Does God Have Orgasms?

Before I take up the alarming question of whether God has orgasms, I will begin with a story of two Martians. A spaceship from Mars has landed in New York City with the mission of studying the earth's inhabitants. The ship's commander turns to one of his crew and says, "Find somebody on the street and ask him what makes humans happiest in all the world." Then he turns to a second crew member and says, "You find somebody on the street and ask him what makes humans un-happiest in all the world."

"Yes, sir," the two Martians say. They depart, and return in an hour.

"Well, what do you have to report?" the commander asks the first Martian.

"Sir, I found a human male in his mid-30s coming out of an office building on Fifth Avenue. I asked him what made him happiest in the world, and he said, 'Sex.'"

"Very good," the commander says. He turns to the second Martian. "And what do you have to report?" he asks.

"Sir, I also found a human male in his mid-30s coming out of an office building on Fifth Avenue. I asked him what made him unhappiest in the world, and he said, 'Sex.'"

"What? That makes no sense. Give me your notes," the commander orders. He scrutinizes the papers his two scouts hand to him. "You bunglers, here's the problem. You both asked the same man."

I think of this as a very plausible story. If you had to define human beings to aliens who knew nothing about us, we could well be described as the only creatures on the planet who are ambivalent about sex. Sex is as much a source of guilt, shame and secrecy as it is of joy, delight and creativity. Sex drove Jack the Ripper and Picasso; it has been expressed in Michelangelo's sonnets and in obscene messages on the Internet. Sex is a necessary biological function that many people rarely engage in; at the same time it is a recreational function, freed of its biological necessity, that millions of people engage in out of sheer pleasure.

To resolve this dichotomy, human beings constantly look for answers, because living with ambiguity isn't comfortable. Besides turning to therapists, friends, family members and the next guy in the locker room, people seek answers in some version of spirituality. Which in essence means that they want to know, "What does God think about sex?" Most of the time, it seems that she is against it. Puritanism is, after all, both a religious sect and a synonym for rigid sexual repression. Two thousand years ago Saint Paul wrote that it was better to marry than to burn—in essence, he threw up his hands in exasperation, saying, "Well, if you people have to...." The Christian West hasn't progressed much further, it often seems, in shedding spiritual light on sex. Since the days of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, conventional religion has been severely criticized as a primary source of sexual guilt and shame, and in these latter days of sexual scandals involving a huge number (if still a minority) of the clergy, no one with spiritual authority has stepped forward to strike a blow against repression and guilt, much less to celebrate sex as a sacred act.

These are dark days for sex and spirituality. Therefore, I would like to offer three shocking propositions:

Sex is itself spiritual, because flesh and spirit are one.

God is in every orgasm.

The creative energy of the universe is sexual.

I do not offer these statements as a sexual rebel or social renegade. These are intimate truths that I have worked toward in my own life; they are offered to anyone who wants to abandon the confusion of conventional wisdom and find the truth for himself or herself. Truth isn't handed down from a mountaintop—it is a process. You discover it by walking a path. In every religion this path leads to God, but at the same time it leads to love. Therefore, trying to discover the truth means confronting God's love, and sex is part of that love. In my view, there is no way around it.

Let me put forward my three statements one at a time:

Sex is itself spiritual, because flesh and spirit are one.

I cannot accept a world in which flesh and spirit are divided. A God of love doesn't punish us for having bodies; in fact, he created our bodies. To a skeptic, the word spirit has no concrete definition, and therefore asserting that flesh and spirit are one makes little sense. By "spirit" I mean the life force, the "breath of God," as the Bible calls it. Spirit is the difference between an inert lump of sugar and a living human body. Both contain complex carbon-based chemicals, but the sugar circulating in every cell of your body is animated; it is far from inert.

Spirit is life, and therefore it is love. When two people unite in love, a spiritual contact is made. You can ignore this fact and turn sex into a loveless and therefore lifeless enterprise. But listen to the words of a medieval mystic named Symeon the New Theologian (in Stephen Mitchell's beautiful translation):

For if we genuinely love him, we wake up inside Christ's body where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as him, and he makes us, utterly, real.

