From: Judy Royster <royster@think.com>
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Sexuality and spiritual practice
Date: 7 Oct 1992 10:48:27 -0700
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Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: sandman.caltech.edu

I found the following talk very germaine to the recent discussions about
sexuality and spiritual practice.  In our spiriutal practice, we study
about and practice "true intimacy" and "sexual conscious-exercise" within
our marriages. I will talk more about our specific practice following this
talk:

**The Pleasure of God-Communion Must Exceed the Pleasure of Sex**
	       a talk by Da Avabhasa from the book "Compulsory Dancing"

	It is interesting to consider the difference, in terms of actual
feeling and enjoyment, between your association with sex and your
association with God.  Your involvement with sex is much more elaborate,
complex, absorbing, and continuous, and it is associated with more
pleasure.  One of the complications of your present state is that you
simply have not learned or adapted to the intense physical and personal
pleasure of God-Communion -- at least not in comparison with all the other
things to which you have adapted pleasurably.  Very little actual
association with God is as pleasurable to you as sexual enjoyment, or
eating, or the other games of daily life.  You association with God is
almost empty in comparison with complicated association of pleasure and
pain that you have with everything else.  Not having lived as a devotee of
God all your life, you show the signs of somebody who has not yet learned
how to enjoy association with God.
	Entering into pleasurable Communion with God is part of our
necessary consideration of sexuality.  Our association with God should be
equally as pleasurable as sexual play, even more pleasurable because it is
continuous and it involves the entire body, including the mechanisms that
you exploit in sexual play., Thus, surrender to God is more pleasurable
than sexual play, even in ordinary bodily terms.
	You simply do not yet know how to surrender, you see.  You have not
yet learned it.  Meanwhile, you are troubled by what you have already
learned, the inclinations you have by tendency!  That is the trouble with
learning sex before you learn devotion: Thereafter it is difficult to
cultivate devotion, because you cannot feel good about devotion itself in
the face of this intense pleasure of sex.  Sex is a familiar and
pleasurable distraction, whereas God-Association is not so familiar and
seems to require a certain period of learning during which you do not feel
as blissful as you would like.
	God-Communion is the primary bodily pleasure.  It is simply that
you not realized it as such, and , therefore, you conceive of
God-Commmunion as self-limiting and ascetic.  You think you will engage
some form of asceticism a little bit at a time and without practicing
fiercely, and that eventually, as a result, you will realize God.  You tend
to feel that God-Realization is a matter of stripping yourselves of
attachments, relations, and enjoyments, rather than giving up to God.
However, in truth God-communion has nothing to do with such self-denial.
It is a matter of outshining attachments, relations, and enjoyments through
Communion with the Primal Enjoyment.  If you are already in a condition of
spiritual, bodily enjoyment, then all manifest enjoyments become
superficial, ordinary, conventional processes that are neither overwhelming
nor binding.
	We were talking recently about St. Francis.  Whenever he felt
worldly desires, he would mutilate himself, punish the body for desiring.
Once he threw himself, into a briar patch.  On another occasion he threw
himself naked into the sea to cool off his cravings.  Rather than living in
the principle of God-Communion, he was busy working against desire.  He
associated with troublesome desires for which he could not be sanely
responsible.  He felt that they were happening to him.  Thus, he could deal
with them only in this bizarre, ritualistic, strategic fashion, trying to
tear himself away from their binding force.
	In contrast to St. Francis, others spend their whole lives
indulging sexual desire.  But neither the solution of indulgence nor the
solution of suppression, as we see in St. Francis, is illumined.  Neither
of these two tendencies in any individual is true in itself -- everyone
adapts in some way to both solutions.  Therefore, this matter of the
emotional conversion, of the spiritual transcendence of all experience, is
the root of the consideration of sexuality and the root of daily life for
all practitioners of this Way.  When the emotional conversion is not
realized moment to moment, all practice becomes mediocre, if not simply
false.

from the book, "Compulsory Dancing" by Da Avabhasa



Our practice of "true intimacy" is about living as love.

In our practice, ideally we discipline the frequency of our sexual
occasions (ranging from 1-2 times per week to once per month) in a process
that allows us to observe what arises (places where energy is
bound/identification) in the face of such discipline so that through
self-understanding, energy and attention become free for God-Communion.

In our practice of sexual conscious exercise, we learn to conduct sexual
energy during sexual occasions (rather than dissipate it in conventional
orgasm) so that our bodies and minds are energized and rejuvenated. This
allows attention and energy to be free for God-Communion.  Again, this is
not an ascetical practice, but a profound and deep, pleasurable intimacy.

For more information see "The Dawn Horse Testament," by Da Avabhasa (in
particular Chapter 21), and "Love of the Two-Armed Form" also by Da
Avabhasa.

--Judy