Sexual compatibility, sexual frustration.

My girlfriend rarely comes, and it’s starting to drive me batty.

Yes, this is that kind of post, so if you get offended by frank sex talk, take your eyes away from what disgusts you, don’t slow down, don’t stare, and move along.

It’s driving me batty, and it doesn’t help that she is an excellent girlfriend in most other ways. She dotes, she loves enthusiastically, she’s romantic, I matter to her each second, and she tries, really really hard, every day, to make me happy.

She still doesn’t come, and what’s worse is our discrepancy in staying power. I’m above average in my staying power and needs for minutes or hours per day of sex. She tends to tire after ten or twenty minutes.

Ok, but she makes up for that by pleasuring me when she has no more oomph for receiving pleasure. The problem sometimes then happens that we lose sync and disconnect about what it means to be having sex. She’ll change position or ask me questions or stop a strong tempo, taking breaks in the middle of ecstasy. Can you imagine at the climax of Stairway To Heaven if someone kept fussing with the radio dial?

I’ve made it clear from day one that I’m not offering monogamy, and it’s my fault for not finding sexual compatibility. But we live together. I am just satisfied enough to not have the oomph to go out and work at setting up other situations. And if I did? I’d need hotel rooms, and a certain kind of girl.

I really don’t need to hear from people who have some deep seated need to play down the importance of sex. You are welcome to your own values. I have mine, and sex is HUGELY important to me. I’m not 80 years old. I can’t be satisfied with twenty minutes. I’m just getting warmed up in the first thirty. And I need to hear the loud screams and feel the contractions and feel hugely powerful with a woman of power. That’s as factual as my need for oxygen and meat.

I understand that some women will come only under a limited set of circumstances. I’ve some experience in awakening deep sexual feelings in women who thought they couldn’t have vaginal orgasms. I’m also aware that men and women have innate sex drives. Some of us have an ever present and powerful fire in the belly, some of us have other priorities. People vary widely.

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I know many people tend to see all issues filtered through the gossip angles of self-esteem and blame. Blunt descriptions harm the sensibilities of such folk. It isn’t necessary to change the subject or downplay the importance of it as soon as variance is mentioned. People vary, and it isn’t about blame. Not every conversation boils down to whose fault it is.

I doubt machines are sexy

I like a physical fucking, but I doubt a clever machine could satisfy.

As we know, fucking, ping pong, tennis, conversation, is about the subtleties of what we get to listen to.  Sex is at least as about the feedback from and the emotions of other, as about what we get to give or receive. Music made together is different than taking turns making music.

…If I want something simple, I can pay for that. I want more. I can’t see how a computer can make ideas. Creativity and an engaging surprise, wit, wonder and a depth of feeling, I can’t imagine machines emulating these.

An excellent commentary on spiritual metaphysics!

I’m digging to the groove of this riff by Meera Nanda against reifying mystical insights into rational arguments.

My main disagreement is that I don’t see it as merely reificiation of a non-dual awareness experience that could be cause to have the viewpoint that awareness must somehow be inherent to the universe. Enough non-mystic-serious-scientists consider this at least reasonable to make the notion no longer even out of bounds of mainstream. I’m not saying that ideas such as rocks having awareness, or that we have souls that transmigrate are in any way scientific; I’m saying that the “hard question” is considered by some scientists to be reasonable grounds to speculate that awareness is somehow not merely an emergent property. It may still be an untestable metaphysical speculation, however the grounds for the speculation were logical reasoning, not reification of a mystical experience.

The full article is worth a read, if meditative spirituality has had any impact on your life. One most poignant excerpt:

Harris offers a standard characterization of the mystical/spiritual experience. He describes it as tuning, or focusing, the mind through meditation, fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation or using psychotropic drugs, that enables it to overcome, or dissolve, the sense of the self that stands separate from the objects of its consciousness. The goal of spiritual experience is to “experience the world perfectly shorn of self… to lose the subject/object perception …to continue to experience the world, but without the felling that there is a knower standing apart form the known. Thoughts may arise, but the feeling that one is a thinker of these thoughts vanish.” (p. 212-213) The goal is to dissolve the ego-bound, individuated subject by ending its separation from the object itself. Harris is describing the classic all-is-one and one-is-all experience that mystics and spiritual adepts tend to report.