If these sensuous lines don't sound like theology as you are used to hearing it, imagine the shock they aroused among the Greek Orthodox community a thousand years ago. Symeon flouted the conventional wisdom that the Holy Ghost was above and apart from human flesh; he perceived spirit as a penetrating, transforming love, a merging that turns every cell into God. The sensuous intimacy of such an idea still has the power to provoke controversy. When Symeon declares, "I move my foot, and at once/ He appears like a flash of lightning," Christ's manifestation reminds me of orgasm, which is also a penetrating and sudden explosion of love within flesh.

It's no surprise that Symeon paid for his words with exile, spending his final years in a remote Turkish village, well away from the religious mainstream of his day and roundly condemned by church authorities. But now we can hear the voice of a saint in his vision of how "everything/that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful/maimed, ugly, irreparably/damaged, is in him transformed/and recognized as whole, as lovely/and radiant in his light." For many people today, the words dark, ugly, shameful and damaged apply to sex, and to transform these feelings into joy and fulfillment is the goal of spirituality.

Symeon's voice sounds like the voice of a saint, but I believe his vision applies to us all—we, are lovers in both flesh and spirit who are trying to "awaken as the beloved/in every last part of our body." A thousand years ago a lover of God was not permitted to speak reverently of the body, because that violated the dogmatic belief that the body was wicked and corrupt. In our age, the opposite belief has more or less turned to dogma: The act of love is basically physical, to the exclusion of the spirit. In either case the fusion of spirit and body has been missed.

Yet at moments love creates a surprising, unexpected joy that no dogma can hold back. The touch of your beloved or simply the sight of her can seem suddenly amazing, appearing like lightning, just as Symeon says. This joy penetrates the heart as if it were from nowhere, because love is inherent in life itself.

God is in every orgasm.

If orgasm is purely physical, it has no spiritual meaning. But when it brings a burst of joy and love, it has the potential to contain God. This is the kind of statement that easily arouses reactions of fear and hatred. If you have taken God out of sex and made her aloof and pure (so that sex can remain earthly and dirty), then your credo is one of separation. You believe that humans are fallen and presumably that they will remain fallen as long as sex exists. This is a shame-based view of human nature, and I am not here to try to abolish it. Every person is entitled to his own beliefs in these matters.

On the other hand, love's journey is about getting out of shame and guilt. Does God really want us to stamp out and condemn part of our nature—a part shared by every living creature—before we feel loved by him? Three thousand years ago the ancient scriptures of India declared of human beings that we are "born in bliss, sustained in bliss and return to bliss after we depart." Bliss, or Ananda in Sanskrit, is more than a feeling of joy. It is our true nature. God is bliss, and in her image so are we. Therefore, the undeniable bliss of sexuality is itself divine in origin.

There is no doubt that sexual pleasure can be cheapened, degraded, corrupted, turned into perversion and stripped of love. But if you can look past that, isn't it possible that sex is a place where people in fact feel free, open and truly themselves? Almost everything else in modern life is encumbered by rules and boundaries.

Does God Have Orgasms?

Two people have a hard time meeting soul-to-soul today. But in bed there is, or can be, soul contact. God is potentially in every orgasm because God wants us to be free, open and joyful. When two people unite in love, they are offering their portion of God to each other.

The creative energy of the universe is sexual.

Being born in India, I was not raised on the same metaphysics taught in the West, and the Judeo-Christian portrayal of God as a solitary male sitting up in the sky runs counter to thousands of years of wisdom, primarily from the East, that makes God all-inclusive, both male and female. The union of these two aspects is an act of cosmic passion from which the universe is born; therefore the whole cosmos came about as a sexual creation.

In spiritual terms there is only one marriage that has ever taken place: the union of God and God. In India the male deity (Siva) is, often shown with his beloved consort (Shakti). When these two poles meet, passion flies between them. But this passion must be a form of playfulness, for God knows in reality that male and female are one. There is only one divine purpose behind the division of God into two sexes, and that is the joy of sexual union.

Sexual union imitates divine creation. What you express through your passion is God's love for God.

