The evolution of man as the “Crown of Creation” or “the Highest Blossom of Nature” and so forth are all about the MAN or the Homo sapiens that walked this planet for millions of years. However the latest human subspecies, namely, modern man, who is largely confined to modern industrial civilization of the last few centuries has only a few features of the original man. How this mortal disintegration has come about, more so in his mental sphere, and the role of organized religions in the sudden drastic change, are all the topics of discussion here.
Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind. ~ VIRGIL, the Roman poet of first century BC
Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society. ~ THOMAS JEFFERSON, the third president of the United States.
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. ~ ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU, the Nobel laureate of South Africa
The environmental crisis is an outward manifestation of a crisis of mind and spirit. There could be no greater misconception of its meaning than to believe it is concerned only with endangered wildlife, manmade ugliness and pollution. These are part of it, but more importantly, the crisis is concerned with the kind of creates we are and what we must become in order to survive. ~ LYNTON K CALDWELL
On Earth, there never has been a higher creature than man, the final fruit of the tree of organic evolution. Nature has succeeded in making man and the organic evolution has done its work. In any matter or event in Nature, its brain or its internal logic is the nucleus of its freedom of motion. And being the most free, man is the freedom of Earth, and therefore the nucleus of Earth – the mind of Earth.
Man is the key to Nature. He is a child of Nature. Nature has not so much “given” him, his faculties by and in which he works, as he has them de facto as being a child of Nature. They are not a gift; they are not a development of faculty which he has inherited. He is born with those qualities.
Sages have called man the Noble Savage. The Noble Savage is that inhabitant of a pristine world whose life harmonizes with his natural surroundings. He does not need government or law, for he has no private property, no desire for wealth or status, the twin dynamics of crime and war. His existence is peaceful, free from war, crime, and strife. He takes from Nature only what he needs and needs only what he takes. Because he is at one with Nature, he does not require labor or technology to survive. His social relations are egalitarian, uncompromised by the artificial distinctions of sex or class, the bitter fruits of complex civilization.
Political power and hierarchies are unknown, as are law and coercion, unnecessary in a world of communal equality untainted by private property. He and his fellows are, as poet John Dryden put it, the “guiltless men, that danced away their time/Fresh as their groves and happy as their climes.” They embody what Jean-Jacques Rousseau described in The Discourse on Inequality as the “celestial and majestic simplicity of man before corruption by society.
The myth of the Golden Age is another idealization of lost simplicity that compensates for the burdens of living in a complex society. This vision of history imagines a time before cities and technology when humans lived in harmony with a benevolent Nature. With no private property, gold, or other wealth, greed and status-hunger likewise did not exist, and so there was no reason for social strife, slavery, war, trade, and crime – not to mention law, courts, governments, prisons, and all the other consequences of a civilization whose degeneracy warps people and thus requires these oppressive controls.
The spiritual connection that we have had with Nature and the cosmos has been sacrificed with the rise of a more highly mechanized and urbanized civilization. Much of the sense of loss was subsequently expressed in metaphors of degeneration.
Today many may not agree with this reality of the fall of man; and not without reason. A new psychological theory holds that human beings exist in different ‘levels of existence’. At any given level, an individual exhibits the behavior and characteristics of people at that level; a person who is centralized at a lower level cannot even understand people who are at a higher level. And it is no wonder that modern man cannot even understand the real man, let alone the Noble Savage.
Man is a moral animal: In humanity, as in individual man, everything begins with the formation of a conscious nucleus. However, all the mechanical forces of life fight against the formation of this conscious nucleus in humanity, in just the same way all mechanical habits, tastes, and weaknesses fight against conscious awareness in man. The very process of evolution is completely analogous to the process of evolution of the individual man. And it begins with the same thing, namely, a certain group of cells that gradually becomes conscious. Then it attracts to itself other cells, subordinates others, and gradually makes the whole organism serve its aims. As a child of Nature, as the crown of all creations of Nature, man is essentially a moral and spiritual being and his constant yearning is for realization of a fuller and higher spiritual life. A brief historical survey of the mental and spiritual growth or decline of mankind may be of interest to the scholar as well as to the thoughtful general reader. The power and the dignity of human leadership by being the simple human being have been visibly illustrated by Mahatma Gandhi. Albert Einstein’s message on Gandhi’s 75th birthday sums up the essential character of his leadership: “A leader of his people, unsupported by an outward authority, a victorious fighter who always scorned the use of force, a man of wisdom and humility who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being and at all times risen superior….”
Humans are inherently “good”, in the sense that we want to love, we want to care, and we want to help others. All normal humans have a conscience, a natural inbuilt sense of right and wrong. We are all born with a survival instinct. Under such conditions, we are in a state of our organic whole.
This animal instinct is built in us to help us survive. And through social experiment we have learned to control our most radical emotions to fit into society we have created for ourselves. People do have an inherent ability to distinguish right from wrong. Conscience is inbuilt. But there is more than one way for conscience to develop. First, there is potential for it to exist in our genes.
Humans have the capacity to observe and reflect upon their own behavior. Second, there is potential for conscience to develop during childhood. We absorb the culture in which we are raised. Society does create certain laws to promote the survival of the group. Also morality is the result of natural selection from an environment where cooperation increases one’s chance of survival and getting laid. Only their inbuilt sense of right and wrong is based on their perspective of the world.
All humans, in terms of potential, have an inbuilt potential to do good. That potential remains whatever habits of thinking and behavior we develop in childhood. Each of us has to decide for ourselves to what extent we realize that potential. The challenge is to know yourself and become what you are. Of course, there are some things that are a question of culture and custom.
Nature is Spiritual: Everything, including every creature, in Nature is spiritual. Here, it is not because we don’t teach the dog catechism that it doesn’t bite the hands that feed it, but because it is naturally spiritual and that its spirituality has not been contaminated by mechanically indoctrinating it spirituality. And so is the case of humans. Modern humans have become non-spiritual or his spirituality has become commercial because they are groomed in modern society in a new sort of mechanical spirituality which is only the counterfeit of spirituality.
