In The Realm Of The Senses: The Psychology of Ecstasy in Erotic & Religious Life For Rina “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.” - Henry Miller Introduction When God died in 1882, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asked whether the greatness of this deed would be too great for us. Jung thought it was. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” And, indeed, in the West we have been unable to fill the moral and spiritual void left by God's absence, turning our eyes away from the heavens, and narrowing our focus of concern towards the self. On a global level, societies continue to advance. We often focus on the negative aspects of life, on miseries that remain, and sometimes forget the enormous improvements made in, for example, healthcare, educational, technological and living standards, the spread of representative democracy and international discourse. Furthermore, the argument can be made that these gains have not happened in spite of self-interest and industrial capitalism, but because of them. That said, such advances have been accompanied, in the industrial world, by an erosion of environmental and humanistic values. The pertinent question, then, becomes whether economic progress and humanism can coexist, or whether the former precludes the latter. As many civilisations have flourished without science, it seems likely, with a balance of technological progress and primary values, we could optimise fulfilment and well-being within society, and that technology in itself needn’t detract from the timeless values taught to us by the earth itself – which, for the purposes of this paper, will include an exploration of the experience of having a body-conscious, particularly in relation to erotic pleasure. Religious Belief Religious beliefs have been shown to be complex enabling mechanisms for survival, to ensure the preservation and influence of their leaders and practitioners in both a superstitious and a literal sense. Human predisposition to religious belief has formed an integral part of society throughout the ages. The act of faith is embedded within the human psyche. We could even go as far as to say that Humans would rather invest in superstitious beliefs than face a mortal existence void of purpose. Human life follows a fairly predictable set of stages and, no matter how much we like to think we're acting freely, our aspirations, choices and behaviours are governed by predetermined biological norms and physiological predispositions. Our species follows a cycle of very subtle and very complex - but ultimately very common - behavioural responses that are blindly replicated from one generation to the next. The mental faculties themselves conform to rigid predictable patterns. The intellect is limited in its understanding of itself, reality and our place in the universe. But these characteristics needn't be thought of as limiting factors, so much as traits that define us. After all, we must live - even if we do not know how to live. The question, then, becomes not one of freedom, but of fulfilment within the range of behaviours, sensations and judgements by which our species is defined. If we are simply perpetuating life, even if whilst doing so we make advances within society, the question we always come back to is: What is the purpose of my life? How should I live? What should I do? What is it all really for? Defining “Value” Within Society Instead of living in conviviality with our natural surroundings and each other, in the last century we have seen a shrinking of concern towards the self and one’s immediate future. Technology per se cannot be held to blame, but our estrangement from the natural rhythms of the world can. If we are to reach fulfilment as individuals, it seems likely that a sea-change, not only in societal behaviours but in individual perspective, would be required. We would have to learn to look beyond our own immediate cravings and fears and moral orientation and unpick the very fabric of society based on some new “art of living”. If we were to move towards fulfilment as a species, we would have to relinquish control, not merely on this more personal level, but also on a wider value-based level. This would include, but not be limited to, affording rights to the earth itself and assigning value to the non-human world. So far only Ecuador and, just last month, Colombia have formally recognised such a right, including it within their respective constitutions. (Though, tellingly, its practical applications in Ecuador remain unsatisfactory to many, including some indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation.) Sexual Bonding In addition to a re-thinking of our moral landscape, in order to reach fulfilment a shift in our sexual orientation might be required. As Edward Wilson points out in On Human Nature, sexual pleasure “has little if anything to do with reproduction. It has everything to do with bonding.” Wilson illustrates the numerous ways in which human sexual behaviour is inefficient as a strictly reproductive act (a large investment of time, energy, resources and risk - from a Darwinian standpoint, mammalian sexual reproduction (as opposed to, say, asexual reproduction) has evolved to create diversity within a species) and shows that, in terms of human fulfilment, the act of giving and receiving sexual pleasure serves to create a deep bond between individuals. The bond created by sexual love and the emotional satisfaction of the family unit is, in the words of Wilson, “based on enabling mechanisms in the physiology of the brain that have been programmed to some extent through the genetic hardening of this compromise... Love and sex do indeed go together.” It is based on this idea of sexual pleasure as a bond-forming mechanism, that we'll consider whether, by enriching our sexual experiences, we can nourish that part of the psyche that religion once sought to appease. Christian