Sex, as well as the rest of the drama in your life, may be experienced at any level of consciousness. It may be done on the security level (as in the case of a turned-off wife who lets it happen to keep her marriage together), on the sensation level (as with a playboy), or on the power level (such as a man who challenges himself to make it with a difficult-to-get partner). Sex is experienced on the love level of consciousness (when you use the experience to flow more lovingly and acceptingly), or on the Cornucopia level (when one finds in the experience of sex a deeper awareness of the way in which life offers us everything we need). On the sixth level of consciousness one watches the drama of the physical union from a deep calm place within one’s heart. On the seventh level of consciousness, one becomes the sexual experience. It is not perceived as something that is happening to oneself. Instead, one feels an identity with everything and everyone. On this level, you would not experience sex as a happening — you are the happening…
Unless you are well on your way on the journey to higher consciousness, you are probably now experiencing sex largely on the second level of consciousness. You engage in sex with your partner for your mutual enjoyment. Your consciousness during sex is concerned with the sensations that you have during the time you are making love — and especially during the moments of orgasm. The consciousness of your partner similarly will be focused on the delightful sensations. Although there is cooperation and agreement between you regarding what is happening, each of you is using the other as an object with which to gratify a desire for sexual feelings. There is thus a subject-object separateness that deprives you of the more beautiful feelings that await you when sex is experienced from higher levels of consciousness.
Sex at the second level of consciousness leaves you vulnerable in many ways. You may compare tonight’s experience with the high feelings of a previous night and this comparison may lead you to feel that what happened tonight was not quite enough. You are vulnerable to disappointment if your partner is tired or for some reason is not interested. If the experience is particularly great, your consciousness will begin to wonder how soon you can repeat it — or whether you can repeat it at all.
This grasping, manipulative focus of consciousness keeps you from being completely satisfied here and now. It keeps you on a roller-coaster of pleasure and disappointment. Our habit of anticipating the future rather than letting ourselves completely experience the here-and-now enjoyment of life can enormously detract from the experience of sex. For example, a man may spend an evening dining and talking with a woman with a large proportion of his consciousness involved in his anticipation of going to bed with her later that night. He is bodily with her, but a large part of his consciousness is drained away by his preoccupation with the future. If the person he is with is perceptive (and not caught in the same game), she will be aware that there is something lacking in the vividness and oneness of their here-and-now interactions.
Let us suppose his plan works out and they are now in bed kissing each other. The man’s consciousness (if he has not learned how to be in the here and now) will not be totally enjoying the experience of kissing. He will be anticipating the next step when perhaps his hands will be caressing her breasts. Once he is caressing her breasts, he is very likely to miss the enoughness and delightfulness of that experience. He will be anticipating how nice it will be when his hands begin to explore yet more intimate regions that await him below her hips. And then when he is next touching and feeling her labial and vaginal areas, he will still not be here now. He will still be unable to savor and completely appreciate the nowness of the experience. His consciousness will then leap forward to anticipate how nice it will be when his penis is inside of her. And even after that happens, he may still not be in the here and now! He will be anticipating the moments of climax. It is only when he finally reaches orgasm that he will be completely here now. For the moments of orgasm are so consciousness-dominating that he will probably not be able to place his consciousness anywhere else. It is one of the few times in his life when he can experience being completely in the here and now!
When your consciousness is dominated by your desire for the intense sensations of sex, you will be depriving yourself of a large part of the beauty and loveliness that will be yours when you can enjoy sex at the Fourth Center of Consciousness. When your consciousness is operating at the Fourth Level, you will begin to enjoy every second as a fulfilling whole in itself. Whatever happens as the flow of love unfolds is enough. Your mind is not concerned with what will be happening a few seconds or a few minutes from now. Hence, it is not grasping. It is not manipulating. It is not striving. It is not comparing. It is not trying to make anything happen. It is just flowing completely with your feelings and the feelings of your partner — and the nowness of the environment around you.
If you would like to know whether your consciousness is dominated by sex, you might apply the following test. You can probably do this in your head. Suppose you have been in bed with your partner for a half-hour and are getting near the point where intercourse may begin. Then suppose your best friend knocks on the door. He has a serious problem and it is urgent that he see you immediately. Can you without disappointment — without any grasping at the previous experience — let your consciousness flow to this new here-and-now situation in your life? Can you turn to this new situation without irritability, anger, or disappointment of any sort? Can you rechannel that energy that was created by lovemaking into helping your friend? If your consciousness can flow from one here-and-now experience to the next here-and-now experience, you are peacefully and beautifully flowing in the river of your life.