The concept of giving and re-giving is beautifully depicted in Nature. For example, grass grows in response to the love emanating from Earth and sun. The grass is given life, in which it experiences the love of physical existence. Grass growing on the African Savanna also experiences this feeling. From time to time, a zebra comes along and eats the grass, which may or may not terminate its physical life. To be eaten by the zebra is the grass’s chance for giving back to Nature what it got from it.
The zebra, experiencing the same love from Earth will give back to Nature when a lion kills and eats it. Being at the top of the food chain, much like human being, the lion’s only real predator is time. The lion comes to the end of its natural life and typically dies in its sleep. Upon death, the buzzards, other scavengers and microorganisms will ensure that the lion gives back to Nature what it got from it. Thus the cycle of life is complete.
Through the process of living the love principle, each life form is afforded the opportunity to exist and experience the splendor of a life sympathetic with existence as that particular life form. The laws of Nature require that each person gives back to Nature what it got from it. That is why the popular adage: ‘there is no free lunch in Nature’.
In ancient times, this highest knowledge was transmitted orally and even now many philosophers disregard the written word. Many saints who have taught the higher spiritual value were themselves illiterate. For them knowledge is an organic whole.
The ancient philosophers have offered a more encompassing view of this Truth. All Truths are something to be realized by self-effort. They are testable in the range of human experience. Tolerance is a virtue that comes from Love and Truth. A truthful man knows that he ought not to repay injustice with injustice, or to harm a man, no matter how he suffered in his hands. He believes that the place of deepest love is in self-suffering. As Kabir says, “he who plants thorn for you, for him you plant flower. You will have the flower for the flower (that you planted), he will have the thorn.” Christ preached, “Love your enemies…. that you may be the children of your Father, which is in heaven.”
Human values are the universal moral values required for survival of the species as a social species. Human adaptability depends on preservation of the integrated functioning of the personality as a whole – the basis for personal power or ‘self-empowerment’. Self-empowerment is a function of the integrity of moral consciousness or ‘conscience’ (moral values of humanness).
The ancient communities had developed a self-organizing system of resolving conflict at various levels – the family, the kin group, the caste, the village, and at the inter-village interaction. This has been destroyed by the modern state system. Regrettably, religious leaders of our times are discussing more politics than Truth.
The ancient Greeks were very much closer to the wisdom of Nature and the manifestations of Nature than we are today. They approached the wisdom of Nature without theology, in our modern sense of the term, and in this receptive consciousness, many questions and riddles impressed upon them. Modern approaches to Nature are fundamentally different from that in antiquity. Man no longer believes that direct intercourse with Nature which brings him near to the Divine Wisdom of the world.
Fading away of the spirit of questioning and reasoning: Socrates had questioned all assumptions and had drunk the poison instead of pleading for mercy. Aristotle had defended Alexander among the Athenians and was hated for it. He was charged with preaching that prayer and sacrifice were of no avail. Greek philosophers who followed Aristotle did not have the courage to stand for their conviction either against the ruling classes or even in front of the uneducated masses. Romans who conquered Greece took the philosophers with them just as they had taken other slaves. Philosophers lost all respect but the real loss was the fading away of the spirit of questioning and reasoning.
Ancient wisdom for modern ignorance: Renaissance indeed was a modern revival of ancient wisdom. “Renaissance” literally means “rebirth”. Renaissance thinkers strongly associated themselves with the values of classical antiquity, particularly as expressed in the newly rediscovered classics of literature, history, and moral philosophy.
During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity. Conversely, they tended to dissociate themselves from works written in the Middle Ages, a historical period they looked upon rather negatively. According to them, the Middle Ages were set in the “middle” of two much more valuable historical periods, antiquity and their own.
However, when modern man happened to rediscover the ancient wisdom and spirituality, he only succeeded to subjugate, mechanize and finally release them into modern society in a highly damaged condition that provided favorable social milieu for modern science and analytical philosophy to take birth. Thus the contraction of human consciousness proceeded into the modern period in an accelerating phase. Sir V. S. Naipaul (1932 – ), the Nobel Laureate writes:
Our present environmental crisis is in essence a spiritual crisis. We need only to look back to medieval Europe and the psychic revolution that vaulted Christianity to victory over paganism to find the spirit of the environmental crisis. Inhibitions to the exploitation of Nature vanished as the Church took the “spirits” out of the trees, mountains, and seas. Christianity’s ghost-busting theology made it possible for man to exploit Nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. It made nature man’s monopoly. This materialist paradigm has dominated the modern world for the last few centuries. The current deplorable condition demands a spiritual response. A fundamental reorientation of human consciousness, accompanied by action that is born out of inner commitment, is very much needed.
What is Spirituality?
It is difficult to define the concept of spirituality because of the limited scope of language. Therefore, a definition of spirituality is only a starting point that cannot fully represent the entire concept. Any definition must be accompanied by qualifications and the following reflections.
Spirit may be defined as the animating life force, represented by such images as breath, vigor, and courage. Spirituality is the drawing out of the inherent spirit in man. It is experienced as an active and passive process. Spirituality is also defined as a capacity that is innate to all persons.
This spiritual tendency moves the individual toward knowledge, love, meaning, peace, hope, transcendence, connectedness, compassion, wellness, and wholeness. Spirituality includes one’s capacity for creativity, growth, and the development of a value system. Spirituality encompasses a variety of phenomena, including experiences, beliefs, and practices. Spirituality is approached from a variety of perspectives, including psycho-spiritual, religious, and transpersonal. While spirituality is usually expressed through culture, it both precedes and transcends culture.
Spirituality is not the same thing as religion. While religion may be one way in which persons express or experience their spirituality, it is not the same as spirituality itself. Religion can be thought of as the organization of belief which is common to a culture or subculture, “the codified, institutionalized, and ritualized expressions of peoples’ communal connections to the Ultimate” (Kelly, 1995, p.5). Religion is “an integrated system of belief, lifestyle, ritual activities, and institutions by which individuals give meaning to (or find meaning in) their lives by orienting them to what is taken to be sacred, holy, or the highest value” (Corbett, 1990, p.2).