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For Hindus, this attempt to divest the ego by consciously realizing its identity with the ground of the entire macrocosm — what the Hindus call the Brahman — is the very essence of what the Vedas and Upanishads teach: “Thou art That,” “all this Brahman” and the atman (self) in you is the Brahman. Brahman, the Vedas teach, is the sole, truly existing, non-material, eternal reality which is beyond space, time and causation. Once you experience the sense of being beyond space, time and causation through yoga, breath control and meditation, you will realize the truth of the Vedas, namely, the self in you (atman) is identical with Brahman, your consciousness encompasses the entire macrocosm, and that you are, in fact, God. Once you reach this state of mind, you are not held back by fears or tempted by desires: the here and now of the material world become illusionary and lose their grip on one’s mind. Thus, the achievement of the sense of one-ness with the universe is a central commandment of Hindu and Buddhist teachings. While Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have their mystics, only the Eastern traditions provide a doctrine that can make sense of the mystical experience of unity or one-ness.

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I would have no argument with Harris if he were only recommending spiritualism as means for mindful relaxation, and the delight and even ecstasy that sometimes accompany the sensation of losing one’s sense of space, time and self. Indeed “wise mystics” have long realized that the mystical experience does not confer existential status on its content. Rather than construct metaphysical systems, wise mystics have learned to simply enjoy and value the experience itself.[1] There is enough data to believe that meditation, if done consistently and over many years, does bring about a deep state of relaxation, with dramatically lowered heart rate and brain activity. If the goal is to reduce stress, even the most militant rationalist will have to admit that meditation does provide some benefits. (It does not follow, however, that all the claims of yoga and pranayam, must be accepted. There is very little rigorous controlled testing of the more extravagant claims of those who believe in the power of the mind to cure everything from blindness to cancers).

This last paragraph is, I think, one of the main things I try to convey on this blog. This is an anti-materialist blog – a call to see a big picture and have a big party. Mindfullness and compassion training seem to be essential to both seeing the big picture and to partying. I strongly believe in the value of mind training to enhance quality of life for self and others.

I also advocate chi-kung, and do not find that the practice requires belief in prana as a “real” force. Prana may be a psycho-physical kinesthetic visualization. I suggest that such visualizations might be shareable in ways that we don’t yet understand; through hypnotic suggestion, craftily interpreted subtle non-verbal subliminal cues of smells, sounds,sights and pressures, and, just perhaps, by senses that we have yet to discover. A shared orgasm feels very shared. Furthermore, kinesthetic visualizations are phycho-physical – they affect your body and mind. They can be taught and you can train in them, and doing so has effect.

While I applaud pointing out where others make meta-physical errors, I feel it is a mistake to overlook or downplay what are some very real benefits of mind training. The benefits might not cure blindness, but nor do they all relate to stress reduction. Sometimes someone has a valuable message, but pollutes it with errors. I feel Meera may have short-shrifted Sam a bit, in pointing out mostly his errors. But she did such an excellent job of it that I applaud.

 

Meditation in Literature: Olaf Stapledon

This from meditationblog.com is a profound example of allowing images to coallesce creatively as metaphor; using the muse to discover. I also find it remarkable his speaking of the sexual nature of natural “meditative” awareness.

Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), one of the most important figures in science fiction, taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Liverpool. Like his contemporaries, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Stapledon explored his ideas in novels of the imagination. While writing, Stapledon wasn’t aware that science fiction existed, though he became a formative influence on the genre. His greatest works, “Last Men and First Men” (1930) and “Star Maker” (1937), he termed “histories of the future.” In “Last Men and First Men,” Stapledon tells the comprehensive story of humanity from the present time until a future two billion years from now. “Star Maker” takes on a broader scope — the history and future of the universe itself. The science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, eloquently describes these two books:

There is nothing else in all of literature like Stapledon’s two cosmological novels. Every few pages contain all the material of an ordinary science fiction novel, condensed to something like prose poetry; and their profound view of our place in the scheme of things is a joy to experience.

