#the level of smug know-it-all privileged male 'teacher' is astounding

[premakalidasi]

Listen, I’m up to here with “spiritual” men and frigid women turning their noses up at physical sex (including its supreme form, masturbation) as spiritual practice, simply because they’ve only ever associated sexuality with being an abuser or being abused, and because they’ve never experienced the Divine through the fully embodied, non-sublimated erotic, and most of all, have never experienced full, blissful, union-with-the-Divine or even samadhi during orgasm. 

The female orgasm is vastly different from the male one, for a start. She is not exhausted by it; far from it. She is rejuvenated by it; her body springs into life instead of experiencing a “little death.” If anything, the female orgasm is a little Big Bang (the double entendre is, here, believe it or not, unintentional. Were I to say “spontaneous explosive expansion of space-time,” few would get what I’m getting at). But it is that: where, for the male, it’s unfortunately an end, it is to the woman, a beginning. And yet we’ve had to hear from heterosexual male “adepts” over and over that sexual energy should be retained, that it shouldn’t be wasted, that it shouldn’t be spilled, yadda yadda.

Have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds to someone whose body is built to be the container and developer of sexual energy? Or, for that matter, to any receptive partner, as at least some receptive men and post-op transwomen understand something of how absolutely different it is to experience an internal orgasm where the energy doesn’t leave the body, but where, instead, the expansion and explosion of energy is inwards?

Look. It’s like this. Imagine a pitcher full of water and an empty glass. And when the pitcher is picked up and water is poured from it into the glass, the pitcher feels a relief at his load being lessened there at first, but then he realises he’s getting emptier and weaker and bemoans “Oh, woe is me! I felt a relief of pressure and an unloading of weight at first, but now I feel exhausted, emptied!” And then, in a tremendous feat of ego, being utterly unable to understand that not everyone is a pitcher, presuming that everyone is like himself, he thinks the glass is feeling the same thing. “Glass, I’m so sorry I’ve dragged you into this! You must be feeling so miserable right now!” while the glass is filled, overjoyous, bubbling, swirling, going “I feel so full and rejuvenated! I’m filled with life! Mmm, can I have some more?”

And the pitcher doesn’t understand this at all, is suspicious, calls her an evil witch and topples off the table. And his broken, bitter pieces preach the horrors of this thing to everyone, write it into holy scriptures, into spiritual practices, imposing it onto everyone regardless of how different their build is.

The bliss the female is capable of experiencing is entirely different. It’s due to what her muscles, her complex hormonal, neurological and all kinds of biological workings do at the stimulation, when they prepare her body to--potentially--nurture an entire new life. The plant casts off its seed and it’s done, and it withers away; the earth’s job has only just begun. It rolls up its sleeves; it’s rippling all over with a burst of energy, tingling and busy and alive; never fuller. And that’s not due to her sucking out his energy either, any more than a massive field full of rich earth can nourish itself from just one little seed--the fecundity, the earth in all its complex organisms, is already existent within her, the energies becoming released and activated at stimulation of the vulva and the uterus. 

In fact, it’s even better experienced alone with a suitable toy, without a man having to enter into it all, not due to a technical fault on the part of the man but because that’s the way the female orgasm works. The contractions of the uterus and the pelvic floor muscles build up slowly and, ideally, lead to orgasm--but in practice, they are far too often interrupted by the thrusts of the penetrator because these thrusts are out of synch with the woman’s ripples. When the vaginal walls want to contract (i.e. squeeze), the squeeze is interrupted by something moving inside the vagina (not letting it squeeze down fully), and the cascade towards orgasm is interrupted. And that’s why so many women have trouble having orgasm during vaginal sex: because to time them right, the guy (or whoever delivers the thrusts, regardless of sex or gender) would have to be telepathic. (And incidentally, this is also why it’s easier for a number of women to come from anal sex, because the thrusts aren’t interrupting what the vagina and uterus are doing. They can contract as much as they like, while intense nervous stimulation is still applied; the best of both worlds.) Only when she’s in control of the thrusts, can she pace them to her own ripples so that her vaginal walls aren’t pushed apart just when they want to contract or left without anything to thrust into them when they yearn for a thrust. (And the dildo won’t call you a stupid whore or an evil witch, or tell you to not moan in such an embarrassing way, or otherwise hurt you when he’s inside your body and you’re enduring discomfort and potential pain for his sake, either.) 