The difference between a divine love affair and an earthly one is the difference between need and play. Some amount of need enters into every relationship in the material world—survival is too pressing an issue for us to feel that our life is pure play. But in spirit you only play. Your purpose is not to survive but to express every grain of passion that love arouses in you. You were created to create, and what you use in your creation is sexual energy.

The psychological link between sexual energy and art is by now well established, and we are not shocked by the lusty painter or sculptor. In ancient India this connection was much broader. It was held that the life force, or Prana, entered the human body on seven levels. These levels were envisioned as wheels, or chakras, aligned up and down the spine. The bottom three chakras, approximately situated at the tip of the spine, the genitals and the solar plexus, are concerned with survival, sexual drive and will. The top three chakras, at the crown of the head, between the eyebrows and at the base of the throat, concern knowledge of God, intuition and creativity. Between these two regions is the heart chakra, which is meant to unite the higher and lower energies through love.

All of us find ourselves caught between two worlds, striving to make the higher and lower energies meet. This is the spiritual marriage that the path to love makes possible. Whether I want to or not, I act out of my lower chakras, like everybody else. There are mornings when I furiously want to see my enemies destroyed; sexual insecurity, loneliness and deprivation have been as much a part of my life as anyone else's. But the answer is not revenge or retreat into survival mode; nor is it pretending to be sanctified and above such base concerns. The answer to man's double nature, high and low, lies in the heart. We are meant to unite ourselves through love.

In my cynical moments, I am tempted to think of America as a society determined to live out of the two lowest chakras, survival and sex. Incredible displays of violence and aggression are considered a normal reaction in this country. Far more conflicts seem to be ended with a bullet than with compassion or forgiveness. When the two lower chakras are activated—which means when they are triggered by fear—people cannot see beyond survival. Sex becomes a matter of my woman, my orgasm, my right to treat everyone else with no love whatever. It is frightening to put oneself forward as a spiritual person in such an environment, and even more difficult to follow sex from its lower expressions to higher ones that our culture has not taught us about.

Hope belongs to the upper chakras, for as violent and irrational as humans can be, we are also the only creatures who understand God, who make art, who intuit the truth. To me, there is sexual energy in the Sermon on the Mount as well as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for both express spirit through a unique creation. To someone who can tap the higher energies of the creative force, there is no question of attack, repression, guilt or shame. Life contains too much joy and freedom to waste it out of fear and threat.

•

No one deserves to be burdened with the phrase "the perfect couple," but Marilyn and Kirk come close. Now in their late 40s, they have successfully worked in the same small magazine business for 12 years while raising a family and remaining in love with each other. "We share some values that keep us real," Marilyn explained. "We treat each other as equals. We make sure we communicate and don't hold things in. We try to be sensitive to each other's feelings. It's a miracle to get that far nowadays, when relationships have become a disposable commodity."

I agreed. The only trouble was the question that followed. "So if the sex isn't quite there anymore—well, almost not there at all—isn't that OK?" It was Kirk who had asked the question. Marilyn looked away, and though I heard the insecurity in his voice, I couldn't tell if she was as sad as I imagined her to be.

"Are you asking me if it's n normal not to have sex after 20 years of marriage?" I asked. "Normal is whatever makes both of you feel happy. Having sex once a day or once a year both fall into the statistical norm, as far as that goes."

"We don't miss it," Marilyn said. "I mean, our intimate life is private, and if this is what we've agreed on——" Her voice trailed away, and this time the sadness was unmistakable.

"There's nothing wrong with either of us," Kirk interjected defensively. "We're just not kids anymore. I mean, there's only so much fantasy you can live on, and a lot of other things become important. We almost have to pencil sex into our schedules."

"So no one's complaining," I said. At this they both sat back, not quite agreeing or disagreeing. I met Marilyn and Kirk as patients years ago in Boston; they later attended meditation weekends and seminars on healing. We had run into each other on a retreat in Colorado. The fact that sex came up at all surprised us—clearly some things were boiling beneath the surface.

"Let's reframe the situation," I suggested. "Let's forget that you two have ever had sex. If today were the first day you decided to sleep together, what would you want the sex to be like?"

