Source and Seen are One Reality

Therefore God is Realized Via Intimacy with All Ordinary Conditions.

God and Sex are the two most powerful words in the English language. Placed together, the use of both is purified. By separating these words, each has toxified the other. Now we bring them together and define the meaning of each through a deep, yet profoundly simple convergence of understanding both.

For most of the public, each of these words is uneasy and evokes a complicated response. God as “other” engenders either fanatical adherence to or fanatical rejection of the god-concept – or just a casual turning-away, because it is too hard to think about. Likewise, the word sex usually implies a compromise: something negative, something sleazy, or something that is fundamentally disappointing. Either there is exaggerated response, or denial, or oscillation between the two.

Yet sex, the complete union of male-female polarity, is the way life renews itself, regenerates and evolves all species. Is that not God’s method on earth?

The means of the creator – indeed, the basis of all creation – the union and attraction of opposites? No one enters this realm without sex. It is entirely God’s purpose; and can be enjoyed, participated in as the profundity of that purpose.

In the ancient world, the warp and weft of the cosmos were found in the dual concept of puruṣa and prakṛti. On one hand was awareness itself, masculine, pure and prior even to the finest grain of existence; on the other, existence itself, substantial and feminine, birthing all life from the most subtle hint of the promise of being to the weightiest and most expansive expressions of earth, sea, and sky.

Creator and creation were thought of differently as the two aspects of reality. Each possessed its own integrity and identity, and provided one of the two fundamental components of being in this world in which mundane and sublime were crucially related. While puruṣa and prakṛti continued to form the cosmological basis of the philosophies that followed, over the centuries they were separated from each other and recast in an isolation that would restructure and redefine religious practice, taking enlightenment out of earthly life at the expense of human sensuality.

The masculine puruṣa would be privileged over the feminine, mind placed above body, as philosophers reasoned the goal of existence out of existence. In order to reduce reality to a single principle, or to assert the supremacy of one God alone, feminine prakṛti was seen as less than real, a nettlesome illusion, or a blemish on the face of wisdom. To reach God meant to transcend and deny life – or sex in all its affective manifestations: love, family, community, food, birth, death, touch, music, joy, sorrow.

The pain and confusion generated by the resulting struggle to somehow escape this embodied reality – the reality of human being – has been documented for over two thousand years and has given impetus to technical and exclusivist philosophical discussions.

Yet these elite philosophies of mokṣa, liberation from the “aimless wandering” (saṃsāra) of creation, too cannot reflect human life. If anything, they have added to the struggle, and alienated God from this world.

A fraught situation has emerged in which figureheads of religion and philosophy urge us to seek direct experience of reality outside of this reality which we already live and breathe. We are taught to resist the temptation of our own lives! A holding-pattern arises as we vacillate, desiring both God and Sex, but fearing what they have become.

Puruṣa and prakṛti speak of duality, of two forces at play in all the universe and neither reducible or subordinate to the other. In fact, puruṣa and prakṛti cannot be separated. Here is distinction without separation, for whilst puruṣa and prakṛti – our God and our Sex – each possess their own independent and autonomous integrity, they are not opposed. Rather, they are deeply complementary, and they each constitute the meaning of the other through their state of mutuality. Each is defined through its autonomy in relationship.

There is no conflict or competition between them. According to the earliest expositions of this cosmology, it is the sheer presence of God that inspires the universe to unfold. Life, as such, is the only means of knowing God. There is no mokṣa without prakṛti. There is literally no sex-without-God.

Freedom from aimless wandering comes with the understanding that reality is our being. We are liberated into our own lives. It is this natural state of affairs that is allowed to rise when we bring God and sex together and see that their meaning is always already defined in relationship.

From the forthcoming God and Sex: Now You Get Both. [Edit Jan 2020: Now published]

Mark Whitwell