Audio version read by Rev. Steven Lane Taylor, B.Msc. – “Intimacy and Spirituality”

There is a powerful relationship between sexuality and spirituality in the human psyche. Sexuality is not simply a strong biological urge; it has a spiritual reality. Down through the ages, mystics have known and taught that sexuality is the outer physical manifestation of a spiritual urge to have mystical union with God, or to reestablish an intimate relationship between the human soul and the eternal Spirit.

Certainly, through recently recorded time, sexuality has been degraded by the spiritually unaware. The need for reconnecting to God is so strong an urge in some, without an awareness of the real truth underlying their desire, they are often driven to the lowest forms of sexual expression.

This lack of awareness and low expression do not diminish the spiritual significance or the real spiritual truth underlying the relationship between sexuality and spirituality. The interesting thing is that often, the more people are driven by the sexual urge, the greater the need to reconnect to God. If these same people have a spiritual awakening and discover this, many of them could make great strides in their spiritual growth, awakening, and awareness in this lifetime.

Carl Jung, whom many believe was the greatest psychologist of the 20^th century, thought that the libido—something psychologists attributed solely to the sexual drive—was, in truth, the life force or urge to life itself. Mystics understand this urge to life itself as the urge to Universal Life, or God. As taught in schools of Tantric Yoga, this urge—at its highest level of human expression—can become a means to union with God or mystical enlightenment.

I have observed that most people experiencing higher states of consciousness through meditation were affected in terms of sexual stimulation in the physical sense. It was not uncommon for a person who was meditating for purely spiritual reasons to embarrassingly admit that their meditations were arousing them sexually. This can be readily understood by students of chakra forms of meditation, where the root chakra—the inner spiritual counterpart of the human reproduction system—is stimulated. In advanced stages of this kind of meditation, sexual energy may be sublimated into a purely spiritual force for the awakening of the entire chakra system to reach higher states of consciousness, eventually culminating in enlightenment, or union with God.

As previously stated, sexuality, as it is commonly practiced in the human experience, is the veiled attempt of an urge or inner prompting to reunite with God, or have mystical union with God. In human expression, it may vary in its higher expressions, such as love shared between two people.

Expressed in physical union, the expression of real heartfelt love between two people is an outer example of how wonderful the experience of union with God could be. As God is love—quite literally—sexuality can be a teacher of the inner love that exists between a person’s soul and one’s Creator. In fact, a measure of how real love may be between two people is whether the parties feel closer to God after intimacy, or further from God. The truer the love, the closer they feel to God. The further from true love they are, the more there is a feeling of emptiness after contact.

When two people who have loving feelings toward each other engage in sexual activity, there is an exchange of male and female energies. Since God manifests as both male and female energy, each is exchanging a part of God’s Presence within themselves with the other person. The experience can have even greater benefit if both parties are aware in their spiritual understanding of what can take place during intimacy where loving feelings exist.

Culmination, or orgasm in the sexual act, is the spiritual equivalent of union or merging with God on a mystical level. The ecstasy experienced is the human equivalent of divine union with God. If a person can feel so much through union with one other person, imagine what culmination with the Allness of God could be like. Actually, it is impossible to imagine, and those who have had mystical union with God find words totally inadequate for describing the profoundness of the experience.

The very act of sexuality can also serve as a release mechanism into a state of higher consciousness. In the immediate moments following culmination, there is a release of human tension, causing ultimate relaxation or a tendency to just let go and be. As a human being is a psycho-physical unit, the total release of the physical also creates a total release of the personal ego, thereby creating a consciousness that is open to being filled with higher awareness, up to, and perhaps including, union with God.

Sexuality and spirituality are two sides of the same coin of life. Whether this is recognized or not, that fact remains, and eventually—in some lifetime—every soul will come into conscious awareness of the profoundness of spirituality underlying sexuality.

Dr. Paul Leon Masters

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