But when the vaginal orgasm does arrive, it’s a full-body one, a blissful one, something that ripples through every muscle. If combined with yogic awareness, the chakras burst open; the experience is very much that of flower after flower, a series of petals bursting into bloom, opening, heaving inside, all glittering with sunlight. Or cascades of bright water, rainbow-coloured light--it’s exactly that which is hinted at in some scriptures, but buried under all kinds of misconceptions. There has absolutely been a woman involved there at one point when those concepts were formulated, describing that surge of energy upwards and exploding out at the top of the head. And the rain of nectar, being saturated with nectar? Yep. That’s what it is. 

Therefore, if your only experience of orgasm is post-ejaculatory fatigue, of just bringing the seeds to the field and not knowing what it feels like for the earth--if you never feel the expansion, the ecstasy, the ripples of creation itself radiating through your body in waves, why, pray, do you presume your shallow, pitiful experience is the same for everyone else? And why should you think that sexuality was harmful--it couldn’t be because you were born into the privilege to abuse it? How do you presume to hurt someone when you’re equipped a womb, cause someone an unwanted pregnancy with it, rape someone with a clitoris? Even the woman who’s used her charms to manipulate men still subjects herself to physical pain every time she opens her legs; it’s a shallow victory if it subjects you to the risk of having your body ripped open by a baby and dying as a result. If one woman out of a billion has ever abused sex to the point of molesting someone, it’s been noticed exactly because it’s been an anomaly: she makes headlines in newspapers, but sexual abuse by men is so commonplace it doesn’t even make the news--it’s just accepted as standard. Can you please consider again what it takes for a woman to even dare speak of sex, when she’s faced with that? 

Have you thought of what it would be like to have sex so that you were the one being penetrated, and that the default would be that you never had an orgasm? Because that’s the reality of most women on this planet. Stop and think about that for a while. How would that change your entire view of things? Of how, perhaps, it’s more than just the atrocious tyranny the world exerts over women’s bodies in the name of chastity that makes them reluctant to even discuss sex? Have you really thought of how orgasm is a privilege, something that happens to a male body so automatically it occurs even in sleep, because it’s a biological necessity (but not so for the woman) to ensure the continuation of the species? And how much work it requires for a woman to even conquer the shame over her body to touch it, to study it, let alone enough to learn how it can, potentially, orgasm? And how, if she’s only allowed to have sex with her husband and in ways where she cannot control the thrusts, and she’s shamed out of masturbating, (as most women on this planet genuinely are), it’s likely she never will? Have you really thought of that? Sex, always, with someone grunting on top of you, inside of you, maybe with a little pleasure but without orgasm, unless you’re extremely lucky?

Have you thought of what it’d be like to be born into the half of humanity that’s penalised for expressing sexuality in any way whatsoever? What’s a frivolous little act of amusement for you that you regret as a bit of wasted energy (and to a woman, equal to full samadhi at best), is, for a woman, an extremely radical act of self-expression and wholeness and even daring to fucking exist, performed under the threat of extreme violence and death. It’s not a fucking joke.

Even those “neo-Tantra” books you scoff at, hell, any books about sexuality written by women and involving the use of female genitals for the female’s own pleasure and enlightenment, are radical as fuck. They’re taboo-breaking, consciousness-transcending, seriously fucking out there, in and of themselves. They are the most antinomian, most mind-fucking, most explosive things of all, but egotistical men can’t see that because the stuff these books talk about--getting in touch with your own genitalia--are something men take for granted. It’s accepted that hey, guys think with their dicks. Most of the English-speaking world, on the other hand, doesn’t even know what the word “vagina” means, symbolic of how out of touch women and everyone else is about female bodies. Ask a woman to touch herself and she’ll blanch; ask her to taste herself and she’ll throw up. 

And you know what? I’d read even the loopiest, fluffiest, New Agest crystal-crusted version of those over one written by an egotistical male “sage” constantly going on about his own superiority without having ever paused to think of the full human experience, not just his half. He doesn’t even fucking acknowledge I exist, nor does he understand shit about my body’s experience, using it as a tool at best, whereas the hippie New Ager, no matter how cringeworthily misguided, at least respects the female body and allows me to fucking have my birthright of the pleasure it’s built to experience. And these  “updates”, these new practices and variations by people uninitiated by gurus that so many of you sneer at--has it ever occurred to you that they’ve never found the one female guru who understood women, supported women, let alone female sexuality at all? So that they have had to come up with new practices, new religions from scratch? In this, they are not less valuable: rather, more valuable because they finally depart from withered, inhuman old books and fucking allow half of the human race to even exist, and mind-bogglingly, even offer women the (gasp!) chance to expand into all we can be. It’s about time we resurrect and reinvent and rebuild spiritual practices that regard women as more than slaves, penis receptacles, son-producers, housekeepers. 