Religions also have in common their authority over the participant’s life, ritual forms of expression, explanations about the origins and meaning of life, and tradition (Smith, 1994). Spirituality and religious practice are neither exclusive nor do they automatically reside simultaneously in an individual. “Everyone has a spiritual component, but not everyone is religious.” Religion is generally recognized to be the practical expression of spirituality; the organization, rituals and practice of one’s beliefs. Religion includes specific beliefs and practices, while spirituality is far broader.
Spirituality and morality should not be equated with religious dogma and faith in God. All religions are frank dualist systems that separate humans from their creator and the creation. The rationalist rebels against theology – Descartes, Leibnitz, and Kant – and also failed to escape the vicious circle of dualism. To offer security, religion impressed upon people the need to submit before the imaginary will of God or a theological ethical code, sanctioned by the scriptures and defined by religious institutions. Morality in this sense, however, is the absence of freedom.
Religion and Degeneration
The history of humankind during the last 5000 years was full of dynamic, and, at first glance, unexplainable events. Various religions suddenly appeared, rapidly spread, and then sometimes disappeared into the oblivion within the lifetime of one or two generations. A religion can conquer the minds of millions of people, only to be swiftly replaced by another, sometimes a sharply different one. One religion can be extremely successful in some country, but leave almost no trace among its neighbors. Here we’ll try to understand the hidden laws and moving forces of this process, using the terminology of even theory, microbiology and epidemiology. Such an unusual approach is justified by the existence of certain analogies between religions and biological infectious agents.
Since early age, any person born into a society is learning this society’s morals and values, mythology, and ideology in general. If society is religious, this ideology is mostly based on its religion. All religions have special methods of facilitating this process, such as systems of religious education and various initiation ceremonies. Many of these rules and myths are consumed during childhood, and make their way deep into the subconscious.
In any human society, a religious message can spread in different ways: by force (such as after a conquest), or naturally, by active carriers (missionaries) or in areas of contact with another society. In all cases, the new religion gradually changes, adapting to local mentality, political and economical situation, and the remaining elements of the old religion and so on. Eventually, a new religion evolves. Any of the major religions of the world is composed of numerous local sub-religions, for which the term “subspecies” seems applicable. Even the most formalized and conservative religions cannot avoid it: for example, the Russian Orthodox Church became noticeably different from Greek Orthodox within few years from the conversion of Russia into Christianity.
After a religion has succeeded in completely subduing a society, it starts to assume dictatorial powers. Various social factors can contribute to degradation of the religion; the typical examples being drastic changes in the economy, or immoral behavior of the clergy. Dogmatization of religious practices and ideas provokes people with non-conformist mentality to start thinking seriously or even critically about the myths and taboos of the religion.
Every organized religion is the catalyst of social vitiations. It happens by the degeneration of human mind through the mechanization of human spiritual faculties. Here religion is maintained by cooked or mechanized spirituality which then degenerates as mere superstition.
Often a religion is rapidly degrading in its core range, but remains virulent in more remote areas, where it is still expanding or competing with other religions. Subtle grades of depression kill more people than all the other diseases of mankind combined. There is no antidepressant that will cure a depression which is spiritually based, because the malaise does not originate from brain dysfunction but from an accurate response to the desecration of life. The body is the reflection of the spirit in its physical expression, and its problems are the dramatization of the struggles of the spirit which gives it life. Everyone spiritually dies because of the kind of life he leads. That is a hard clinical fact, not a moral view.
Any attempt to impose standards of good and evil is itself one of the greatest moral pitfalls. In a world of mass confusion we desperately need a reliable, accurate, verifiable yardstick with which to measure truth. Our journey of investigation has finally led us to the most critical realization of all: Mankind lacks the capacity to recognize the difference between good and evil. We are caught in a situation in which every citizen of every country, his children, and his life’s work, are threatened by the terrible insecurity which reigns in our world today.
Cultural degeneration and the birth of industrial civilization
In history, we can see higher intellectual and spiritual level in the past. There are traditions that assert mankind once lived on a much higher intellectual and spiritual level than today. Today it can be found that, in every society, the majority of people don’t feel happy with the existing religions. They may be spiritual and morally conscientious.
Man, like every life form in Nature, is spiritual. Religion, with the help of modern science, however exploits this truth. It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. And the highly mechanized modern mind had severe limitation in perception. A degenerate mind cannot observe the superior worlds. Had it not been for the mechanization of religions and sciences, man would have long created heaven on Earth and developed wings for interstellar travels.
The mind-set of industrial culture is conditioned by the cult of scientism. The view that matter is the only reality has become the cultural “common-sense” view. Science has become the bible by which truth and reality is verified by a mass culture influenced by years of classroom conditioning by modern science. Love, creativity, hope, consciousness, in fact much of the real non-material reality of life and activity have been relegated to insignificance by the cult of science. Materialist science is a cult. It is a mass social institution and also a linear and compartmentalized method of knowing; only that the knowledge imparted is thus partial and fragile. The cult of scientism and its empire has brought us to the brink of the death of the planet and the cult figures have no adequate response.
The triumphant advent of the machine opened a new era in which life loses its organic character and natural rhythm. Man is separated from Nature by an artificial environment of machines, by the very instruments of his intended domination of Nature. As a reaction against his mediaeval ascetic ideal, man attempts to dominate Nature, and increase its productive forces.
This, however, does not help to bring him any closer with inner life. On the contrary, by mastering it technically and organizing its forces man becomes further removed from it. Organization proves to be the death of the organism. Life becomes increasingly a matter of technique. The machine sets its stamp upon human spirit. Thus modern civilization has neither a natural nor a spiritual distinctiveness. It represents the triumph of technique over both the spirit and organism.
The machine and technique are the product of the brain development and discoveries of culture; but they sap its organic foundations and kill its spirit. Culture, having lost its soul, becomes civilization. Spiritual matters are discounted; quantity displaces quality. The assertion of the will to “life,” power, organization and earthly happiness, brings about mankind’s spiritual decline; for the higher spiritual life is based upon asceticism and resignation. Such are the tragedy and fate of historical destinies.
