SPIRITSEX:
DR. GEORG FEUERSTEIN
in conversation with
ALEXANDER BLAIR- EWART
Dr. Georg Feuerstein has
written over twenty books on spirituality and is a foremost scholar on the Yoga
tradition. He is a contributing editor of Yoga Journal and Ecstasy magazine,
editor of the anthology Enlightened Sexuality (1989), and author of Yoga: The
Technology of Ecstasy. His two most recent books are entitled Sacred Sexuality:
Living the Vision of the Erotic Spirit, (1992), and Holy Madness: The Shock
Tactics & Radical Teachings of Crazy-Wise Adepts, Holy Fools, & Rascal Gurus
(1992).
ALEXANDER B LA I R - E WART:
Because of the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular, we have a lot of
apprehension around the idea of a healthy, holistic, and completely integrated
sexuality. Do you think that people are ready to rethink sexuality at this
stage?
D R. G E 0 R G F E U E R ST E I
N: The short answer is no. You always hope that more people will be reached at
this point than perhaps before the sexual revolution occurred. And considering
the immense number of problems that people are facing in their sexual lives,
from the guilt that we have inherited from our traditions to performance anxiety
to all the rest of it, one would hope that by now people are looking for
something that is deeper and not simply a gimmicky technique or some good advice
from a marriage counselor. Sex has very much to do with the rest of our very
fragmented lives. And if people want to put their lives together, sexuality
certainly is a large element in that.
A B E: In the book Sacred
Sexuality you talk about sex, love, and transcendence, and you talk about
spiritual breakthrough in sex. How could that actually take place and what is it
that people have to realize about sexuality that they don’t currently?
D R. F E U E R ST E I N: I
think a whole bunch of things. Sex, for most people, is unfortunately and sadly
little more than one or two hops in the hay a week. It’s a very perfunctory kind
of thing for most people, and the little thrill that comes with it seems to be
enough compensation for many. If people want to repair their lives—and that’s
really what it boils down to— they have to look at all aspects of their
existence, and see to what degree they live their life in a mechanical way. And
then, hopefully, understand that there is quite another way of living that
includes higher dimensions of existence. I’m very hopeful that more and more
people will be dissatisfied with the way they obtain their sexual thrills, and
understand as time goes on perhaps that they are shortchanging themselves, that
there are profounder experiences of, not just thrill, but blissfulness,
blissfulness beyond pleasure. And as there is more of a felt need for this kind
of experience, I think people will happily reorganize their sexual lives, as
well.
A B E: Would sacred sexuality
represent a different approach to relationship altogether?
D R. F E U E R S T E I N: Well,
certainly it would. If our relationship to the ground of existence, to God if
you like, is straight, all other aspects of our life will fall into place
naturally. If my relationship to the ground of my existence, my higher self, is
in order, then I will be a kinder person, a more compassionate person, and a
person who doesn’t feel separated from others.
A B E Is there anything
inherent in the worldview of sacred sexuality that would allow a man and woman
who have lost-their passion, engagement, and love to go through a process of
rediscovery of each other, or does there have to be really intense chemistry
there in the first place?
DR. F E U E R S T E I N: You
see, you can’t repair sexual relationships on the basis of sexuality alone. I
think this is a mistake some sexual counselors make. Something much more
comprehensive has to happen. The man and the woman first have to be truly
intimate with one another. And they have to know each other’s needs, know each
other’s abilities in terms of responding to each other’s needs. They have to
know each other’s fears and hopes and so on, and have to have a basic desire to
be together and to grow together. I think it’s the commitment to growth that is
important, and if the sexuality is dormant in a relationship, usually the
relationship is dormant. The man and woman don’t talk to one another anymore;
they don’t excite each other anymore; and maybe the only real interest revolves
around work or children or whatever. But they are not alive anymore as people to
one another. And so the relationship can’t be ‘repaired simply by saying that
maybe they should consider looking at sexuality in a different way.
You can always doctor things to
try to fix it, and for a while it may work out. But ultimately we are isolated
beings if we don’t connect up with that larger reality. So you can’t start from
sexuality and work towards harmony. You have to start from the disposition of
harmony in order to make a change in life that includes sexuality.
A B E: In Sacred Sexuality you
discuss various traditions including the Tantric traditions of India. Those
traditions seem to be very old, and according to your account of those
traditions it looks as if there are quite a number of misconceptions in the West
about what Tantra actually is.