At the core Stapledon’s works focus on moral, spiritual, and religious evolution. In his future histories, he measures the success and failure of a species by the degree to which it attains an awareness of an underlying unity in the workings of the universe. In “Star Maker,” which Arthur C. Clarke called, “Probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written,” one of the many creatures Stapledon documents is the plant-men. Half-human, half-vegetative in nature, they are mobile workers at night, then sink roots and rest by day. Stapledon describes their resting period as a rejuvenating, meditative state of communion. The following excerpt contains Stapledon’s literary description of their meditation, and a feeling for the moral purpose in his writing:

Briefly, the mentality of the plant-men in every age was an expression of the varying tension between the two sides of their nature, between the active, assertive, objectively inquisitive, and morally positive animal nature and the passive, subjectively contemplative, and devotedly acquiescent vegetable nature. It was of course through animal prowess and practical human intelligence that the species had long come to dominate its world. But at all times this practical will had been tempered and enriched by a kind of experience which among men is very rare. Every day, throughout the ages, these beings had surrendered their feverish animal nature not merely to unconscious or dream-racked sleep, such as animals know, but to the special kind of awareness (we learned) belongs to plants. Spreading their leaves, they had absorbed directly the essential elixir of life which animals receive only at second hand in the mangled flesh of their prey. Thus they seemingly maintained immediate physical contact with the source of all cosmical being. And this state, though physical, was also in some sense spiritual. It had a far-reaching effect on all their conduct. If theological language were acceptable, it might well be called a spiritual contact with God. During the busy night-time they went about their affairs as insulated individuals, having no present immediate experience of their underlying unity; but normally they were always preserved from the worst excesses of individualism by memory of their day-time life. [Star Maker, p. 118.]

On the following page, Stapledon further describes the quality and content of this meditation:

And this experience afforded him an enduring ecstasy whose quality was almost sexual, an ecstasy in which subject and object seemed to become identical, an ecstasy of subjective union with the obscure source of all finite being. In this state the plant-man could meditate upon his active, night-time life, and could become aware, far more clearly by day, of the intricacies of his own motives. In this day-time mode he passed no moral judgements on himself or others. He mentally reviewed every kind of human conduct with detached contemplative joy, as a factor in the universe. But when night came again, bringing the active nocturnal mood, the calm, day-time insight into himself and others was lit with a fire of moral praise and censure. [Star Maker, p. 119.]

Time dilation, expanded awareness, kinesthetic awareness.

When people die, their life flashes before their eyes. Sometimes during a trauma or during dream time, a person will experience time dilation and in a few seconds experience several hours (or days or even years) worth of dreams. Sometimes when startled by a sound, as that sound wakes me, I will have an instant mini dream that culminates in the sound as the climax of it – as if the sound was anticipated. Sometimes a dream will include a memory of a dream past – instantly created and complex.
Susan Blackmore talks about time dilation, and how linear time as we experience it is a fabrication of consciousness, not an inherent aspect of consciousness. That is why we get time dilation – one second literally can include many hours worth of experience.

Some people practice visualizations. With practice they can visualize an incredibly complicated scene – all in incredible detail. This is similar to time dilation, except without the time dilation: many hours or days worth of experience crammed into a short period of “time”. Expanded awareness, in other words.

The time in the morning, after a decent rest but while still asleep, often allows for expanded awareness. As can time on the meditation cushion, or altered by drugs, or during intense flow moments such as surfing, skiing, sky-diving, or sex.

Expanded awareness and peoples visualizations can get big. Some people report a clear visualization expanding to include not just their entire house, but the planet, solar system, and then out and out to Universe. And tales of a full lifetime being remembered in a matter of seconds number in the several thousand, at least.