Civilization as opposed to culture, which is given up to the contemplation of eternity, tends to be futurist. Machinery and technique are intended to be responsible for the speeding up of life. Organic life is slower, less impetuous, and more concerned with essentials, while civilized life is superficial and accidental; for it puts the means and instruments of life before the ends whose significance is lost. The consciousness of civilized men is concentrated exclusively upon the means and technique of life considered as the only reality, while its aims are regarded as illusory.
LOSS OF VALUES AND THE ONSET OF DECADENCE
Tale of modern society is the tale of a depraved society. We know that when we deprive a living body of its protective antioxidants like enzymes and essential vitamins, we are only causing its degeneration and decay through free radicalization.
Similarly, when you deprive a mind of its values like love, compassion, herd-mentality or herd-bonding and the inherent spirituality, you are only preparing that mind for fragmentation, free radical (intellectual type) formation and the eventual spiritual degeneration and decay.
Rationalism or barren logic desiccate and dehydrate the living species (including mankind) and deprives it of its social values the way the chemical process desiccate and dehydrate the organic matter and deprives it of its enzymes and vitamin contents, thereby making it fit for further splitting to its minute elementary parts.
The large scale mechanical split up and treatment of the broken down parts have led to the disintegration of healthy wholesome systems in Nature. Family values have thus degenerated into abstract market values.
Now let us see how has the erosion of life-giving matters – enzymes, minerals, vitamin C (from body) and values (from mind) – started on the wholesale, continuously, globally and systematically.
Mineral deficiency today is a virtually undisputed fact. As for the case of vitamin C and minerals, scientific research continually indicates worldwide vitamin and mineral deficiencies within the present global population and also their steady disappearance from the soil. This is happening mainly because of mechanization. For example, in the case of America, the majority of mineral websites quote a 1936 source – US Senate Document #264 (74th Congress, 1936) – as scientific proof that dietary minerals were generally inadequate for optimum health. Certain findings are as follows:
Most of us are suffering from certain diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until deplete soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance. ….The alarming fact is that food…now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough…minerals are starving us, no matter how much of them we eat. …. Lacking vitamins, the system can make use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless.
The same document went on to quantify the extent of mineral deficiency: “99% of the American people are deficient in minerals, and a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease.”
Values are to mind what enzymes and vitamins are to body: As the prime life-promoting matters, enzymes, minerals and vitamin C are to human body as human values are to his mind. Decadence – mental and physical – takes place due to the gross and continued insufficiency of these vital catalysts of life.
In the body, decadence occurs due to the steady erosion of enzymes, minerals, vitamin C and the like from the body; and in the mind, decadence occurs due to the steady erosion of values from life. We can say that the species then prolongs its life as degenerated and half dead. However, as the species is not fully dead, any full-fledged decay too does not take place. Under such conditions, any species, including man, ceases to grow towards its higher forms in the evolutionary ladder once it hits the degeneration trail button. With its lifeless mind, it will not have any new ideas to offer, nor does it understand anything new. The messages and ideas it may teach to its environment of influence all end up as past, lifeless ideas which thus help to create a mechanical (lifeless) world around it. Neutered animals, celibate humans, professionals and experts who undergo rigorous training belong to the degenerative sort of species. This also happens basically in mechanical hybridization of living species, a process that is massively and globally happening today.
“Love makes the world go round.” And that exactly is why the world and everything, including billions of stars and planets in it, co-exist in circles. They survive harmoniously by going around one another in cyclical, circular rotations – as individuals and as groups – as the cosmic terrestrial motions show. Coming to the mental decadence, which occurred prior to the physical decadence, it is the flight of human values, like love and compassion, from society and its replacement with some artificial/mechanical values that led to the mental/spiritual decadence first.
“It is impossible to love and be wise”, Francis Bacon wrote and positioned himself on the latter path. His cleverness (mechanical wisedom) not only led to the development of the modern mechanical philosophy but was also instrumental in ‘rationalizing’ it through the development of analytical methodology based on INDUCTION. Two centuries later, the great French Philosopher Rousseau proved Bacon basically wrong. Rousseau wrote:
Consider the frightful disorders in Europe. Wherever science arises, the moral health of the nation decays. It was even a saying among the philosophers themselves that since learned men had appeared, honest men were nowhere to be found. I venture to declare that a state of reflection is contrary to Nature; and that a thinking man (an “intellectual,” as we would now say) is a depraved animal. It would be better to abandon our over rapid development of the intellect, and to aim rather at training the heart and the affections. Education does not make a man good; it only makes him clever–usually for mischief. Instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason.
Lack of instinctual love and other moral values leads us to do crimes against man, society and Nature. And, as a logical consequence we, as criminals, end up as prisoners. Nature becomes prison when we move away from the bonds of Nature. Bonds of Nature are what we call love, compassion for the fellowmen and other instinctual or native feelings of social values which make us live in harmony with Nature and with our fellowmen. And this makes us live as the children of Nature.
The role of love on spirituality is fundamental. Love encircles life and permeates everything in Nature. Love is the symbolic language of circles, whirlpools and season – the language of love permeates every event in Nature.
Fundamental Values: Love and Sex
The way life begins is the sacredness of human beginning. The exact moment when life begins is unknown to man. This event is performed secretly. It reflects the most intense expression of love between male and female whom we may culturally call couples or spouses. And they are the honors of human body in the best possible way. The reproductive function is also sexual. It is the only autonomous function of human body. It is the par excellence psychosomatic function that requires the participation of both genders. (More on this topic discussed under the subtitle, Essential Elements of Relationship in Wholistic State, in chapter 4)
Sex glorifies love: From ancient times we have Taoism and Tantra, which are spiritual paths for attaining union with God using our sex. Both of these traditions accept the body, senses, sexuality, and emotions to help us evolve spiritually. They do not force us to make a choice between being spiritual or sexual.
