{"id":245,"date":"2008-03-14T06:08:24","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T06:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/conversationswithgod\/2008\/03\/sex-something-to-celebrate.html"},"modified":"2008-03-14T06:08:24","modified_gmt":"2008-03-14T06:08:24","slug":"sex-something-to-celebrate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/conversationswithgod\/2008\/03\/sex-something-to-celebrate.html","title":{"rendered":"Sex: Something to celebrate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I asked here yesterday, what is going on in the mind of a person who utilizes the services of high-priced call girls and risks utterly destroying an extraordinary career and a lovely family in doing so? The answer is: lust. In most cases, lust, plain and simple. The urge to engage in sex–particularly sex with a new person, and perhaps in a “new way”–is enormously powerful and strong in the human species. And not only in the male of the species.
\nThis does not condone the behavior of those who violate their personal (and, for that matter, professional) oaths regarding conduct. If you have promised someone fidelity, your highest choice is to demonstrate fidelity. If you have been put in a place of high responsibility by others based on their understanding, from you, of your personal values and ideas, your highest choice is to honor those values and ideas through behavior that reflects them.
\nSo my point in the explorations below is not to suggest for one minute that straying from our promises and our vows is “okay.” What I would like to explore here is why people do this anyway.
\nThe answer, as I observe it, is that from the outset people have been sublimating their sexuality–and that has caused many of them to be sexual dysfunctional or sexually addicted.
\nFrom the standpoint of the New Spirituality the highest choice is to experience human sexuality as a celebration. It is a wonderful way to celebrate our humanity, to express our love, and to create new life.
\nConversations with God-Book 1<\/em> has this to say on the topic: <\/p>\n

Everyone knows that the sexual experience can be the single most loving, most exciting, most powerful, most exhilarating, most renewing, most energizing, most affirming, most intimate, most uniting, most re-creative physical experience of which humans are capable.
\nHaving discovered this experientially, you have chosen to accept instead the prior judgments, opinions, and ideas about sex promulgated by others\u2014all of whom have a vested interest in how you think.
\nThese opinions, judgments, and ideas have run directly contradictory to your own experience, yet because you are loathe to make your teachers wrong, you convince yourself it must be your experience that is wrong. The result is that you have betrayed your true truth about this subject\u2014with devastating results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is because many people have placed their sexuality on a shelf marked “shameful” or “bad” that we live in a sexually repressed society–and sexual repression leads inevitably to sexual expression that is detrimental and non-beneficial to just about everyone. The situation in which New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has allegedly become involved is a case in point.
\nIn CwG-1 I asked…. Is sex okay? C\u2019mon\u2014what is the real story behind this human experience? Is sex purely for procreation, as some religions say? Is true holiness and enlightenment achieved through denial\u2014or transmutation\u2014of the sexual energy? Is it okay to have sex without love? Is just the physical sensation of it okay enough as a reason?
\nHere’s the answer I received:<\/p>\n

\tOf course sex is \u201cokay.\u201d Again, if I didn\u2019t want you to play certain games, I wouldn\u2019t have given you the toys. Do you give your children things you don\u2019t want them to play with?
\nPlay with sex. Play with it! It\u2019s wonderful fun. Why, it\u2019s just about the most fun you can have with your body, if you\u2019re talking of strictly physical experiences alone.
\nBut for goodness sake, don\u2019t destroy sexual innocence and pleasure and the purity of the fun, the joy, by misusing sex. Don\u2019t use it for power, or hidden purpose; for ego gratification or domination; for any purpose other than the purest joy and the highest ecstasy, given and shared\u2014which is love, and love recreated\u2014which is new life! Have I not chosen a delicious way to make more of you?
\nWith regard to denial, I have dealt with that before. Nothing holy has ever been achieved through denial. Yet desires change as even larger realities are glimpsed. It is not unusual, therefore, for people to simply desire less, or even no, sexual activity\u2014or, for that matter, any of a number of activities of the body. For some, the activities of the soul become foremost\u2014and by far the more pleasurable.
\nEach to his own, without judgment\u2014that is the motto.
\nThe end of your question is answered this way: You don\u2019t need to have a reason for anything. Just be cause.
\nBe the cause of your experience.
\nRemember, experience produces concept of Self, conception produces creation, creation produces experience.
\nYou want to experience yourself as a person who has sex without love? Go ahead! You\u2019ll do that until you don\u2019t want to anymore. And the only thing that will\u2014that could ever\u2014cause you to stop this, or any, behavior, is your newly emerging thought about Who You Are.
\nIt\u2019s as simple\u2014and as complex\u2014as that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then I asked…Why did You make sex so good, so spectacular, so powerful a human experience if all we are to do is stay away from it as much as we can? What gives? For that matter, why are all fun things either \u201cimmoral, illegal, or fattening\u201d?
\nThe reply:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve answered the end of this question too, with what I\u2019ve just said. All fun things are not immoral, illegal, or fattening. Your life is, however, an interesting exercise in defining what fun is.
\nTo some, \u201cfun\u201d means sensations of the body. To others, \u201cfun\u201d may be something entirely different. It all depends on Who You think You Are, and what you are doing here.
\nThere is much more to be said about sex than is being said here\u2014but nothing more essential than this: sex is joy, and many of you have made sex everything else but.
\nSex is sacred, too\u2014yes. But joy and sacredness do mix (they are, in fact, the same thing), and many of you think they do not.
\nYour attitudes about sex form a microcosm of your attitudes about life. Life should be a joy, a celebration, and it has become an experience of fear, anxiety, \u201cnot enough-ness,\u201d envy, rage, and tragedy. The same can be said about sex.
\nYou have repressed sex, even as you have repressed life, rather than fully Self expressing, with abandon and joy.
\nYou have shamed sex, even as you have shamed life, calling it evil and wicked, rather than the highest gift and the greatest pleasure.
\nBefore you protest that you have not shamed life, look at your collective attitudes about it. Four-fifths of the world\u2019s people consider life a trial, a tribulation, a time of testing, a karmic debt that must be paid, a school with harsh lessons that must be learned, and, in general, an experience to be endured while awaiting the real joy, which is after death.
\nIt is a shame that so many of you think this way. Small wonder you have applied shame to the very act which creates life.
\nThe energy which underscores sex is the energy which underscores life; which is life! The feeling of attraction and the intense and often urgent desire to move toward each other, to become one, is the essential dynamic of all that lives. I have built it into everything. It is inbred, inherent, inside All That Is.
\nThe moral codes, religious constrictions, social taboos, and emotional conventions you have placed around sex (and, by the way, around love\u2014and all of life) have made it virtually impossible for you to celebrate your being.
\nFrom the beginning of time all man has ever wanted is to love and be loved. And from the beginning of time man has done everything in his power to make it impossible to do that. Sex is an extraordinary expression of love\u2014love of another, love of Self, love of life. You ought to therefore love it! (And you do\u2014you just can\u2019t tell anyone you do; you don\u2019t dare show how much you love it, or you\u2019ll be called a pervert. Yet this is the idea that is perverted.)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I asked here yesterday, what is going on in the mind of a person who utilizes the services of high-priced call girls and risks utterly destroying an extraordinary career and a lovely family in doing so? The answer is: lust. In most cases, lust, plain and simple. 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