People cultivate time dilation and expanded awareness. Micheal Jordan is famous for being able to slow down time.

Chi-kung, or kinesthetic awareness practice, also is a type of visualization, that can expand along with awareness. One embodies a greater and greater self, and integrates it.

We are told that mind and body are in mutual influence. The limitlessly intricate body system is affected by our attitudes and feelings and thoughts. Intractable illnesses are healed by placebo, health fails from stress, visualising weight lifting increases muscle mass. Chi-kung integrates our awareness with our sensations and our body; the feedback loop of attention and action. Focus on your fingertip, and your fingertip will subtly change because of your focus – neurons there will fire. Every time neurons fire, they strengthen a circuit. If you practice playing the piano, the circuits practiced between your hands and spine strengthen, such that the brain need only send a signal to the spine, “c-chord” and the spine will send the signal to the hands. All our actions and attentions build or let atrophy circuits.

And our awareness can include many circuits at once. So, kinesthetic awareness can build to include greater and greater subtlety, and include more and more of the body and sensations at once.

But sensations are not limited to the physical body. Amputees can feel lost limbs. Pain is sometimes felt in a part of body physically located in a different place than the injury. People see auras – information is processed in unconscious ways, and then displayed in consciousness as a perception – an aura can not be seen if the body is occluded from view – a body next to a doorway but hidden won’t show an aura to someone who sees. There is no physically existing aura that is seen, but subtle thoughts and perceptions are organized into a scene. And our perceptions can be incredibly subtle – we don’t really yet know the limit to just how subtle. We do have many reports of extremely subtle hearing; hearing the exact words of conversations happening in distant room. Lovers are familiar with the feeling of their mates subtle sensations being felt in their own body, bringing them to a mutually experienced climax. Very subtle cues and sensations are transmitted in ways we don’t yet understand or know where to look for the physical correlates.

So a very complicated kinesthetic or visual visualization needn’t have direct one to one measurable correlates in physical space in order to be “real”, or to encode useful and practical information. Dislocated pain symptoms point to a real problem, somewhere. A feeling of love in the heart, or of sexual feelings in the belly, don’t have to point to any measurable physical thing called love or sex to exist and be meaningful. The nervous system in touch with with emotions and the hormonal and all physical systems makes sense of complicated patterns through felt visualizations – through feelings and images.

There are many experiences people can train themselves to feel and deepen in – many common circuits we can tune into. Individuals share much in common, as our physical systems are all human. When we feel sadness from breaking up with a lover, we don’t say that we feel it in our big toe; we feel it in the center of our chest.

Many of our circuits of attention/sensation can be talked of in subjective terms, terms that need not have direct correlates in the body. People practice meditations to feel energy below the feet, and report somewhat common experiences that happen to them when they feel this. Where exactly do the physical correlates to feeling energy below the feet occur? Does that have to be found out, before we agree that many people have felt this, and that many people have learned to re-create this at will? What are the physical correlates to feeling a huge rush of energy up the spine? In subjective experiential terms, that question can be irrelevant. Subjectively what matters is the reproducible and communicable experiences – do this, and then this will happen to you.

If you practice feeling into your heart, and re-create feelings of being in love, or of loving, you can integrate that feeling with other sensations. You can then and therefore create the fact of sensations arising as loving. Many integrations are possible.

The rush of energy up the spine is the most obvious experience that is not common to everyone, but that is reasonably easy for anyone to experience, with training and practice. There are hundreds, and thousands of such common aspects of being human one can train in discovering. And then integrating.

Integrations can happen endlessly. No one knows to what degree – we already have information that awareness can be incredibly vast, and not merely vast, but vast and coherent.

That is where expanded awareness comes in – feeling more of the present moment and ones being at once. And making decisions about who to be, what to be, how to be.

And this relates to my other posts about vision-logic. If we at least try to let the implications of any one thing we know integrate with any and all other things we know, perhaps we will get a visualization that includes, coherently, many systems at once.