D R. F E U E R S T E I N: The
single most important issue here is that there is a mighty difference between
Tantra, original Tantra as it is taught even now in remote areas in India, and
Tantra as it is propagandized in the West. And I know there are some people out
there who will hate me for this, but I make a very significant distinction
between Tantrism and what I call Neo Tantrjsm. Most of the Neo-Tantric teachers
of whom I’m aware have not had the benefit of a teacher-disciple relationship in
the way it was established long ago in India, and the way in which Tantra has
been handed down for hundreds of generations. Most people learned it either from
other Westerners or from books, a I think we need only look at the literature of
the Neo-Tantric movement to realize that it is a very thinly disguised movement
that seeks to magnify pleasure rather than recovering the bliss which is an
innate aspect of our transcendent self, or the identity that is anchored in the
divine.
A B E: Does the distinction
have to do with the role of physical sex?
D R. F E U E R S T E I N: For me,
Tantric sexuality has originally been a minor aspect of Tantra. It is made into
the single most important thing in Western Tantra, and I think that has to do
more with our predisposition, our sexual obsession, than any spiritual
orientation that is rooted or derived from original Tantra. There are many
Tantric schools that recommend strict celibacy, where the whole sexual issue
never even arises. The emphasis is placed entirely on rituals and ceremonies
that awaken the inner power, the kundalini power, guiding it to the crown of the
head, as in the tradition of Hatha Yoga, in order to accomplish what we can
metaphorically describe as the sexual union between the feminine and masculine
principles in the Universe. In what are known as the left-hand schools of
Tantrism—there were very few of these—this union was understood in a literal
sense, and the feminine aspect was manifested or was embodied by an actual human
Tantric partner, a woman who was initiated into the Tantric secrets and who -
was in a way used for that purpose by the male initiates. Of course there were
also female Tantric initiates who would use male counterparts who embodied the
divine male principle in the same way.
A B E: In Western neo-Tantrism,
then, the embodied sexual tendency is dominant?
D R. F E U E R S T E I N: Yes it
is. That seems to be the main preoccupation of Neo-Tantrism, judging from the
literature and the reports I hear from different schools. I’ve never myself been
involved in any of it, mainly because of my impression that what seems to be
moving those people is the sexual interest, and it’s just unworkable for most
Westerners. My own recommendation in the occasional talks I give on Tantra is
always that anyone who really is overly eager about finding a Tantric group or
finding a Tantric sexual partner should first very carefully examine their own
motivation. It’s very likely that the people who want to have Tantric sexuality
the most are the ones who should perhaps practice a period of celibacy for six
months to find out where their sexual energies are coming from, what emotional
roots there are, and whether there are other problems that should be handled
first.
ABE: It’s interesting to note
that most people appear to react to the idea of any period of celibacy with
absolute horror. Even people who are purportedly working at a spiritual way of
life feel that if they don’t have sex for a month something awful is happening
to their lives, and if it goes on for longer than that, it’s a major
catastrophe.
DR. FEUERSTEIN: I think most of
us are sex addicts. We wouldn’t necessarily use that term, but I think that’s
what it boils down to. We have become addicted to that thrill, that very
momentary thrill of orgasm. It’s a habit, and like any habit it is very hard t
break. So we suffer when we have to be celibate, especially when we are forced
by circumstances—our partner dies, or we break up, or we feel guilty about
masturbating—and then we experience a lot of emotional trouble. We are not used
to feeling our body filled with energy. If it is our habit, say, to have two
orgasms a week, which seems to be the average for North American people, and
then we abstain from sexuality for a period of time, we don’t know what to do
with the energy. We run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Not a
nice image, but that’s about it. And we want to blow it off. So, given that, how
could we handle the delight and the bliss that come-s with a higher realization,
with Samadhi ecstasy? We wouldn’t even know what to do with it, because it fills
the whole body; it’s not somewhere in the head. It’s when your entire body feels
utterly pleasurable and blissful.
A B E: So you’re basically
saying that celibacy, in the context of a person who has a reasonably good
psychological balance to start with, can lead to health rather than sickness.
D R. F E U E R S T E I N:
Absolutely. In fact, I would say more than that. I would say that anyone who is
addicted to sexuality or orgasm, in the way that most people are, is not healthy
to begin with. What we consider normal is not necessarily healthy. I think the
traditions are very clear on this point. There is so much psycho-energy involved
in sexuality that any orgasmic discharge literally pours out vast amounts of
energy that we could use to ‘repair ourselves if we are not well, to invest in
creative projects, and so on. And so we live a life that is energetically flat.
