God and Sex: Now We Get Both — Our Response-Ability in Difficult Times

photo by Dean Raphael

“we have the ability to respond to the dreadful situation we find ourselves in.” — God and Sex: Now We Get Both

Humanity is dissociated from our own reality. We are cruel to each other and we are cruel to animals. We suffer from a disease we could call ‘hard-heartedness’. We are not born like this, but we become this way through the cultural influences that teach us that the sacred is above and apart, and the world around us, our bodies, and other people are less, the profane, the mundane, the humdrum everyday.

As a book, God and Sex holds the public discussion that is necessary for humanity to survive together on the planet, in harmony and respect with all other species. It points to the practical means through which to shed our dissociative inheritance and participate right now, even in the midst of a pandemic, in the wonder and beauty of our own reality. Right now, in your body, you are in Nature, wherever you are.

Humanity now has to change its relationship to the natural world in all ways. Before our very eyes the old world is dying and a new world is being born. The health crisis is inseparable from the exploitation of Mother Nature (including other people) and the separatist commercial thinking that dominates modern culture: the cruel trading and torture of animals, the polluting industries of tourism and travel, the compromised immune systems of people living under the stress of survival in an unequal society, the panic-state sown into our minds by media. It is mainly the poor, the stressed and the elderly left in the cities who are suffering the brunt of both lockdowns and health risk. This crisis is not new: it is only highlighting the effects of global hard-heartedness that were there already for a feeling person to see.

What is needed is a correction of the cultural and religious fault that civilisation has been built upon: god as ‘other’ and the denial of the feminine. What is needed is the practices that reprogram the nervous system and allow us to feel.

Ecology is relationship. There are no steps to be taken. We can move through life understanding that it is about participation in the given reality, not an arduous project of self-improvement. We do not have to struggle to attain a relationship with nature, life, or God, relate in a particular way, or achieve any kind of ‘higher’ or better state, as if we are somehow not in relatedness already!

Life is only about relationship. Only. The mind is for relationship only. It is not made to look for higher states or to constantly improve upon itself or the body. Such activity puts thought structures in the mind that obliterate its ability to notice that it is indeed arising from the heart of life as a function of life. The mind is not separate from the whole body and the whole body is not separate from Life. Imagining that mind has an existence of its own, thinking and assuming separation from its source, is like seeing a mirage. It seems to be there. But it’s not really there. The mind is an unfathomable refinement of the nervous system arising from its core, the heart. It has no life or purpose dissociated from its source. It is the communication mechanism of the whole body only, designed for relationship only. It’s there to say “I love you” and “Pass the biscuits.” Life is to be in our own bodies, with the head/mind returned to its beautiful place as a function of the heart. — God and Sex, page 11.

I am so heartened to see the response of humanity around the world to the suffering caused by illness and by isolation. Many people are doing everything they can to help each other. This is of course our natural state—relationship, intimacy, and caring. It is time now to make new social arrangements based on this reality and refuse those that deny it. It is everyone’s birthright to abide in the unity of life, and to give back to Mother Nature the gifts that she so freely gives us. Your practice of Yoga is this process. It is your direct intimacy with life, a daily embrace of your place within the nurturing ecologies of Mother Nature.

God and Sex traces the impact of patriarchal thought-structures on our lives—whether in religious, spiritual, or modern scientific cultures. In doing so, we hope it relieves you of the feeling of dissociation from reality that these cultures have promoted and their attendant projects of never-ending self-improvement, God-realization, social comparison, and searching for intimacy. People are having such difficulty in their intimate lives because we have been grossly imposed upon by cultures that deny this fundamental need.

“The subtitle of this book is ‘now we get both.’ By ‘we,’ I mean both all of humanity, and you personally with your chosen intimate partner. A vital consideration in these matters is that love and Sex are always an intimate affair. Love is personal. It is an appreciation of an actual person. Intimate relationships are the primary vehicle by which we experience and express our love. The idea that withdrawing your attention from physical intimacy with another person will somehow free up energy to focus on spiritual devotion or love of God or guru is misguided. Attempting to depersonalize your loving by placing it in a larger context, such as universal love of humanity, or love for God, will only succeed in watering it down. Where will you find God, exactly, if not in the person in front of you, despite their patterning and annoying habits? As our friend William Blake wrote, “God only acts and is, in existing beings.” If you have an attraction towards universal or devotional love, the perfect place to learn how to express this is toward your intimate partner, not toward an abstract idea.” — page 115

The book is offered as an encouragement to your practice of actual intimacy—with your body, breath, and relationships. Many of us are with our loved ones twenty-four hours a day now, and it is good to have to some practical tools to help us get on well with and love each other. The book invites you to live your life of intimate embrace, to give to and receive one another, and to be present to your friends, family, and partner. We need to practice our intimacy, including sexually, which may go out the window in these stressful situations. It is a good way to pass the time.

“We are designed to empower each other in an endless mutual exchange, a sublime flow of energy between bodies who deeply adore and receive one another. Our nervous systems are still contracted, however, from the forceful struggle of trying to attain some eternal possibility, so we must learn receptivity to soften our forms to feel all that there is to feel. Sex changes as we become receptive from the brain core right through to the genitals, and that is where the big change for humanity will occur. A decision to consciously participate in this harmony (that we are) is required to turn that programming around. Please don’t exaggerate your yoga, relationships, or sexuality in the same old religious assumption that your life is a problem and you have to use other people as a tool to get some possibility for yourself. With great sympathy, I encourage you to step out of the cultural mess, take a deep breath, and choose to investigate intimacy with yourself and all of Life before re-engaging in sexual practice. Simply understanding how the game is rigged by the same old life-denying rules is a powerful step towards breaking free of the whole scene.” — page 118

We can still embrace our lives, no matter what our inheritance from culture.

“It is our individual and collective responsibility now, in the truest sense of the word: we have the ability to respond to the dreadful situation we find ourselves in. I urge everybody to investigate this matter, whatever your own cultural background. Please take this writing’s logic and merge it with the authority of your own intellect and experience until it is yours or modified by you. Please translate it into your own language, logic, or cultural framework and communicate it to your own demographic. Our world depends on it, and so does the ecology of Mother Earth. Sustainability begins with intimacy with the wild nature of your own body, breath, and Sex. The first place we begin to honour the feminine is within our own body.

God and Sex, the two most loaded words in the world, are already in union, because Sex is the regenerative power of this universe that creates all things and presently exists as all things, including you. Sex is God’s method on Earth. We cannot bypass our responsibility to participate lawfully in our own reality. The weight of religious history still presses on us with the hidden assumption that Sex is lesser, so it is up to us to reclaim it as the pure and holy matter that it is: the heart’s activity. It is our responsibility to heal the apparent dysfunction and return to the intrinsic harmony that is the nurturing power of life itself. We don’t have to philosophize about it, but we do need to do it. Bob says it all in ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.’

We heal the imagined rift between God and Sex when we behold our body, our spouse, our children, our deity, our guru, our mother, our father, our God, and all of our intrinsic relatedness with the natural world, seen and unseen, as the One reality. There is no hierarchy, and because it does not exist, there is no linear process by which authority is transcended. The mistaken belief in God as ‘other’ is simply no longer relevant as you participate in your own authority as life. You walk out of the tent of the ‘knower’ with the courage to stand in your own ground and bloom in your own garden as the great exuberant power of life that you are. Life is exploding through you. God and Sex: now we get both.”

— God and Sex, pages 178-179.