Vision logic, the centaur, and chi-kung

When we integrate our knowledge and can see meta-narratives and arrays of them cogently enough that we can make value judgments, (understand and appreciate other cultural possibilities and still think that clitorectamy is not a good idea) we make a meaningful picture out of all the meaningful pixels (that are themselves made out of pictures that are made out of pixels, and each picture changing meaning in context to its connections). The pieces communicate themselves into a vision, and the visions communicate themselves into meta-visions, and all the many meta-visions communicate themselves into accessible big visions. A blurry meaningless fuzz congeals into a picture than contains thousands of words and thousands of contexts.

When we practice kinesthetic awareness meditations we can feel our felt pieces as a communicating whole.

And we can both embody our senses and have a big mental picture, at the same time. The mind/body duality is healed. We are like a centaur; the lower half is an animal, the upper half has all the noblest human attributes. We use all of our triune brain, and don’t priviledge just the cortex. We embrace all that we are, and more than that, we embody what we are. You can have neurons fire in concert. Be emotional and at the same time rational and at the same time sexual and at the same time empathetic – our many ways to be can be simultaneously and with an integrated harmony.

What is enlightenment? The question can be inherently academic if the answer must come only from reason. What about another approach. If the experience of deep dreamless sleep could integrate with the experience of dreaming with the experience of being awake and if all our ideas could integrate and if all this could integrate with our physical senses, what would that be like? (I’m not enlightened, but have found the attempt to be so fruitful)

People have been living practices that do exactly this. People are doing exactly this. You can do exactly this. You can be aware during deep dreamless sleep, you can have lucid dreams, and you can experience, especially in meditation, the awareness of deep dreamless sleep while sitting up with your eyes open. You can integrate your body and your sex and your rationality. It can all be of a piece.

Related links:

Zen Pundit blog talks near to the subject

Google search for “Ken Wilber” “vision logic”

Chi kung is exercise

My lover was complaining about my kisses. She claimed I was not kissing her back. She was questioning my love for her.

I told her to stop complaining, and stood up to do some chi-kung. I explained that love is an act, not words, and that chi-kung would fill me with power, that would function as love.

She kept clinging after me, wanting to hold me, wanting to have sex, wanting closeness. I made her wait.

After one hour she came in for a kiss. The lips may have moved the same, but this time we felt spark. This shut her up and she let me practice more chi-kung.

After two hours we had sex. My body was integrated and strong; powerful and overflowing with love and passion yet harnessed and carefully intimate, carefully intimate enough to ride right up to the edge, play there, and then find a new edge to ride into. When we are that high, she allows and wants boundaries broken, intimacy takes any shape – rough or tender – wild energy is love.

She used to be wary of me doing chi-kung before sex, as I would keep fucking her even after she was tired. Yes, I did push her stamina. I habitually pushed her just a bit past her limits. You should see how she has flowered and grown and strengthened and opened now. Now she is no longer wary of me doing chi-kung, and encourages it. Energy is what we use, what burns as love.

Many men, after orgasm, find their love for their mate diminishes.

What would be the opposite? Chi-kung! One can increase libido.

What is chi-kung? Harmonization amongst the many kinesthetic senses. Can you keep your perineum relaxed while getting a blow job? Can you feel the soles of your feet at the same time as you feel the top of your head? All the senses can integrate, come together, work together, as an orchestra comes together. You can get not only control, but finesse, not only finesse, but power. Chi-kung is the music of the kinesthetic sense.

What do you feel in the middle of your chest when you are in love, or heartbroken? That is the kinesthetic sense – your emotions and body work together. You can re-create and strengthen love if you pay attention to the kinesthetic sense – you can feel into your heart, and feel love. Then feel individually into other emotional and energetic nexuses in the body-mind, then feel them together. Learn the flute in your body, learn the cello in your body, learn the timpani. Learn to play them together.

Then learn to jam with another symphony.

Chi-kung is essential to living the good life. Just as are exercise and music and food and companionship.