So sexuality has been polarized between two warring camps and this war has been going on for thousands of years, a war between those who possessed the secret of the erotic/divine connection and those who would repress it. From the burning of women in the middle ages to the 13th century invasion of Tantric temples that resulted in the wholesale slaughter of women and children and the destruction of manuscripts, to the burning of the books of Wilhelm Reich in 1957 in New York, our left-brained patriarchal paranoia has until recently succeeded in suppressing sexual knowledge and destroying its innocence. This attack on sexuality and the war between opposing forces about something that bubbles up irresistibly in almost every human being has led to our psyches being badly fragmented.
The truth is that sexual energy is pure (in and of itself) and thus we can purify ourselves of anything not pure that we project into it. Many beings have descended down into darkness where sex, love and intimacy can become nightmares ruled by insecurity and lack of trust. Sex, in particular, has become a major source of anxiety and stress for many of us and this is not all our fault. It is lust and violence and instead of generating more love and intimacy it creates pain, suffering and eventual separation from others.
Pornography also separates all aspects of love from sex and works powerfully to separate us from the beauty of sexual love. And we have been conditioned negatively about sex by our parents, religion, and society and by advertising companies whose only interest is to make money for their clients, indeed holding people at ransom by exploiting their innate urge for love and sex.
Sex is part of our basic nature because we were created in sex from the union of male and female cells. It is a source of a great deal of pain and pleasure, of comfort and discomfort. It often determines our happiness and unhappiness, our ecstasies and our agonies.
Sex is Spiritual: While many religions have defined sacred and spiritual as being separate from the body, from Nature, and certainly from sex, the ancient roots of our language imply a different understanding. It is no coincidence that the word sacrum is also the anatomical term for the triangular bone at the base of the spine, the very place which Tantra tells us is the seat of the sleeping Kundalini or Shakti energy. When aroused through Tantric practice, the kundalini rises up the spine to awaken the spiritual centers in the brain.
So our language suggests that once upon a time, Western Civilization understood the sacred nature of sex. This wisdom was lost during the Inquisition. In fact, one might say this was the purpose of the Inquisition: to create a cultural shift from sex as sacred to sex as being sinful, as the movie, “Dangerous Beauty”, beautifully demonstrates. Now it is time to return to the ancient wisdom of worshipping life rather than death. Or as we usually say “Make love, not war.”
Sacred is understood differently in indigenous cultures where the concept of sacred is one of relationship rather than edict. In native cultures, humans, animals, plants, and especially Earth herself are sacred because of we are all part of the Whole. No one and nothing have to be proven worthy to be considered sacred. All of creation is inherently sacred because it is part of the interconnected web of ecology that sustains life. In this worldview, Earth is not only seen as sacred but as a living being. This is sometimes called synchronicity, or the Tao. Here is another meaningful coincidence! It just so happens that tantric lovemaking turns on the “Right” Brain – that part of the brain that perceives patterns.
So we have two different ways of looking at the meaning of sacred sex which are totally complementary. Just as the love of the Mother and the love of the Father are complementary, the Western and the indigenous understanding of sacred are two sides of the same coin.
Sacred Sexuality, or Erotic Spirituality, is a part of virtually every spiritual tradition around the world. In the last couple of decades, elements of Tantra have been blended with the elements from Taoism, Native American, African, Christian, Pagan, and Jewish paths as a basis for re-visioning sexuality. In the pre-Christian view, sex is sacred simply because it’s part of life. The reasons for its basic worthiness are as follows:
1. First, Sacred Sexuality implies awareness that sex is the inception of life, of all that is. Without the sexual act, none of us would exist – at least not as incarnate bodies. Sacred Sexuality acknowledges that our life force and our sexual energy originate from the same source.
2. Sex is sacred because of its role in bonding. Mutually satisfying sexual exchanges naturally intensify bonding. The Tantric attitudes of slowing down, awakening all of the senses, tuning in to subtle energy are wonderfully supportive tools for intimate relating.
To bond with someone is to form an enduring connection – to feel a strong sense of mutual caring, intimacy, and appreciation. Erotic energy works its magic far beyond the plant and animal level as well. Look at gravity! Gravity is the name we give to the force of mutual attraction that holds the cosmos together, but spiritual teachers throughout the ages have pointed out that magnetic pull is just another name for erotic love.
So when we bless, purify, or honor the body as part of a sexual encounter, when we bond more deeply as a result of lovemaking, or when sexual union catapults us into higher consciousness, we make sex sacred.
Hebrew tradition has consistently celebrated human sexual intimacy and its pleasures. In this tradition, sexual asceticism, celibacy, and the single life have no religious value. Sexual intercourse establishes a marriage and is a religious duty and blessing, a meritorious, charitable and humanitarian act.
In the Epistle of Holiness of Nahmanides, Jews are advised to prefer the Sabbath for sexual intercourse because it is “holy unto the Lord.” Herman Wouk, a contemporary Jewish writer, sums up the Hebraic view when he notes: “What in other cultures has been a deed of shame, or of comedy, or of orgy, or of physical necessity, or of high romance, has been in Judaism one of the main things God wants man to do. If it turns out to be the keenest pleasure in life that is no surprise to people eternally sure God is good.” The biblical Hebraic view of heaven was and is: Sabbath, Sunshine and Sex.
Family life enhances humanness and spirituality
Most societies have assumed, however, that the married life is the only reasonable way for people to live as adult and wholesome human beings. In some societies, marriage is a matter of survival. Powerful mating rituals and customs exist in all groups. And in our culture, the equating of health and love with marriage is supported by advertising which links food, jewelry, with kisses and declarations of love.
Perfect partner: Dr Marsden’s research for the BBC’s Body Hits series suggests people look for similar features in a partner. They search for characteristics that are in their parents. That is perhaps because they have successfully raised a child. “It might look like we are all after the perfect partner to wine and dine but underneath, our animal instincts are seeking out an ideal mate to share our genes with. We tend to go for the smell of somebody who has a very different immune system and that stops you fancying your family. Our biology drives us to find a perfect compromise between sameness and difference and we strike that balance all the time when it comes to choosing faces and smells,” Dr Marsden said.