We can’t take, for some reason, the tremendous turmoil, which is what it would
be for most people, the pressure, as Freud would say, of the libido in the body
that looks for an outlet. In Freud’s own case—and maybe we should learn from
this—he was a tremendously creative person; he obviously was a sexually highly
charged man. But most people don’t know what to do with this energy, and our
culture ‘provides very little guidance. What people do is usually discharge it
twice a week.
A B E: And that’s true of both
the man and the woman?
D R. F E U E R STE I N: Both
the man and the woman. Especially now, with the small amount of liberation that
has occurred through the sexual revolution, women feel that they’re entitled to
their orgasm as well, that something is wrong if they can’t have it once or
twice a week.
A B E: As a basic tenet of
Tantrisms, at every level that whole obsession with ejaculation, orgasm is just
completely bypassed. What’s on the other side of that barrier?
D R. F E U E R STE I N: Well,
let’s first talk about what that energy means. For the ordinary person it
manifests simply as nervous tension that has to be released to feel some kind of
semblance of balance. The traditions teach us that this energy is something that
goes beyond the physical body. It is a psycho-energy that wells up within us,
comes from very distant regions, and it manifests as different things, from our
breath to nervous energy to sexual energy. And what we have focused on
culturally is sexual energy. In Tantrism and similarly in Taoism and other
traditions, a different wisdom prevails. They say that if we assume that this
energy is a sacred energy, we relate to it differently. For us, it’s a nuisance,
almost, that we have to throw off. For them, it is something very sacred that
can be worked with to find our way back to our true identity, which is the
higher self, that spark within the divine.
A B E: So sexual energy is
rediscovered at its source. Then what happens?
D R. FEUERSTEIN: The
energy that manifests on the physical level as sexuality, which is in the lower
center of the body, is used, magnified even, in certain Tantric schools, either
through stimulation such as looking at a naked woman, or contemplating a naked
woman in her absence, or the ingestion of alcohol and mead, which are all
forbidden to the Tantric practitioner in the normal course of things. And then
this augmented energy is systematically guided up through the body by way of
meditation and concentration, first of all to the heart center. When that energy
reaches beyond the sexual center to the heart center, something happens to it.
We realize that it’s not sexual energy we’re talking about; it is a
psycho-energy, a sacred energy that simply manifests in the lower centers in a
certain way.
Once we have gathered it at the
heart center, we realize that this energy is something much bigger and much more
valuable than sexual energy.
When it opens our heart there
will be compassion, there will be all kinds of other intuitions, high-level
realizations, and then we can find the wisdom to guide it beyond the heart
center into the higher centers of the body, which are in the head. And there,
the energy again reveals itself differently. The idea in Tantrism is to ride
that energy to the crown of the head, the crown chakra, where it pierces through
the head and unites with the energy that is surrounding the body and the cosmos
at large. This is the marriage of what they call Shiva and Shakti, Shakti being
the feminine energy within the body, Shiva being the static energy that is
surrounding the body, and also of course interpenetrating it. Once this happens
you realize that the entire notion of sexual energy was really an illusion. It
is simply a lower level manifestation, a lower vibration of the same cosmic
energy that sustains our bodies, sustains everyone’s life.
A B E: So it is an essentially
transformative process. You take the whole human being into this state, whereas
there are other schools where y leave the body behind.
DR. F E U E R STE I N: Right. I
see two major orientations within any spirituality, any tradition. First is the
vertical tradition, which consists of an ascent of awareness. You identify with
the higher reality while forgetting the body, forgetting in two ways. First of
all, you’re no longer aware of it as a separate thing. You can forget it insofar
as your priority is union with that higher reality, and so the body itself is no
longer given any value, and you begin to neglect it. And so you have ascetics in
India’ who live in a high state of consciousness, but have to be fed by their
disciples because otherwise they would die from hunger. The second spirituality
is a much more integral spirituality. It has that ascent, but it also
understands that the body and the physical world as a whole are a manifestation
of that same reality that is reached or experienced through that mystical
ascent. And so there isn’t that separation anymore. This kind of spirituality is
holistic spirituality, and is far more palatable to us moderns than the vertical
type of spirituality which was very much a feature of past eras.
A B E: That holistic sexuality
as you’ve defined it would seem to be more suitable for the kind of culture we
are in where we don’t have an antagonistic attitude towards the physical plane.