No, I’d rather listen to the full glass. She’s been shattered over and over, and has had to glue herself together ten times over before she got there, in a world where most women are not ever given glue, and where women themselves restrict the access to glue because it’s dirty and bad and slutty and impure.

It’s a whole different fucking game, a whole different  experience, a whole different world.

Don’t belittle it. Don’t remain in the pitiful accepted ideas of it, whether it’s simple classic patriarchal masculinity or self-sacrificing female chastity where even looking at your body in a mirror is a sin. Accept that you know fuck-all. Accept that you have a lot to learn still. And that you can learn from women, you can learn from gay and bisexual men, you can learn from taking something up your ass. You can learn from gay men’s fear of AIDS a little something of the pain and the risks (not just STDs but unwanted pregnacies, potentially lethal) women have to fear every time they accept a man’s advances. You can learn from what a post-op transwoman has to say. You can learn from what lesbian and bisexual women have to say about how they’ve felt about making love to a woman, or being made love to by both men and women. You can learn by empathising, visualising yourself as the other, via exercises where you try to see something in a way your opposite would. This includes those--especially those--who you think are doing it wrong, and trying to understand what they get out of it; just as in everything in life, even your “enemies” help you achieve a more integral and holistic view that includes as many experiences, ways of being as possible. 

As for this “clinging” business, this “human relationships are transient” thing. Whoever the fuck said you have to have sex with another person at all? Due to the aforementioned biological reasons, for women in particular, masturbation is the key. Making love to The Divine is the key, and hey presto, all your daddy (or mommy, or androgyne trickster deity) issues are solved. Someone, somewhere on the way, forgot to include wanking as sexuality (usually the stuck-up gits who allowed only for procreation and wanted to burn all gays at the stake, even if us and a few other species of ape are the only species who fuck more for social reasons than procreation to the point where we stopped having a heat/mating season once a year and became horny all year round), and that’s when all went downhill. And now people whose only sexuality is with themselves even call themselves asexual, even if, especially for women, it gives you the best, sometimes the only orgasms you can have. Which is, frankly, like a highly skilled brain surgeon calling herself severely motor-impaired and saying she’s retired anyway even if she’s in the operating room, saving someone’s life that very moment. But it’s by and far the best option, especially if you tend to get hysterically clingy and have bad abandonment experiences or just suck at having relationships. Think of it! None of this clinging business that’s always invariably associated with sexuality; none of this people-bonking-people that’s always also invariably associated with sexuality. No unwanted pregnacies, no STDs, going at your own pace, minimal risk of pain, no hurt feelings, no trying to please your partner to the point where it ruins your experience, et cetera, et cetera. 

And nothing, absolutely nothing compares to the state of samadhi, the state of hieros gamos, the full union reached during a Self-powered love-bout dedicated to the Divine. In my four decades of various spiritual practices, I’ve had the good fortune to experience a few types of extreme enlightenment experiences, and let me tell you, that much-vaunted, hard-to-reach state of complete emptiness that one gains with ardurous fasting and yoga? 

It’s boring as fuck. 

It’s dull, boring, lifeless. It’s nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the fully conscious, divine, uterine, kundalini-bursting-orgasm achieved through masturbative meditation: the explosion of LIFE, the radiant sparkling iridescent colourful bliss that is the root of creation itself, of spirit and matter, solve et coagula, Shiva/Shakti, as above, so below, yin/yang, absofuckinglutely transcendental and immanent and all, all, all.

It’s all in how you approach it. For some people, emptiness is their biggest kink, their biggest fetish. But if your body’s built for love, in the absolutely-embodied-and-also-transcendental sense, and you’re not harming a soul by doing it, fucking go for it. 