The research also suggests sex is booby-trapped. It helps partners bond. “Your body has evolved over millions of years with one aim – to go forth and multiply, so while having kids may not be on the agenda. Yet your body has a few tricks up its sleeve to drag you in that direction,” he said. According to the research, the more two people have sex, the more likely they are to bond. “We all know you can have sex without falling in love but if you have enough sex with the same person there’s a good chance you will hit the body’s booby-trap which is there to tip you head over heels into love,” said Dr Marsden. “So your body goes all out to make you bond with your partner and that makes love highly addictive. Being attracted to someone sparks the same incredible feelings no matter who you are. Love really does know no boundaries,” he said.
The impact of parents and a warm, stable loving home environment is important to a person’s psychological well-being. If this is absent, distortions are likely to result which may not be resolvable without help later in life.
Any approach to sexual ethics must consider the whole human person and an attempt be made to seek a truthful understanding of what it is to be fully human. Lovemaking between two people is something ‘deep’ and mysterious. It, like birth and death, is one of the great mysteries of life and concentration on the mechanics of the act without an appreciation of its role in the wider relationship misses its true significance. No philosophical analysis will be adequate to capture the full mystery of love nor will any set of rules meet all the complexities of human relationships.
Sex is an integral part of life. The happiness and enjoyment quotient in life is doubled with active sex life. Sex is necessary because without sex your life is incomplete. Sex acts like medicines on many of human ailments so this makes sex more important than just a mere pleasure part of life.
Some of the highly pitched saints declared sex as a sin, but they forget that it was because of sex, they are here. The first thing that sex gifts mankind is the replication of human race. Many may feel that a lot of energy is wasted in sex. But, the truth is that sex is the source of energy and your body forces are revitalized with the help of it. This is proved by the scientific research.
Love is medicine: Sex is the fitness mantra that maintains the health of an individual at optimum best. Love is a drug, scientists say. Sex is like oxygen. Being in love is physically similar to taking drugs and also has withdrawal symptoms, an expert on addiction has said. Dr John Marsden says, “Dopamine – the drug released by the brain when it is aroused – has similar effects on the body and mind as cocaine or speed.
Sex is not the only means of pleasure, but it also helps humans to maintain and improve their health. Sex when performed on regular basis, improves the health of an individual. Sex boosts the immune system among men and women who does sex more times. Sex increases the production of antibodies called Immunoglobulin A. It makes men and women more resistant to diseases and also frees them from infectious diseases like pneumonia and bronchitis. Sex is even said to be as the best weight loss technique. Sex is also a memory booster as it is proved through research that people who indulge in sex frequently are found to have much higher IQ than other people who have sex irregularly.
Love manages the living; laws manage the dead – the machines. Laws are to the machines what love is to the living. By replacing love with laws (social taboos), we replace the living with the dead – we kill the living. The process that converts the live to dead is mechanization that leads to degeneration.
Love and sex weed out parasites: The role of sex in increasing resistance to parasites was suggested as long ago as in 1932 by the eminent biologist J.B.S. Haldane, but for many years no one followed up on his idea.
We all have microbial parasites and cancer cells in our bodies that are kept in check by the immune system. And when the biological terrain of environment and body politic becomes filthy with systemic toxicity, immoral values, mental constipation and self-destructive behavior, it creates an environment in which parasites can thrive.
All parasitic infestation is paralyzed by the frequency of Love. That’s why the medical-industrial drug-pushing complex has made energy medicine with frequency devices illegal. They can heal virtually all parasitic disease – fungus, bacteria, viruses, worms, etc. – without drugs.
When honest people understand this “healing crisis” in civilization, they will either conscientiously choose to build a healthy immunity against pathological parasites – or they will cease to be honest.
A natural organic man can expel parasitism. A man aflame in heart will never become a parasite. Such an understanding of parasitism will redeem the entire trend of thought. There will be no parasites, there will be no idlers.
Sex is good for the brain: Having sex makes you more intelligent, as a latest study suggests. According to the results of the study, during the intercourse, as many as seven different chemical reactions occur. Sex is particularly important for older people as it boosts brain activity later in life.
Sex increases life expectancy: Sex releases several hormones in the body, increases intimacy and bonding, and works against loneliness and depression. Staying sexually active has physical, social and mental benefits. According to the Real Age books, frequent orgasms (about 100 per year) can increase life expectancy by 3-8 years. Studies also show that men with enough frequency of orgasms have a 50%reduction in mortality risk.
The Value of Touch: Touch is necessary for mammals to thrive. Animals and babies deprived of physical touch are sickly and do not develop normally. How touch impacts health is a mystery, but it works on several levels:
- Touch cements relationships.
- It helps create bonds. The bond provides vital social support and other benefits known to be linked to life expectancy.
- It also increases self-esteem. Self-esteem is largely our perception of worth. Frequent touching is a way to communicate worth to one another.
- It provides physical stimulus. It is possible that touches releases hormones and relaxes self.
People who have a supportive social outlet tend to manage stress better, live longer, and enjoy increased overall health. Studies show that a massage can be a great stress reliever. In fact, we need touch for our emotional health; studies also show that babies who are not touched enough can fail to thrive. Body touch is important for a balanced emotional and neurological life. Oxytocin is a hormone and neurotransmitter. Apart from its well-known role in facilitating childbirth, recent research points to its absence in autism, personality disorders, depression, social phobias, psychosis and sexual disorders. Oxytocin is released during bodily contact, stimulating a sense of bonding, well-being and social participation. Some doctors promote the start of oxytocin treatment early in a child’s life to improve her social skills.
Sex enhances values
For any intelligent conscious beings, value is inevitable. Creatures that do not value anything will not have motivation to live, to function from day to day. Value is to conscious intelligent beings what force is to physical mass.