DR. FEUERSTEIN: If we are
materialists we have a mistaken appreciation of it, because we regard it as the
ultimate reality, but we can learn from the traditions that say that the
physical realm is like the outermost peel of the onion, and that there are
deeper and deeper layers of reality, and that, as human beings, we have the
potential to discover them.
A B E: Can you say more about
what is on the other side of the ejaculation orgasm syndrome?
D R. F E U E R STE I N: In
orgasm, essentially, if we are honest, what we feel is a kind of tingling
sensation in a very limited area. If we are more relaxed, and very few people
seem to be, we can have that pleasurable sensation spread through wider areas of
the body. If we are even more relaxed or particularly attuned to or in love with
our partner, we might find that for a moment we have become unself-conscious in
that pleasure. And very occasionally, one experiences a kind of mystical blowout
in sexuality, where pleasure suddenly becomes bliss, where the body’s boundaries
melt, where we are no longer aware that these are Our genitals having these
sensations, but suddenly all these feelings and sensations are thrown wide open
and we feel connected, not just to our partner, but to all of life. And the
bliss that wells up inside us is the same bliss that exists forever outside us.
A B E: One reads in Tantric
literature of the man and woman reaching a point where they simultaneously
attain kundalini awakening through the practice. Are there many documented cases
of that?
DR. FEUERSTEIN: No. I think a
lot of the stuff that is reported, especially in Neo-Tantric groups, has nothing
to do with kundalini awakening. Prior to kundalini awakening, there is what is
called the prana arousal, where the life force in the body—not the mammoth
energy of kundalini, which is a very distinct thing—but the life force that
circulates in the body, that maintains the body, starts streaming. And a lot of
this streaming is confused with the kundalini. For instance, you could have
prana streaming, say, from the tip of your fingers up your arm, or sudden
burning sensations in your hands, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the
kundalini is awakened. It’s a local phenomenon of prana flow.
A B E: So, is the kundalini
awakening something that is so absolute, in a way, that you couldn’t mistake it
for anything else?
DR. FEUERSTEIN: Yes. You see, you could compare the prana streaming to an
ordinary chemical bomb, whereas the kundalini is a nuclear device that’s
triggered by prana. In fact, in certain schools in Hatha Yoga, the idea is to
focus on the lower center and also to guide the body’s prana there through
breath control, and then the prana acts like a stick that keeps hitting the
snake, which is the kundalini. And then the snake gets angry, and what does the
snake do? It rises up and hisses, which is exactly the sound that is described
by people. I’ve. never had an awakening in that sense, so I can only repeat
what. I’ve read and heard. The kundalini hisses and rises up the central channel
like a snake. -
A B E: There obviously are many people out there who have these experiences, but
we don’t hear much about it.
DR. F E U E R S T E I N: In my
book I give descriptions of what people have experienced in those moments. And
it can happen spontaneously to people who have had no previous experience with
any spiritual tradition. Very often they don’t know what to do with it. They
think they’re out of their minds, or they’re very anxious about concealing it,
because they think, well, what will my partner say, what will my family say? And
so we have what I call a conspiracy of silence around spiritual experiences in
sexuality, and spiritual experiences generally. Very few people, even now, talk
about the experiences they’ve had, and many people have had some amazing ones.
Just recently I made the
acquaintance of a man who had a fairly full- blown kundalini experience some
thirty years ago and ended up locked in a mental hospital. I was the first
person he talked to about this, and the symptoms he described were very classic
kundalini symptoms.
A B E: The tragedy with those
symptoms is that, in the Western psychology books, a lot of them fit in rather
too neatly with the description of “deluded,” “paranoid schizophrenic,” etc. So
you have this major problem where there are many people, I think,
institutionalized in mental hospitals, whose initiation has become pathologized
by the surrounding culture. We victimize people who are in the process of
authentic enlightenment.
D R. F E U E R STE I N:
Absolutely. And that was, I think, R. D. Laing’s great contribution, to suggest
that maybe some of these psychotics are not just psychotics, but people
undergoing genuine spiritual experiences.
A B E: Stanislav Grof has
helped to evolve the Spiritual Emergency Network, an agency that helps these
kinds of people. So there appear to be some glimmers.
DR. FEUERSTEIN : Yes, and in
fact it’s the beginning, I think, of something that will one day, hopefully not
too long in the future, be recognized as a very ordinary fact, that there are
some people who seemingly have psychotic breakdowns, when in effect they are
spiritual breakthroughs.