Note how I’m not telling the entire world that they should take up spiritual wanking (although I’d love that)? Because I know that there are as many paths as there are people, but for some reason, there’s a conspicuous amount of stomping over certain paths, and in the world’s usual misogynistic manner, practices by and for women that celebrate the female body are laughed at and attacked because vulvas are, apparently, that fucking terrifying. I could devote an entire rant to how we need to disassociate sex from abuse (because that’s the usual reason these practices are dismissed, and frankly, tantra, in and of itself full of deeply morally suspect scriptures, does attract the worst types of guys--the amount of so-called gurus and babas in that who treat women like shit and are only after siddhis and other ego-boosting things is too high), but that’s for a later date. Women and queers in particular know what it’s like to be on the receiving end, so thanks to us knowing what hurts in bed, we’re equipped with some tools there already to change things for the better. It’s a shitty way of learning empathy to have to have been bullied, but there you have it.

This is not to shame anyone into thinking they’re inadequate. (That’s the same tool that’s been used against women for millennia.) It’s the voice of all those who’ve been told to shut up by people who think they know better, and who have dictated the rules so far. But no matter how hard you try, the full experience of Divine bliss, the full existence of the Universe is not all male and/or asexual, and you need to shut up and listen for once. I, or Nature, doesn’t actually give a fuck about whether you have a womb or not, whether you have a sex drive or not, whether you have a dick or not. The point is to stop any one group, no matter how numerous and powerful, from trying to dictate the rules (because that causes suffering) and to understand that yours isn’t the whole story (because this knowledge, translated into awareness, helps banish suffering). 

It’s a million times easier to just ignore sexuality than to use it responsibly, especially if you haven’t been given decent tools for it, but that isn’t an excuse to keep on running away. Running away is exactly the thing that causes hallowed, celibacy-preaching yoga gurus to fall for pretty young students, and then be exposed as hypocrites. Solution: don’t be a hypocrite in the first place, but integrate the fuck-power, no matter how difficult it is, no matter if you have to pave the way there yourself. Particularly as this full awareness means you’re not paving the way there with other people’s bodies; once you have even a vague idea of what it feels like to your partner, compassion comes naturally. (And I mean real awareness. Not egotistically thinking you know everything. Real awareness means that even when you’ve been married to someone for thirty years, you still don’t know everything about them and still learn that someone anew every day.) Or, if you decide to pursue the conjugal-bliss-only-with-the-Divine route, I reassure you that if you’re still alive after having handled that, you’re already on the last leg of your journey.

And even if you chose celibacy still because sexuality just wasn’t your thing, the important bit is to stop telling those of us that use it that we’re doing it wrong when we’re hurting absolutely no one by it and, moreover, are 10000% goddamn motherfucking one with the Divine when we do it. (Or, rather, are explosively reminded of our oneness with it, just as much as someone else is, through using another, more “acceptable” method.) And it’s not for you to tell us that we aren’t really experiencing the Divine Union and we’re just deluding ourselves, any more than you can describe a country we live in but you’ve never been to.

This has been a kick into casting off your ignorance and going beyond that into the full experience of the fully intertwined, fully immanent Divine that is the World that is the Divine. Accept that you know fuck-all, accept that you must work seriously and sincerely to know the Other to know your Self and the Whole. I’m giving you my part of it, after being suffocated by your part of it over and over and over, to make even a small difference in the mix, to work towards a balanced understanding of the whole. Even if that balance seems a faraway utopia as long as women continue to oppress themselves and as long as men remain oblivious and as long as the ones who think they’re superior by stepping outside of the two remain smugly passive. 

Even if I just said I’ve experienced bliss beyond bliss, even that is an infinitesmally small part of the whole Bliss. And if I’ve had to go beyond so much shit to get even that, what about those people who’ve never even thought about these things? That’s why these things need to be thought about and talked about, rather than just slammed down as “wasteful” and “dirty” and “depraved” by That Big Guy Who Knows Better. 

Just because something’s covered in human, social, gendered, delusional, traditional, limited, unconscious crap, it doesn’t mean that it’s crap all the way down to the core. Why do we imagine that? We imagine that because it’s so much easier to be a rake or a prude; that handily takes away our responsibility. Yet science evolves, and so must humanity. In our thinking about sexuality, we’re still on the level of thinking the Earth is flat; hell, we haven’t even admitted we’re apes yet. Let alone that we’re intelligent, empathic creatures who are well-equipped for beautiful, blissful ecstasies, for love beyond what we can even imagine.