"섹스를 통해 영적인 경지에 이를 수 있다 (Through our bodies touching, we can touch the divine.)"고 주장하시는 Adam Gilad씨가 오는 2월 10일에 "From Sex to Super-Consciousness: The Future of Love" 라는 주제로 온라인 강연을 합니다.
허나, 우리는 여전히 '매춘/혼외정사의 세계'와 '일부일처제가 강제하는 울타리' 사이에서 칙칙하게 흐느적거리고 있습니다.
아래 인용된 글은 위에 언급된 온라인 비디오 강연에 게스트로 초대된 Allex Allman씨의 글을 Reality Sandwich에서 허락없이 무단 전제한 글입니다.
"욕정이 사랑하는 사람과의 열정적인 섹스로 연결되기 보다는 오히려 그 친밀감으로 인해 욕정이 수그러드는 경우가 허다합니다. 심지어 타인과의 섹스를 상상하는 것이 사랑하는 사람과의 섹스를 상상하는 것보다 훨씬 더 성적으로 자극적인 것에 대해 부끄럽게 여기기도 합니다."
왜 그러는 걸까요?
대부분의 사람들에게 '섹스'는 그저 '사랑하는 사람과 육체적 관계 맺기(욕정 해소)' 정도로 이해되고 있다는 것에서 문제는 시작됩니다. 이 정의에 따르면 '사랑'은 '육체적 관계 맺음'이라는 행위 과정 속에서 무언가 새롭게 적극적으로 창조되어지는 것이 아닌 수동적이고 부차적인 어떤 것으로 밀려나게 됩니다.
또 다른 문제는 우리의 인지구조와 관련이 있습니다.
내가 내 스스로 알고있는 '나'는 과연 진정한 '나'일까? 하물며 내가 잘 알고 있다고 믿고 있는 '타인'은? 만약, 내가 알고 있는 '나'와 내가 알고 있는 '타인'이라는 것이 사실은 우리 뇌의 인지구조가 지어낸 '허상'이라면?
생면부지의 타인과는 '불타는 밤'을 보내면서도, 믿음과 사랑으로 긴 시간을 함께한 타인과는 '밤이 무서운' 현실...
침대에서 벗어야 할 것은 속옷만이 아니라 성스러운 '영육합일'을 가로막는 '나'와 '타인'에 대한 '허상'도 함께 벗어야 합니다.
침대에서 성불합시다!
It can feel like your sex drive is betraying your heart. You wish that you could be consumed with mad attraction for the person you love, and yet all too often, familiarity actually kills libido. You might even begin to feel shame around the simple truth that you are often more sexually aroused by thoughts of complete strangers than thoughts of the person who is so dear to your heart.
Yet it would be naive, or worse, self-deceptive, to not acknowledge that this is the way humans are built, and in absence of some intentional action on your part, this is likely the way your relationships will evolve.A big part of the problem is that most people define "making love" simply as "sex with someone you love."
Their partner is the person they are most likely to feel judged by, and the person they most fear judgement from. There is simply too much at stake.
The danger with that definition is that it assumes that love is passively to be enjoyed during sex, rather than something that you DO.
However, if you examine the phrase "making love," you might notice that it is not grammatically passive. There is a powerful action term in there. "Making" is creating -- perhaps the most demanding of all actions. One can watch, listen, or even walk quite passively, but making or creating requires attention, intention, and presence.
In my definition, making love is in doing the work of surrendering the mind (or the ego) in service of relating. It is being present with your shared desire rather than being wrapped up in your unconnected mental or emotional experience.
One of the unexpected consequences of this definition is that it is possible to engage in profound love-making with a total stranger in a didn't-even-catch-your-name one-night-stand.
Being "in love" is not required for "making love." Rather, what is required is an openness to love itself and a willingness to "do love" by being present. Further, it is often easier for some individuals to do this with a relative stranger than with someone they deeply love and respect, with whom they have shared many of life's trials and rewards, and with whom they've developed a deep and trusting relationship.
There are two reasons for this counterintuitive experience:
The first is that for a couple who have not practiced and worked at "doing love" while "making love" throughout their relationship, the path to being truly present with each other during sex becomes overgrown with all of the accumulated disappointments, minor betrayals, grudges, wrong-makings, and resentments of the years living together as partners in the business of life.
Eventually, for many couples, they wake up one day to discover that their life partner is the single most threatening person in the world for them to become sexually vulnerable, present, and real with.
The second reason is that no human ever really accurately knows another in the terms of the "ego/I". The person I know myself to be on a daily basis will never be the same person that exists in your mind of who I am.
If we dig into the labyrinthian alleyways of modern spiritualism and non-duality, then we might agree that the person who I know myself to be on a daily basis is a fiction to begin with, just a story that I have created about myself to justify my self and hide from the terror of mortality. And my fictional story of who I am and your fictional story of who I am are not likely to be exactly the same story.
The longer we know someone, the more entrenched our version of that story becomes. We might not be surprised to discover that someone we just met is, in fact, very different from the way we first imagined them. But our parents, children, siblings and lovers? We have built up strong certainties that we know them as well (or even better!) than they know themselves.
Bringing that story into bed with you, in open and loving acceptance of your partner, with all of their faults and all of their wonderful qualities... might feel a very great deal like intimacy.
Yet I'd like to offer a perspective that no matter how you bring that story into bed with you, you are actually destroying any chance of authentic intimacy, killing the freshness of attraction, and erecting powerful barriers to experiencing Making Love.
Try this instead:
Do whatever mental acrobatics you need to in order to completely drop your "knowing" and your familiarity of who your lover is. Bring yourself back to presence, to seeing them new in the moment.
You will discover that it is more powerful to be present with your lover's orgasm - simply at the level of feeling and experience (or even just to be more present with his cock or her pussy and your own baseline animal feelings of arousal for their genitals), than it is to be present with your lover's personality.
Sometimes the training wheels necessary to get your mind to drop familiarity might involve a fantasy... perhaps a fantasy of a didn't-even-get-your-name one-night-stand. You close your eyes and then open them again to see this person before you completely new. The truth of the situation opens for you and you relate to them not as "who they are," but as the root experience of being human together.
Bringing your self back to presence, seeing your lover in the moment simply as they are, and not as they have ever been before, and then experiencing them through erotic touch IS making love.
At this level, sex becomes an entirely spiritual endeavor. You are now in the space, not only of truly making love, but of truly making love with a person you are in love with. In this state of mutual experience, it is not uncommon to weep tears of joy over and over again, each time you make you love, because it is not something that never becomes routine or familiar.
Ultimately, your commitment to "doing love" with your partner during sex will lead to moments of deep and profound recognition of Truth itself; which, of course, is the recognition of Love itself.
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