Meaningful sex has to be value based. Values are personal. Each situation that has sexual energy in it, involves the whole human being and their entire value system. My values may be different from yours, and I have no right to be the moral judge of anyone’s values. It is important, however, to have core values, and respect them. Without values, we become spiritually bankrupt. Sexual experience will never cause problems and will always be joyful, if lovers share the same values. Sex is a means of escaping our little self or ego. It is many peoples’ only experience of meditation.
Sexual energy is the lust for life in all forms. Sex has been the driving force of creativity, resourcefulness and evolution itself in both men and women for millennia. Sexual energy is natural and belongs to Mother Nature, to procreation and to physical satisfaction. The same time there is within your sexual energy a mechanism that triggers the expansion of your entire being. It is, in effect, an evolutionary process. Sex is to the mind what food is to the body.
Sex is a spiritual experience. ”Great sex starts in the mind,” says body+soul’s sex and relationship columnist Dr Gabrielle Morrissey. “Turning on your brain hours or days before you have sex triggers your libido into action.” There are many physical and mental health benefits of sex that go beyond the bedroom. Countless studies prove that sex has many positive impacts to the mind and body, and is good for you in many ways that you may not have thought about before. True intimacy is union between flesh and flesh, between subtle body and subtle body, between soul and soul. Sexual energy is sacred energy. When we have restored the sexual experience to the realm of the sacred, our world will be chaste and divine, holy and healed.
This new perspective is not strictly about performance or procreation, or even about orgasm, though that can be a wonderful benefit. Sex is about sharing, connecting and exchanging energies that originate more from our souls than just our heads or from our genitals. It is about uniting our longing for wholeness and connection, yearnings that are naturally sacred and spiritual. It is about pleasuring and being pleasured in whatever consensual form that takes.
Your partner is joining and supporting you in this awareness and experience. Then you switch; pleasure your partner in whatever ways are desired and appropriate for the two of you. If you really give yourself such a delightful experience, you will experience ecstatic sex, erotic energy, and you will have a rich spiritual experience that is enlightening as well. Every time more veils are dropped between partners, more consciousness opens to them. It will reveal itself in the daily living of life and in creative expression.
Combining love with sexual expression can be an act of higher consciousness. In workshops, we help foster a genuine belief that when two human beings combine love’s energy with erotic energies, a transcendent experience occurs, one that is often profoundly healing. This is a very sacred sharing and the true goal of a fulfilling sexual experience. Reaching this goal is the result of a give and take, a negotiation of the openhearted experience of interconnectedness.
Under our needs, desires, and fantasies are powerful and subtle feelings and energies that want to be expressed. These expressions help us grow holistically; they teach us about aggression and passivity, about our feminine and masculine energies, and about pleasuring and being pleasured. They help us dissolve shame toward our inner contradictions and complexities and experience them fully for healing, growth, and self-understanding.
Sexual energy is the primal and creative energy of the universe. All things that are alive come from sexual energy. In animals and other life forms, sexual energy expresses itself as biological creativity. In humans, sexual energy can be creative at all levels – physical, emotional and spiritual. In any situation, where we feel attraction, arousal, awakening, alertness, passion, interest, inspiration, excitement, creativity, enthusiasm, in each of these situations, sexual energy is at work. Whenever we feel these states of awareness, we must put our attention on the energy that we are experiencing, nourishing it with our attention, experiencing it with joy and keeping it alive in our awareness. Our sexual energy is our creative, life-force energy. Through it, we give birth to new life. That life may be children and it may be new ideas and projects.
Sexual desire is the most powerful human emotion. By achieving a state of sexual desire and maintaining it, you keep the mind in a heightened state of arousal and activity. When you mix sex and love, you have the perfect mix for drawing on the creative mind. You can also transmute or turn your desire for sex into a desire for something else, such as writing a poem, working out a solution to a great problem or getting direct spiritual insights.
Sexual desire is sacred and chaste. The suppression of sexual energy is false, ugly and unchaste. During sexual union, there is union between flesh and spirit. Sexual intimacy is the road to the taste or experience of true freedom, because it is the one area of life in which we can become completely uninhibited and free. Sexual fulfillment occurs when the experience comes from playfulness instead of need. Frequently people bring their conflicts and needs into the sexual experience. When sex is used to fulfill needs, it leads to addiction. When sex comes from playfulness, the result is ecstasy.
In sex, as in all areas of life, resistance is born of fear. All resistance is mental. It implies judgment against what is being felt. Sex becomes a problem when it gets mixed with hidden emotions such as shame, guilt and anger. All problems related to sex, neurosis, deviancy, sexual misbehavior, violence, abuse, can be traced to resistance, to suppression and repression, not to the sexual urges themselves. If we are allowed to discover our urges, desires and emotions, without outside inhibition, they won’t go to extremes. Extremism, in any form, is a reaction to repression, inhibition and suppression. Aggression and violence are the shadow energies of fear and impotence.
The first law: Sex and Values are Proportional
Humanity needs some kind of grand unification theory of sex that touches upon its spiritual, emotional and mental elements. We all need guiding visions that offer beautification to our sexual selves. Though sexuality involves many subtleties its effects on our destiny is in no way light. From puberty and before, sexuality is a force that shapes or dents our life, affecting us by bringing us to cliffs of shame and guilt or to a heaven of ecstasy, love and compassion for the fellow beings. Many of us however are scared and carry deep wounds that surface in the world of our sexuality.
There is no denying that sex is one of the most pleasurable activities available to human beings and that it is important and central to life itself. It provides a universally recognized enjoyment in all societies but for some very deep reasons there lies darkness across the world of sexuality. And thus no matter what our religions and spiritual teachings do or suggest, there continues to be a darkness that hangs in many hearts about it.
Sex is like meditation. But unlike meditation, which we normally do alone, sexuality offers the incredibly blissful feeling of becoming one with another as we merge with our own most beautiful and natural self. Under the right conditions it is something we want to do as often as possible, and thus we can mix one of the deepest pleasures in life with the growth and evolution of our souls.
When we make our pleasure more pure, pleasure becomes more pleasurable. And when pleasure becomes exquisite we begin to touch on the deepest reaches of our beings and this is something that happens only when we find ourselves well past the limits of our minds.