An individual who is hung up on the second level of consciousness will irritate himself, his sexual partner and his friend in the situation described above. Once he has talked with his friend and done whatever is necessary, his consciousness will still be clouded by resentment toward what he perceives as an intrusion. When he then returns to be with his lover, his consciousness will be preoccupied with the immediate past. Instead of flowingly enjoying the here and now when uninterrupted sex is possible, his preoccupation with the past may keep him from doing that which he most wants to do!
An individual who is hung up on the second level of consciousness can never live completely in the here and now. For example, a woman who is addicted at the second level will scan everyone she sees as a sexual partner. Her response to all of the beautiful individuals who flow into her life will be limited by her analysis of whether this person would fit the pattern in her head that she has for an exciting bed partner. Instead of reacting to the whole person in front of her, she is only tuning in to a very small slice of what is available. She is depriving herself of the broad spectrum that life is offering her. She is disregarding the Second Pathway by creating an illusory version of the people around her. It is the opposite of the openness which brings the miracle of enoughness into one’s life.
A person whose consciousness is dominated by sex may be led to purchase automobiles, homes, clothes, boats and most of the things in his or her life on a basis of their supposed contribution to future sexual experiences. The things purchased may be too costly, not wear well, or may have many other disadvantages. If they are too expensive, they will put a person in debt or cause him to focus more of his consciousness on earning money. This has the repercussion of taking time and energy away from sexual activities that one tells oneself will bring pleasure. It is thus with all addictive patterns which keep us on the self-defeating pursuit of illusory concepts of fulfillment and happiness.
What do we do when we discover that a large part of our consciousness is trapped on the second level? The Third Method for consciousness growth, explained in Chapter 13, can be helpful in enabling us to reprogram this addiction. Sexual addictions can gradually wear away when we become consciously aware of the resultant disadvantages and suffering that an addiction causes. Our growing insight reveals the penalties we are unnecessarily paying: the way we alienate people we would like to love because of the intrusiveness of our subject-object manipulation, the disappointment, irritation and anger that a sexual addiction can trigger, the drain on our pocketbooks, the anxiety that we experience if we have a model for always reaching orgasm, etc.
The addiction to sex can be so powerful that it may help if you stop your usual sexual dance for a period of time in order to give you a chance to permit other patterns to emerge. For example, if you definitely resolve not to have sex for the next three months, you may help your consciousness to get free of domination by sex thoughts and addictions. This can liberate your consciousness to tune in to him or her without any overtones of Let’s go to bed tonight. This may broaden your activities together. It can increase your openness to more fully experiencing the person as a human being. You will begin to free yourself from the diminished awareness that occurs when your consciousness is focused on sexual interactions.
During this temporary moratorium on sex, you can focus your consciousness on fully enjoying every here-and-now experience. You may wish to enjoy just massaging each other. Since your consciousness will not be preoccupied with making anything happen beyond the massage, you can both be completely free to thoroughly experience the here and nowness of the massage. You are consciously reprogramming yourself to become non-addicted to the experience of orgasm. You begin to realize that this ten-second orgasm that sex offers can dominate too large a part of your Conscious-awareness. It gives a hollowness to hours and hours of your precious consciousness — keeping you out of the here and now — and making you unable to fully tune in to the full reality that is available to you every moment of your life. You begin to see that the experience of orgasm is not worth the many hours per day during which it may deprive you of tuning in to everything around you through multichannel perception.
But a beautiful thing about consciousness growth is that when you give it up, you get it all back. For you are not training yourself to reject orgasm — that would be substituting one addiction for another. That which you emotionally reject is also an addiction that will bring unhappiness. You’re simply training yourself to let the experience of orgasm be part of the enjoyable nowness of your life. When you can let sex flow into your life as part of the spontaneous unfoldment of the situations that life offers you, your life will probably bring you more satisfying sexual experiences than you ever had before. And these experiences will be without the disadvantages of having your consciousness dominated with striving to achieve them. You can then enjoy sex (or anything else) without paying a heavy price in lowered perceptions and disappointments.
