each person, regardless of sexual orientation, has to face the same issues. He has to face his traumas, feel his buried rage, and grieve what he lost – and what he might have become if he had been better nurtured. This may be harder in some ways for gay people because they were more hated as children and had to hide more of their true selves. It is crushingly painful to be raised in a world that doesn’t support or often even acknowledge one’s feelings, and instead pathologizes them. But if gay people can grow true and express every iota of who they really are, then our world needs them more than ever. They model something that everyone needs: a connection with and a public acknowledgement of our beautiful and disenfranchised self.
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Relationships: What Lies Underneath Them
People who are not fully enlightened use romantic relationships to hide from the truth. They want to bypass the painful healing process and disappear into false pleasure and false security. They desire either to find the perfect parent they never had or the perfect object onto whom they can project their unconscious rage at their parents – or both. They want someone to finally love them fully, understand them, take them under their wing, protect them, guide them, and be selfless with them. But this is impossible.
Only a fully enlightened person can love another completely. He can do this because he has learned to love himself completely. He would never tolerate being in an intimate relationship with someone not also fully enlightened, because it would be destructive to him. And no fully enlightened equal would ever ask that he meet their unresolved parental needs – firstly because they would no longer have any, and secondly, even if they did, it would not be appropriate to use an intimate for this purpose.
Truly harmonious and deeply satisfying relationships are only available for people who have resolved their deepest childhood conflicts. And until you have resolved your deepest childhood conflicts, your job is to learn how to be in an ideal relationship with yourself.
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Gandhi: A Damaged Man Way Ahead of His Time
Gandhi embodied courageous introspection and daring public expression of himself. His autobiography, though largely dull, is the work of a unusually self-reflective person. Gandhi was celibate for years and never shied away from speaking about its value, and was honest about his relationship with his wife and with his own sexual self.
Gandhi was a pioneer, but like all pioneers made major mistakes in his life. For starters, he had several children. Granted, he had them before he became particularly conscious, but regardless, he was a negligent father – and in his writings he agrees. He was not consistently present for his children, and literally abandoned them for several long stretches of time. And they suffered as a result.
Had he become aware of his lack of presence in their lives while they were still children, he should have radically changed his ways and devoted himself to them. This is true for all parents. No parent has any right to put himself before his child, except insofar as the parent is nurturing himself to become a better parent. Once a person has created a child becoming the ideal parent must become their life’s primary motive. If it is not then they do their child a grave disservice and never should have had them in the first place.
Later in Gandhi’s life he tested his celibacy by sleeping nude in the same bed with nude teenage girls – one of his favorites being his niece – who offered themselves up to him for the honor, and at times cuddled up to his nude self “for warmth.” Although he stated he “passed” the test and never laid a hand on one (despite the copious nocturnal emissions he wrote about having had at other times), this misses the point that he was abusing them anyway. It is abusive to treat teenage girls – or anyone – as sex objects in any form. It denies their value as spiritual human beings.
But the same thing had happened to Gandhi when he was young. He himself was sexually misused by his parents, who married him off at thirteen, throwing him into the disturbing world of adult sexuality. This clearly had a devastating effect on his sexuality, and most certainly led him to his twisted behaviors in later life, despite his rationales. This is true for everyone: people who do not fully acknowledge and resolve their early traumas will act them out in some way. An elderly therapist friend of mine refers to the repetition compulsion as “the most powerful force in the universe,” and from all I have witnessed, I do not doubt him.
Children are not ready for sex. Sex, if had at all, should be had only by enlightened adults. And Gandhi agrees. My paraphrase of his quote: “It may be possible that two adults can have healthy sexual intercourse, it’s just that I am not capable of it.” What he doesn’t see is that having sexual intercourse is not the only form of sex, and that there are many lessers forms of interaction that perpetuate the same dynamics as full-blown sex.
Gandhi never really broke from his parents. He idealized them both to the end, which blocked his anger at their betrayal. Granted, as a mature man he stood against child marriage and knew the reasons why, but he never took the final step of fully implicating his parents. Had he done so who knows what other levels of enlightenment he might have been able to achieve – and what damage it might have prevented him from inflicting on innocent others.
This said, Gandhi remained a man ahead of his times. He was humble, honest, and courageous to the best of his ability – as is everyone, in my experience – but Gandhi’s ability was exceptional. He took a bold stand behind the truth he found, and he pursued decades of inner experimentation to uncover more. He had his weaknesses, but he was a pioneer.
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A few references in case you’re curious:
1) William Shirer’s book “Gandhi: A Memoir.” (mentions Gandhi sleeping nude with young women)
2) Article #1 (mentions it further)
3) Article #2 (mentions it again)