Physical pleasure has moral value. Traditional religious and social views have often condemned pleasures of the body as “sinful” or “wicked.” These attitudes are inhumane. They are destructive of human relationships. The findings of the behavioral sciences demonstrate that deprivation of physical pleasure, particularly during the formative periods of development, often results in family breakdown, child abuse, adolescent runaways, crime, violence, alcoholism, and other forms of dehumanizing behavior. We assert that physical pleasure within the context of meaningful human relationships is essential – both as a moral value and for its contribution to wholesome social relationships.
Therefore sex and values are proportional. That is, where there is natural sex, there are human values or, to be precise, sex helps the growth in human values. Any mechanical attempt to discriminate one against the other, life turns inharmonious and unnatural and whereas when both go hand in hand, life becomes meaningful and fruitful. Thus it is established that freeing our sexual selves is vital if we are to reach the heights of our full human potential. Thus sex is relative to human values: human values increases with sex.
Dualism, reductionism and the great man-woman split
We have already discussed the evils of dualism which in the case of mankind are the consequence of its dual mode existence, namely, the great man-woman split. Having Split up their inherent unity in duality their humanhood is lost; the practice only promotes their singleness and the resultant split ideas and visions.
Today we live in a world that is undiagnosed and untreated of its mental illness created by the mechanization of religions and science. Dualism of religion and reductionism of science have become so bizarre that truth has missed them both. Modern society has disconnected us from human world. Having converted us” ‘‘sub-humans”, our altered reality is our reality: we don’t even recognize that they have some psychological disorder.
The dualism between society and Nature is a religious erection by which Nature is being socially constructed with human beings as its other social constructions. All organized religions, especially Christianity, have lost their original awareness of the inter-connectedness of all life forms in Nature.
Modern society today is in the firm grip of certain chronic genetic diseases transmitted by asexuality or living under a system that promote sex-less life or long abstinence from sex life. Be it the growing degenerative diseases of humans and animals, the growing human infertility rate, the growing antagonism over male-female equalization, the increasing homosexuality, or the growing trend of mechanization of mankind, all these are the primary characteristics of side-effects or fallout of asexuality – of life deprived of sex.
Modern democratic society is an inhuman society: Today, mankind seems to have no role in its social governance. In the present mechanical, inanimate, non-sustainable and non-cyclical practice of modern democracy separate voting rights for man and woman is obviously not serving any human purpose but only certain mechanical/fictional purpose. This sort of democracy revels in ‘divide and rule’ – separation, isolation and categorization in the name of class, creed, color, region, religion etc. Here man is not human without his woman; woman is not human without her man. This in other words means, any democratic government voted to power by these isolated ‘inhuman’ beings, as is the practice today, is an inhuman (or a merely technical) government. (Chapter 19: Sustainable Democracy)
MECHANIZATION OF MENTAL FACULTIES AND THEIR DEGENERATION
Loss of values in human society and the mechanization of human society are closely linked to the degeneration of human mind which is the result of institutionalized onslaught of human mind or its freedom in modern age. And the organized religions have the paramount role on this massive and institutionalized subjugation of human mind and its freedom.
The longest ruler of mankind, in the known history, has been organized religion. Priestly empires have been the longest in history. The most obvious empire building method is by the sword; but this method is uncertain, for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed with it. It will be found that empires based upon military force alone, however cruel they may be, are not permanent, and therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when resistance is paralyzed by the agency of superstition, that the race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds and even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all priestly empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.
Clergy as first category of organized professionals: Professional people are, from the economist’s angle, those who sell services to the community just as others sell commodities. Priests sell their services in this sense. They are an economic corporation like lawyers or doctors. But there is a mighty difference that, while the entire world acknowledges the value of other professional services, at least four-fifths of the educated world regards it with disdain those services which the religions claims to be peculiar to themselves. Professionals of religions, mainly the clergy, thus may be regarded as the first batch of organized societal ‘macro free radicals’ in the spiritual sectors of humans that led to the degeneration of human spiritual faculties.
There’s a difference between spirituality and religion-as-bureaucracy. The bureaucracy of religion is in trouble, but spirituality still remains strong in stray people and laymen. But almost all organized mainstream religions today are simply bureaucratic institutions.
We can say that modern man is a victim of his training, mainly the victim of spiritual and mental training. And this training comes from the leading authorities that have lasting influence in the material, social and spiritual sectors of human society. No government has lasted over a hundred years, and no government had an authority that extended beyond its borders, except perhaps the Chinese and colonial British empires that lasted over two centuries. The only longest globalized ruler, teacher and trainer of man have been religions, especially, the Church. Here, the celibate clergy formed the largest chunk of teachers, and also the teachers of teachers at all times in human history.
The spread of mental decay starts with the mechanization and professionalization of human mental affairs. It is a historical fact that almost all modern philosophers and scientists had Western (mechanical) education, especially by the celibate clergy. Francis Bacon, Descartes and William Shakespeare, who are known as the fathers of modern science, modern philosophy, and modern art respectively, were taught in educational system largely developed by the celibate Christian clergy.
Mechanization is basically the systematization of the controlled or arrested parts. It was started mainly by religions in the spiritual and mental spheres through popularization of ritualism, and in material spheres, by governments under the influence of religions.
Almost all religions are professionalized and mechanized and, as such, they have long succumbed to market forces. Mechanization, Westernization or modernization was initiated in the rest world, largely, in the erstwhile colonies of the colonialist empires by making education and healthcare almost free – like the strategy of promoting the sale of opium and drugs by making the first supplies almost free. This was achieved by influencing, forcing and tricking the local governments by heavily subsidizing these ‘service sectors’. Once these individual nations reached an influential level of modern ‘education’ and modern health care practices and when mechanization remains more addictive than opium and drugs, these nations are ‘advised’ to stop subsidies in education and health care, and the nations and their people, like the drug addicts, automatically become the suitable target of the global marketers of the highly monopolist and mechanized education and healthcare systems.
Note: This essay has been taken from the book, LIFE ON MELTDOWN
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