Marilyn laughed nervously; Kirk kept quiet. After a moment, neither had replied.

"Your silence says a lot, doesn't it?" I said.

"You mean that we don't know what good sex is anymore?" Marilyn asked anxiously.

"Not at all," I replied. "It says you are at a crossroads. Sex is a natural energy. We shape it according to what we want it to do. Think of sexual energy as a kind of modeling clay that the psyche can mold any way it wants. What do most people want? Pleasure, obviously, but also other things—reassurance, closeness, power, thrills, release. Hundreds of needs get expressed through one orgasm, and that is the common thread— need. People use sex to fulfill needs, and when these needs come to an end, the sex often isn't there anymore, because its foundation, its reason for existence, has vanished."

The couple looked more relaxed. They sensed that this wasn't going to be a session about fixing themselves or apportioning blame. "I think you're right," Kirk said. "I'm very competitive, always have been, and when I first had sex, I compared myself with other men—I couldn't help it. I had to know how I was doing, whether I had it right. This went on through college, until I got married and my insecurities settled down."

"You're coming from an honest place if you can say that," I remarked. "Performance is a tremendous drive in most men, and the anxiety aroused by not performing well exposes a huge amount of nee—the need to have power, the need for approval, the need to be as good as everybody else. In the past ten years performance has taken a new twist. Women have begun to insist on their right to have an orgasm, and this has burdened men with the need to perform for them as well. But taking responsibility for two orgasms instead of one has only added to the anxiety."

"I knew that Kirk had to perform well to feel good about himself," Marilyn said. "But that's what I mean about equality. I told him that my feelings, including my orgasmic feelings, were not up to him. He was the object of my desire but not in charge of it. My needs weren't the same as his. I much more wanted to feel that I belonged, that he desired me, that I could count on being loved."

I sat back, looking at these two open, honest people. By any account they should still have been having mutually enjoyable sex—but they weren't. "I think you are remarkable in not using sex for the kinds of basic needs most people bring to bed," I said. "A marriage can last decades with both people repeating the same rituals over and over. Sex gets stuck because it never finds a new use. So again, if you had just decided to go to bed for the first time, what would you want sex to be like?"

This time I didn't wait for the awkward pause. "The reason you don't know how to use sex in a new way is cultural—none of us were taught much about the fact that sex can have a spiritual dimension. Beyond basic need, beyond pleasure, sex has tremendous untapped potential. Its higher purpose is to take you outside the boundaries of time and space to a place where you are love. Instead of feeling anxious and insecure about yourself, which sex brings out in so many people, you can use sex to reassure yourself of your reality."

I realized that these people had never heard sex described in this way, and therefore I went back to basics. Everyone has a deep need to love and be loved. The drive toward love is built into our genes, as is the instinctual drive for sex. The difficulty is that we have kept these two fundamental energies on different levels:

Love is sacred, overseen by God, and not of this world.

Sex is profane, overseen by someone other than God, and too much of this world.

I won't say, for the sake of symmetry, that love is overseen by God and sex is overseen by the devil, though countless people, including many devoutly religious people, believe that. I prefer to say that sex has been left out of God's hands, which, of course, is a logical impossibility, because nothing is outside the range of God if he is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. The separation of sex and love makes no sense; it is our own guilty and ashamed minds that have forced such obviously connected energies into separate compartments. The seven chakras demark not seven boxes but a single flow of life. But we don't bring this flow with us when we have sex.

"If you brought all of yourself to bed in the sexual act," I said, "sex would be incredible because it would be complete. You would not be just the performer, the pleasure seeker, the dutiful spouse or the insecure seeker of approval. Those are all fragments born of need. The complete you is far different: It uses sex for passion; not just passion in the sense of arousal, but a passion for life. Passion is who you are; you've lost it only because you've squeezed yourself into boxes. You see yourself as this package of flesh and bones limited to a brief slice of time and a tiny sliver of space. That isn't you, not as created by God. You are power, intelligence, awareness, creativity. Your potential is infinite, and yet you bring a fraction of this potential to the sexual act. Don't you realize that every sexual union is an invitation to the cosmic dance?"