Romanticism Whilst they are intrinsic human behaviours, sex and love vary according to culture and generation. We know now that romance and monogamy are not intrinsic human behaviours, they are geographically-dependent social constructs. Human beings require social stability (acceptance, purpose, order) in order to feel fulfilled and at home on the earth. Beyond the communal aspect of fulfilment, humans look to the skies and seek to understand the strangeness of this being alive. Like an all-loving spouse, God provided a shelter for our soul and answers to life's most fundamental questions. Whilst there are aspects of love that cannot be arrived at through the physical, there are others which can be arrived at in no other way. Eroticism is not merely a form of gaining pleasure: it cleanses us. Love is the root, eroticism the flower. In the eyes of a lover, something carnal is transformed into something beautiful, in the same way that God cleanses our animistic moral guilt. In His eyes, as in those of a faithful lover, we are accepted for who we are. Our very existence is affirmed through the presence and unconditional acceptance of the other and, along with it, comes the certainty of belonging. We begin to worship the source of this light, holding it in the highest regard until, finally, we are unable to survive without it. Crystallisation There will of course come a time when we have to let go of that which we love most in the world - that woman, that place, that memory. Only then will we fully understand how deeply and irrevocably we had become attached. But we only tend to realise this when we are old, and by then it’s too late. Anyone who has ever fallen in love will be familiar with that feeling, in the early stages of seduction, when a feeling of attraction begins to swell into desire, fascination, and finally infatuation, as, gradually, imperceptibly, the object of our love becomes more and more beautiful to us and the imperfections disappear. Stendhal likened this process to the crystallisation of a twig left in a salt mine that, over time, becomes a beautiful bough adorned with crystals. A similar process can be noted in a religious devotee’s relationship with God. The way we perceive our love-object loses all objectivity and, in our eyes, they are unquestionably great, to the point where we endow them with illusory characteristics and believe that no other version is as great as mine. Such is the intensity of feeling, such is the obsession with which we are attracted to this perfect being, that we are unable to reasonably consider other people’s views about my God, my lover, my twig. “They are deluded! They do not understand the beauty and greatness of Him as I do. They do not see it, that is why they talk like they do.” The key to the relationship comes when the loved-one begins to reciprocate, and we experience the pleasantness of gaining the loved one’s interest. When this happens, and one feels delight and elation, there is no turning back. Initially there was a feeling of great hope, a fear of rejection, as though my very soul hung in the balance. And now that I experience this feeling of being loved and accepted, my attraction solidifies, and I covet the love-object and need to have it as my own. I never want this feeling to end! It is how the relationship develops after the initial crystallisation that is important in determining the health of the bond: will there be mutual respect and understanding and the couple be open and sharing, or will the relationship be limited to extensions of these early superficial stages of desire that, later, inevitably wane as the crystals begin to fall away? We can see that love, as Dante put it, is merely “an accident of substance.” The veils do not hide the beauty - they create it. It is during these early stages of atavistic desire, when a man sees a woman and endows her with all kinds of mysterious perfections, that she ought to submit to him for the utmost physical pleasure. It is during these early stages of sexual attraction that the bonds of love are formed.As Norman Mailer observed: “there is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.” The Neurosis and Ecstasy of Religion Here we will consider two kinds of religious ecstasy, that both have a clear parallel in personal love-relationships: one happens suddenly in the form of a revelation, the other happens slowly over time and involves a more subtle surrendering and devotion. The root of both religious and romantic devotion is fundamentally the same: seeking happiness and completion in another being because we cannot find it alone. Whereas love is a natural response (we are social beings), faith (as an aberration of our intrinsic propensity towards seeking to understand the universe) is not. The parallels between the two kinds of love mentioned above may be obvious: in romantic relationships, we arrive at love, firstly, through moments of intense sexual feeling - specifically the orgasm - and, also, in a more gradual way, by developing a relationship based on trust and sharing. The characteristics of the first kind of revelatory ecstasy bear markedly similar characteristics in both religious and erotic instances: that feeling of a “little death”, of being outside one's own body, sensing a great universal presence, of feeling at one with the world; of being cleansed; a feeling of closeness to another being. The second form of ecstasy comes, in religious life, in the form of the close relationship with God that is developed over many years and contains the subtle mysteries. The crucial difference is that religious devotion is a one-directional construct of the imagination, arrived at through a combination of metaphysical fantasy and blind faith; whereas erotic devotion is an organic connection that seeks the metaphysical through the sensory realm of the body-conscious and the non-fantastical mechanisms of the imagination: seeing