Suppose you have successfully placed a moratorium on sex for whatever period you need to reprogram your consciousness so that you can become free of the second level. Let us suppose that you have begun to interact with a sexual partner on a broader, nonsexual basis. You will find yourself enjoying simple things together that before would have been boring — or at best tolerated as a stepping stone to getting into bed. You begin to experience more deeply the inner beauty of the human being that you are with. You experience him or her on a deeper level of being. Your consciousness is freed from responding as though he or she is an object for your sexual enjoyment.
You may then choose to begin sexual activities but limit them for a few nights to playful interactions that create a sensitive intimacy — perhaps just caressing and exploring one another’s bodies without going as far as a climax. The reason for doing this is to experience the enoughness of whatever you are doing. You will discover that when you are completely tuned in and loving, it is absolutely enough just to be with a person. Whatever you do can be experienced as enough if you are not trying to make something happen — or trying to keep something from happening. Focus your consciousness on the full enjoyment of the nowness between you and your partner. Learn to let each moment flow from the previous one without planning, pushing, or trying to control the flow of one moment into another.
Become completely sensitive to every nuance of your partner. Your verbal and non-verbal communication should be so effective that you know whether your partner is enjoying the flow of events. The cues you need are there — you only need to let them into your consciousness. It should never be necessary for him or her to reject an insensitive action. This is oneness. This delicate beauty of the here and now can only be found when you and your partner flow as one consciousness.
You do not have to strive for or .reject any particular sexual positions — it is all beautiful. Where your body is and what it is doing are not vital — where your consciousness operates is completely vital. As long as there is a oneness flowing between you and your partner, any sexual activities may be enjoyed as part of the drama. Each moment is prized for itself and is not experienced as a stepping stone to what will happen next.
To experience your sexual partner on the fourth level of consciousness, you may wish to begin the sexual dance by sitting facing each other and looking into each other’s eyes. This should be enough — just to look into the eyes of your beloved without any need to touch or do anything else. Do not focus on his or her eyes for this can produce ego personality games. Instead let your gaze rest gently on the bridge of the nose directly between the eyes. You will usually notice a light spot where the nose joins the forehead. Search for this circle of light and hold onto it. You will still see the eyes, the nose, the lips — the entire face. The face of your partner will assume many forms and shapes. You will see him or her in ways that you have never experienced before — both ugly and beautiful. But do not hold onto any of these perceptions. Let them pass as part of the dance of life. Let your love, acceptance, and oneness grow as you just sit there looking into the face of your beloved. Continue this until you find it completely enough — until you experience that your mind is emptied of restless designs and nothing more is desired. You may wish to start the phrase ALL WAYS US LIVING LOVE to add to the beauty you are creating.
Then as love and oneness grow, other things may just happen by themselves. You may find that you get into a position where the man is lying on his back with the woman sitting astride on top facing him. This is known as the Maithuna position in the ancient Eastern science of Tantric yoga. In this position you can gaze into each other’s eyes, your hands can touch each other and caress a large part of each other’s body. When the woman is sitting on top she is able to sensitively modulate the degree of stimulation during intercourse so that arousal proceeds in a mutually heightening way. Perhaps you may sometimes wish to enjoy this position for an hour or more with your partner without reaching a climax. This will free your consciousness of the expectation of something that is to happen in the future. It will enable you to completely enjoy every part of the here-and-now experience that life is offering you.
On the fourth level of consciousness, sex is sought as a way of growing in love and oneness. When your consciousness is no longer focused on an addictive demand for sex, the exquisite sensations are still there and they are more fully and consistently enjoyed. You are now completely free from all vulnerability to grasping or disappointment. You can flow with whatever happens. You can completely enjoy each moment for itself.
This growth will open the doors to your enjoying sex on a higher level of consciousness. On the fifth level, you become more aware that life is boundlessly generous in sending you everything you need for happiness — even more than you can possibly need. You realize that it gave you second level happenings which enabled you to experience disappointment and suffering in your sexual activities so that you could grow to higher levels. You now realize that the irritations you felt when someone did not go to bed with you (or when things did not happen as you had planned when you did go to bed) were given to you by your life to help you grow into higher consciousness. You now see that every sexual experience has helped to set the stage for your present growth into higher consciousness.
So you learn to use sex (as well as everything else you do in your daily life) to accelerate you on your journey into higher consciousness. You realize that your mind creates the world in which you live. Your mind puts you in different places and leads you to experience different things to help you grow in consciousness. You see the sexual dance as part of the drama of your life and you know that when you are open, accepting, and loving, you will experience the optimal happiness that awaits you.
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