"But what does that mean?" Kirk asked. "As beautiful as this sounds, what do we do?"

Naturally that is the question that always comes up, because releasing sexual energy into new regions of expression is exactly what people can't figure out how to do. My answer is to fall in love again, for if encounters with spirit are rare in our society, being in love isn't. Start here; this is the beginning of your path. In a different age, the most fleeting of infatuations had spiritual meaning; the nearness of God in the beloved was taken seriously. Since the advent of modern psychology with Freud, however, falling in love has been reduced to a temporary flight of fancy, if not insanity; the sense of ecstasy that is part of falling in love isn't considered realistic. We are told to accept the temporary nature of romance. This has meant tossing out as illusion some of the most remarkable things that happen when you fall in love.

"How did you feel when you were first infatuated with each other?" I asked Marilyn and Kirk. "Put yourself in that space again, and remember. Didn't you feel special and privileged? Wasn't there a sense of wonder that you had been picked, out of so many people, to be loved? With this sense of uniqueness came the feeling that you were safe and protected, that nothing would ever hurt you again. And in your most rapturous moments, I'm sure you felt immortal and invulnerable—your love would last forever."

"But we aren't unique and immortal," Kirk protested. "Those feelings pass."

"That's because the opening closed," I said. "What lovers feel is real—it is a glimpse of spiritual truth. In God's eyes you are unique and privileged. Your existence is immortal; you exist to express the truth of your soul. Our society permits us few opportunities to grasp these facts, and falling in love is one of them."

I suggested that orgasm is a return to that status of spiritual privilege. In everyday life romance fades; the fantasies are replaced by mundane reality. It's hard to be a god or goddess when the baby needs changing. But in sex we can recapture the moment of openness when freedom, timelessness and uniqueness were ours. In place of Freud's "projected fantasy," love might make us as immortal and invulnerable, as special and safe as passionate lovers feel.

"Let me put it simply," I said. "You have a choice in what to do with sex, including to ignore it altogether. But no matter how much passion has faded, you can always choose to make sex what it really is—a blessing. The sense of delight, uniqueness and blessing felt by lovers has its own reality, but you must find it within. Love and spirit are both states of inner truth. I am proposing that the two can be joined."

But how do you fall in love with somebody you've known for years? In the Odes of Solomon, it says that God can make "all things new; you have showed me all things shining." You cannot take old, stale love and make it new without the spiritual ingredient. In spiritual terms, two people fall in love because they suddenly see with new eyes. Through a magical shift in perception, an utterly ordinary person becomes fascinating, an everyday pair of eyes bewitches, a voice that sounds not unusual to other people sings with mysterious music. Saints have a way of seeing these things clearly, and Saint Augustine said, "I am in love with love." Exactly—to fall in love anew, you must fall in love with love.

How does this happen? The first and most important requirement is openness. "You're both incredibly lucky," I remarked to Marilyn and Kirk, "because you haven't shut down the delicate process of love. You still notice each other and want to be sensitive to the signals the other gives off. Most people have shut down these signals, turning personal encounters into tiny rituals, so that every day is basically a repetition of the day before. Spirit isn't present, not because it isn't there but because people have turned their backs on it."

•

Every day we all feel the faint impulse to express love. But too often these impulses get quashed. It's so easy to hold back the gesture of appreciation, the gentle word, the soft touch, the special look. What does this indicate? It indicates that we have turned outward, seeking fulfillment in external things such as career, status and money. The mind is so geared to these externals that we may forget a simple truth: Nothing can substitute for love. The reason that the scriptures say "God is love" is that love is the ultimate power in the universe. It is our reason for being.

The fading of sex is always a fading of love.

Love doesn't stay around if you don't trust it; it doesn't grow if you don't nurture it. So to unite sex and spirit isn't a choice. If you want to live in the light of love, you must face the spiritual meaning of sex, draw it out, build upon it. The alternative is that sex becomes a stimulus, albeit a pleasant one, and stimuli always fade. You cannot give yourself enough thrilling orgasms to make up for the absence of love; this, and nowhere else, is where the light is.