and being seen, touching and being touched. For Freud, religion was merely a matter of wishful thinking and a way to combat psychological turmoil. In order to satisfy our basic needs and desires, the mind begins to create images, idols, beliefs. As an extension of this, the ritualistic nature of religious activity is a compulsive-obsessive neurosis that Freud called the “universal obsessional neurosis”. Freud argued that religion arises from a fear of a chaotic an unordered world, a view that is now shared by many anthropologists and historians. For Freud, rather than save us, God made us sick, for we invested our faith in an illusion that had no basis in reality or reason. Religious belief functions as a form of psychological consolation. Our belief in a supernatural protector serves as a buffer from our fear of nature, just as the belief in an afterlife serves as a buffer from our fear of death. Religious fanatics should only be deemed free to believe whatever they wish, without receiving scorn and ridicule, if they have first critically examined their beliefs within the wider context of history and psychology. Most have not done so and, more commonly, have been indoctrinated from an early age and are therefore unable to distinguish blind faith from devotion. They accept the teachings of their ancestors, as questioning them has become ingrained in their psyches as an unacceptable and unnecessary act. If for the sake of argument we can suppose that God does indeed not exist (the state's means of controlling the lower classes; the nature of the rhetoric surrounding belief i.e. it is not permitted to question the Highest Being even if He cannot be conceived of or explained; the God of the Gaps; the human psyche´s need to attach itself to something at once beyond me yet myself - what Freud called the human's “sensation of eternity” etc.) then we arrive at two conclusions about the human propensity for Faith: that belief in an illusion is unhealthy in so far as it distances us from the nature of reality; but that belief itself might be healthy, since the human psyche has clung to it with such force for so long. Corporeal Belief “We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body” – Novalis When we embrace a lover to the point where we lose ourselves in their presence, when we give ourselves over completely to the realm of the senses, we arrive at a form of ecstasy which has no equal. In the early obsessive stages of a sexual relationship, lovers seek an unhealthy level of unity and relatedness. Only when the love matures, and neurochemicals and hormones return to normal can lovers hope to arrive at a balance between unity and agency. But sexual unity remains crucial throughout the relationship. As Freud stated: “one of the forms in which love manifests itself – sexual love – has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure.” As self-conscious mammals, the deep sense of pleasure and egolessness we experience when allowing ourselves to merge within another person cannot be overestimated and arguably result in a direct experience of the most profound form of truth a human can experience. These transcendental elements of eroticism are now being refined and explored by Tantric practitioners throughout the world. But the origins of tantric sex can be traced back to around the 10th century in South Eastern Asia. The revival of such practices may be useful in filling the spiritual vacuum within modern Western culture and even reduce the burden of mental health problems on society, which costs the state millions of pounds each year to treat. Furthermore, fusing sexual and spiritual practice serves to deepen and explore the very idea of value itself within society. The human soul rises to the divine in the passion of ecstasy. The journey goes beyond simple pleasure, because it necessitates a stepping out of oneself, an ek-stasis. The Ecstasy of Physical Bonding ecstasy (n.): from Greek ekstasis “entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place,” in New Testament “a trance,” from existanai “displace, put out of place,” also “drive out of one’s mind” (existanaiphrenon).Used by 17c. mystical writers for “a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things.” Oxytocin, sometimes known as the bonding hormone, is present in large quantities in women at childbirth and during orgasm. During such moments, the hormone not only colours but replaces our faculties of perception. It's as though we experience a temporary suspension of participation in the world, a disembodied lingering in this new state of mind. These rich but simple connections are what we crave constantly throughout our lives. The experience of patient, attentive intercourse is the necessary and sufficient means by which to arrive at spiritual well-being. The simple joy of having a body is the greatest of our forgotten joys. The measure of a woman’s beauty is not gauged by the thickness of her hair or the brightness of her eyes, but by the way she moves, the depth at which she is able to lose herself in the experience of intercourse. For a poet, there is no higher pleasure than orally bringing a woman to climax. With his mouth, which so often struggles to express what is in his heart, and with his hand, which stutters across the page with similar uncertainty, he is able to experience, finally, the illusive ecstasy he seeks in the only way he knows how: by observing it in another. And as her cries ascend to that heavenly point of departure, so does his soul. If she be full-bodied with playful eyes, it is a healthy bonus. But of far greater importance is the abandon with which she is able to enter into the act and the corresponding depths to which he is able to amerce himself in her raptures. Erotic love, no matter how prurient or wild, is always bound up with an infinitesimal sense of innocence and surrender. It is a pure form of ecstasy, in the same way that fighting