The importance of libido

Some men feel less love after they orgasm.

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A recent article in newscientist.com is titled Ecstasy really does unleash the love hormone.

From the article: Studies in rats suggest the drug causes a brain surge of oxytocin – the hormone that helps bond couples, as well as mothers to their babies.

Iain McGregor at the University of Sydney in Australia, and his colleagues studied the effects of ecstasy in rats, which, like people, become more sociable on the drug. “It’s very characteristic behaviour. They lie next to each other and chill out,” McGregor says.

The finding ties in with reports from people on ecstasy about how they feel, McGregor points out. Rodent studies have shown a massive surge of oxytocin after orgasm in males. “It’s interesting that guys on ecstasy feel more sensual than sexual,” McGregor says. “It could be that raising oxytocin levels puts them in that sort of post-orgasmic state where they’re actually not very good at performing sexually but they feel really good about the person they’re with.”

They suspect that the oxytocin release might be implicated not only in the pro-social effects of ecstasy but also in the reinforcing effects.

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Increased androgen steroids (e.g. testosterone) generally have a positive correlation with libido in both sexes.

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Libido is more than sexual drive. It is also a habit of embodied expression of passion. Little kids dance around and giggle and wrestle with unhindered unfettered unrestricted uninhibited libido.

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Ecstasy makes you feel good and more social. Increasing libido makes you feel more love and sexual attraction. Increasing libido could therefore have effects similar to taking ecstasy – allowing for a greater feeling of connection with others, and partaking of a universal love. You walk around stoned on the drug of love and lust, and that makes you feel more alive and happy.

There are things you can do to increase libido. Weight lifting and exersise increase testosterone. A male will have more testosterone if he is an Alpha male. Women react to high testosterone men positively, giving positive re-enforcement for further testosterone production. Eating good food and staying healthy is important. Chi-kung and energetic practices make a HUGE difference.

Very important in increasing libido is the style of sex. Sex needn’t diminish libido – ideally it should increase it, to the point where a feeling love and lust and libido is near permanent. As sex releases oxytocin, it is possible that a heightened ongoing passionate libido would also heighten average oxytocin levels.

Intense sex is where all inhibitions are gone, there are no barriers to intimacy, you have enough familiarity and control over your energies that you can rise to very high plateaus without orgasm, and you can let your voice scream and your body and face writhe and contort as they will. Staring into the eyes of your lover will be a fresh shock, everything is so incredibly intense and vivid, as if you were just born there. You feel that your sensations and those are your lover mingle. You are intensely present, full of intense love and lust and pleasure. Your being is, in its devotion and bliss, prayer. This is not an issue of release – it is an issue of prayer. Your being is being, your function is functioning, you have become what you really are.

Libido is a lifestyle. Sniffing a lovers neck is given over to fully. Inhale the drug, place your love and attention inside your beloved, mingle and get drunk on her. This is not a time to keep on top of your game and be the careful wise-ass. It is a time to give over to enjoyment. Be present, mix and mingle and let enjoyment of life take you. Every day offers thousands of opportunities to pay homage to libido. Each female ass on the street demands the eyes to pay two seconds of discreet devotional respect. Any eyes gazed or even glanced into must be met with the full openness given to a lover. A sniff and sip of tea is physical nowness and pleasure. Everything is ripe or ripening and you are in communions everywhere.

A lifestyle of enhancing and honoring libido changes brain chemistry to make you happier – like being on ecstasy all the time. You feel a constant love for nearly everybody. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you want to do is embrace your lover. Wherever you go your heart is warm and a fire is in your belly. You never feel alone. Everyone is your friend.

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If a woman snorts oxytocin, it will bypass the blood brain barrier to enter the brain. Her nipples will then get hard, and she will get horny.

A little more background that may be relevant if you want to try this at home. I’ve been practicing chi-kung and kundalini and daoist yoga and sex techniques for quite a while, so my body is wired up to be wired. My lover and I have sex from 2 to 4 times a day. Near permanent sex and post sex feelings are possible, if you want them. I do.