If you doubt the spiritual significance of sex, consider the following list of experiences (freely adapted from my book The Path to Love) that many people have during the sexual act:

A flowing feeling throughout the body.

A glow in the heart before, during or after orgasm.

A sense of expansion, as if you extend beyond your body.

Feeling that you have merged with your beloved.

Lightness in the region of your heart.

Seeing blue or white light around your body or around your beloved's.

A carefree feeling, laughter, the lifting of anxiety and of daily worries.

A feeling of weightlessness, as if you might float away.

A feeling of ecstasy or bliss.

Feeling blessed or connected to God.

A penetrating sweetness.

The realization, "I am love."

Any or all of these could occur during orgasm or before or after. Look over the list and mark those experiences you've had personally. They aren't accidental; they indicate that you have learned to use sexual energy to create higher states of awareness. If you have had certain experiences only once, these are at the envelope of your inner growth. The experiences you have had more often, especially if recently, constitute the growth you have been integrating into your loving personality.

Love is the key word here, for these aren't supernatural or paranormal experiences. They are the same intimations of spirit reported by saints in their ecstasies and by spiritual masters of every age and country. In Kirk's case, he said that a sensation of lightness had occurred several times in the past, as well as a sense of blissful love that went beyond his personal emotions for his partner.

"This is your link to spirit," I explained. "Whether you are conscious of it or not, you are walking the path to love—all of us are. What impels you is pleasure, delight, yearning. You want to bathe in the supreme love of the divine, and for an instant, orgasm gives you that experience. But the fulfillment is brief and fleeting, only a glimpse of the real thing. The real thing isn't so different, however. Union with God is timeless and blissful, beyond the confines of the body, all-enveloping. Here on earth we taste of these things in our flesh and blood—that is why we are here."

Which brings us to the question of God's orgasms. Does she have them? What are they like? I hope it is no longer so alarming to suggest that the big bang was as orgasmic for God as the pun suggests. Creation surrounds us in infinite complexity, but within is a tiny seed of sweetness, the ecstasy of love. If this seed were not present, we would have no reason to follow love as passionately as we all do. Our lapses into nonlove are grievous; the violence we do against the spirit of life is cause for deep shame. But there is an inevitability to the union of flesh and spirit, because the universe is God's way of showing his spirit.

We have deprived sex of the one thing it cannot do without: its spiritual dimension.

Our longing for love actually reflects God's longing for us. I look out my window and see the splash of flowers against the sky, and in each flower there is more than my eyes can see. There is sun and rain, wind and rainbow. There is the history of life and the eternal flow that brought creation to this point, where my life and the life of a flower can merge. We do so in longing for each other, I think. God wants me to see this flower as much as I want to look upon it. One aspect of God feasts in delight on another.

How much truer this must be between a man and a woman. Two portions of God are feasting upon each other, exchanging delight in their existence, and yet knowing deep down that their existence is one. The rest is play. God likes to play at seducing herself; she likes to peek into a pair of beautiful eyes and pretend they are someone else's. In reality there is no one else. Falling in love is actually a temporary state of spiritual liberation, a glimpse of who you really are in God. The ecstatic feelings that flow between lovers, their sense of being uniquely protected, their belief in a timeless state of being— all these are spiritual realities. Indeed, if we consult the Kama Sutra (which means "the teaching about desire"), we discover that orgasm itself is a release into a state that is timeless, free of ego and totally natural. Spirit and flesh meet in a moment of release that represents a glimpse of immortality.

The great Sufi poet Rumi put it much more elegantly when he declared,

By God, when you see your beauty You'll be the idol of yourself.

To be spiritual, you have to be everything that you are, omitting nothing. Within everyone there is light and shadow, good and evil, love and hate. The play of these opposites is what constantly moves life forward; the river of life expresses itself in all its changes. Sex between men and women can be the ugliest, most shameful and impersonal action imaginable, yet that will never tarnish its spiritual promise. Bring yourself—nothing less and nothing more—to the bed of your beloved. Let the love flower within the sex; win the jewel of trust that endures beyond everything. Meet in honesty, let tears and laughter come, until there is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. Then your love will take on the grandeur that marks every great lover and every saint.