and praying and singing are pure mindless forms of ecstasy. It is within the still moments that exist between thoughts, between heartbeats, that we learn the greatest truths about ourselves and the universe. There is tremendous pleasure, beyond the cursory thrills, that comes from feeling the affection of an unfamiliar naked human body. It ignites the flesh and all the senses. And, in so doing, it widens out the boundaries of our being. If we are in tune with our lover, in the throes of sexual ecstasy there are moments when we feel as though we're both people. Unable to distinguish the limbs of our own body and the one wrapped around us. The boundaries of self and other are diminished, we rediscover through bodily experience our sense of the divine. Such experiences at once defeat the imagination and draw us forward towards it. When we embrace one whose odor and form, whose weight and voice are unaccustomed to us, something deeply atavistic connects our hearts in a way that no other form of love can; on the other side of that oblivion we glimpse our origins, the roots of imagination, the very substance from which our bodies were forged, and we see, above all, that we are not separate beings. Mental Masturbation The catharsis at the heart of this ecstasy is also at play during artistic creation, since the artist is directly seeking to enter into an ecstatic state by moving outside of his normal mental arena to experience the world from another perspective, as a separate reality. The work the artist produces, however, is not merely for his own pleasure, he chooses to share the products of his mental masturbation with others. This brings his fantasy to near completion. If the others than complement him on the mess he's produced on the paper, the feeling of pride and joy is unparalleled. But as Freud himself observed, such catharses, such acts of release, are only a way to mitigate the symptoms of our dissatisfaction and not a means of getting to the root of our neuroses. A baby at its mother’s breast or a lover prostrating themselves at the feet of their lover (calling them "baby") are much like a religious devotee´s behaviour in surrendering to the Lord, helpless in His arms, kneeling before him, seeking nourishment in the warm shelter of his loving gaze. So we can say that religious devotees regress to childlike states, seeking the oneness they found with a parent; while the lovers, meanwhile, continue their game of hide and seek. What is interesting and common among the artist, the religious devotee and the lover is Faith: the belief that there is some profound mystery beyond the cursory act (of writing, of praying, of fucking). Ther is always a sense of something deeper, something we get a glimpse of at certain quiet moments, but rarely have the privilege of occupying for any length of time. And it is these privileged moments that carry us towards that deep bond that Leonard Cohen described in Suzanne: And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For you've touched her perfect body with your mind Much like an orgasm, these fleeting moments of ecstasy rise and fall away and mean nothing beyond the feeling of experiencing them. When the veils fall away, just for a moment, we come face to face with the naked reality of the other side of life and also with ourselves stripped bare. We step outside our inner monologue and directly experience the harmony between our body and mind, and those of the other person, and thereby, albeit momentarily, transcend our habitual selves. I believe I should allow my body to yearn, and that it should have those things it yearns for and not always get caught up in the conditioned tendency towards observation, restraint and rationality. Lying there with the window open on the stars, I held her warm in my arms, curled together beneath the blue evening air and the smell of the stars and the sea it carried down. Lying there together, each alone, private-minded - content to be there not because we were in love, but because we were two people who love - I knew we were strangers and not looking for each other, but for that deep sense of at-homeness in the world which only comes from the tenderness of another person, of being ecstatic and silent in their presence. And this idea of the strangeness of love, only make it more lovely. The fact we did not know much about each other somehow made the embrace more familiar, more profound, as though holding onto Flesh itself. All the words, all the doubts fall away when you make love with someone you love. The feeling is so unequivocal that a deep attachment is formed, that comes from the soil and the stars. And, like this, the human race goes on wheeling itself forward across time, in the dirt, calling it love, but it is also a kind of sadness, as Jack Kerouac describes in The Mexican Girl: "In reverent and sweet silence she took her things off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes... I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung up forlornly in an L.A. shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon... We held each other tight. We had long serious talks and took baths and discussed things on the pillow with light on and then with light out. Something was being proved, I was convincing her of something, which she accepted, and we concluded the pact in the dark, breathless." As Henry Miller said: “The aim of life is to live. And to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” DH Lawrence thought there were two great modes of life, the sexual and the religious. But for Miller there is “only one great way and that is the way of truth.” Truth to oneself; truth spoken in the womb of death; truth with its timeless empty ring; the truth of the solitude we are all living through side by side; truth that is in this world, but not of it: “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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