Sex, Romance, and Conscious Evolution

Happy Valentine’s Day! Here are two excerpts and an audio and a video clip from a two-hour talk I gave a couple of weeks ago on a subject we’re all fascinated by: sex, romantic love, and its relationship to spiritual liberation. I can hardly think of a subject more pertinent for anyone who claims they want to be free, and who is committed to the noble task of conscious evolution.

In postmodern culture, there is no realm of the sacred. There’s nothing higher than the individual. So for too many of us, the only source of intimacy and connectedness is found in and through the sexual embrace. When our bodies connect, there is a temporary experience of consciousness beyond the prison of the isolated, alienated self-sense. One of the ecstatic thrills of the sexual experience is that there is a temporary transcending of ego boundaries. It’s a taste of freedom, and it’s also a rare moment of connection, intimacy, transparency, unguardedness, and vulnerability. This is why, for the postmodern self, the whole area of sexuality and sexual intimacy is so important. It has become, for too many of us, the last bastion of intimacy and connectedness. It has become the realm of the sacred.

For those of us who are committed to the path and practice of Evolutionary Enlightenment, the perspective I’ve just been describing has almost nothing to do with the reality of our day-to-day experience. Why? Because we share the kind of intimacy that comes from knowing that we are committed to the same higher purpose—a kind of profound connectedness that has nothing to do with the sexual and romantic bond. In fact, it is a kind of intimacy that is infinitely deeper than most people ever experience in the sexual embrace. And that changes the picture quite a bit. It changes our expectation of what we are looking for in the romantic and sexual experience. When you are no longer starving for connection, when you are experiencing profound, non-sexual intimacy on a daily basis with many other individuals, when your natural state is one of abiding in deep connectedness, the expectations you place on your sexual relationship are infinitely less. You might be expecting to have a sexual experience, or a romantic experience, but you’re not going to be trying to make a spiritual experience out of a sexual experience. And that changes everything. I’m convinced that a big reason this arena of life is a source of so much pain and suffering comes down to the unrealistic expectations we place on it.

When these exaggerated expectations are reduced, something new becomes possible between couples. What would that look like? Ease of being. Space. Freedom. Peace. Those are very unusual qualities to be looking for in a sexual relationship. But that’s what I look for: the absence of conflict. It’s a relief, because what you are expecting is reasonable. You’re not expecting the other to be your spiritual fulfillment, your emotional gratification, and the source of your perfect happiness. You can breathe again.

The arena of sexuality and romance is one of the easiest places to get lost and confused. This is of the utmost importance to understand for those individuals who are serious about higher spiritual development, and who are personally committed to the evolution of consciousness and culture. That being said, it is also a potentially joyful and liberating part of the human experience. And it’s an area of life that we definitely don’t want to avoid or repress, because as we all already know, that creates its own enormous problems. So I’ve always tried to create circumstances in which individuals would be so spiritually enlightened and would have so much integrity that they would be able to perform the near-miraculous feat of embracing this challenging domain of life without creating any karmic result. What that means is simply that sexual and personal intimacy would not become a source of pain, confusion, suffering, or a fundamental distraction from our highest aspirations.

Usually, our sexual and romantic relationships are the domain of the status quo. Why? Because that’s where we are biologically and culturally conditioned to create safety, comfort, and security. So for those of us who are conscious evolutionaries, whose highest aspiration is to create the future, the goal in this area of life would be that our relationship would never become a place where the personal and cultural status quo that we are striving to transcend is protected. It should never be a refuge for the old. And that is a very radical shift.

Audio: Beyond the Status Quo (4 min)