Update: More info on how Oxytocin acts as antidepressent, socializer, and mood enhancer here.

The connection between sex and the existential question.

In my last post, I was trying to come at the question of meaning, as well as the question of why live. One answer to why live, is because if feels good. One answer to meaning, is that as long as living feels good, you don’t have to have meaning.

I have several ways to try to understand the world, but my main one these last few years is kinesthetic – the embodied feeling of being. I practice some meditations that focus on the feelings in the body. These practices are variously labelled chi-kung, Daoist yoga and Daoist sex, Kundalini yoga and Kundalini sex, and Tantric sex. I am constantly aware of my body and the feelings in it, and so the boundary between feeling the energies of sex, and daily experience are nearly erased for me. The main difference is the intensity of feeling, and that it is easier to feel a reverential love when mixing with a lover.

As I understand the question of why be through the felt embodied sense of being, I have no choice but to also talk about what it feels like to be, and so I also must talk about love and sex. It all permeates inseparably to me.

I was trying to suggest that sex can be a gateway to opening the heart to a sense of divine love, and then past that to being more present and in the flow and then enhancing that to a general sense of immersion and a sense of being and well-being. That to be can be good, can feel good, that we can feel immersed in a flow of good.

Sex is the prayer of being – a reason to live.

Noni loves me.  I haven’t kissed a woman in that way for years.  Kissing with her totally rocks, I could just kiss her without needing to fuck.  Usually I have no mood to kiss at all, unless I’m fucking.  I feel like a teenager again, kissing her.  We have this incredible hunger and satisfaction and thrill, mixing with each other, and the sensations get deeper each time, as if we are starting to be able to reach into each others deep being.

Deep being – I sat by the ocean today.  I also went to the gym.  I tried to keep my eyes open.  Let the visuals in.  Letting go and being wider, there was a sense of being more than seeing.  Walking and swimming in beingness.

Noni loves me, and I felt my heart, as we lay exausted next to each other.  At first I felt my usual energies, and breath and attention moving them in little thrills and streams.  Then there was the strangest thing.  I felt HER love in me, and the world totally changed – there was a sense of reverence – a holy glow. 

So you see why I say that Sex is prayer?  The most important act that humans do?

Regardless of what those feeling may or may not reduce to, whether love truly can touch love in a reverent beingness, or not.  Contentment and joy and plain old fashioned happiness.  I can joyfully dance, joyfully look any stranger in the eye, and enjoy seeing colors.  Inside my heart is contentment, and year by year promises more – has delivered more.

I’m so grateful to all these little girls – even the ones who totally fucked me over.  Learning to love, and to be love, is quite a chi kung.

Sometimes I pour out love, my heart is a furnace.  Sometimes I drink it in.  Sometimes our lusty polarities mix it.  And there are so many sexual positions that internal energies can take, from holding sex in the belly to letting the spine be totally open and large energies pour down from the top of the head and thrill up from below the feet.  It’s endless.

So ya, no way do I want to die.  Being is so good.  I love being.

When I first had sex, I was in my head, thinking and noticing.  But nowadays I’m more just there, given over to it, embodying it, being it.  I’m very present with my lovers.  I almost never have any room in my experience to fantasize about another lover, as who I am with is so very engaging to me.  Being with someone, sharing intense passion and lusty sex and becoming being.  Being is so good.

Sexy dress, and Public sex

There was a time in western culture when it was considered scandalous to show a belly button on the beach. Now thongs are fashionable, and women often go topless. We laugh at the prudish bathing suits of old. Why were those people so repressed?

Sexual repression causes more problems than it prevents. A repressed libido is a sad waste. People who talk of repressing libido, oppressing others freedom to express their sexuality, I find those people scary and disturbing. In need of sexual education. In need of exposure to public sexuality. Grow up already. It’s just sex – it doesn’t hurt people.

Remember the flashers of the 60s and 70s, running out naked onto football fields? They made a statement that I agree with.

Momo on Thaivisa.com said regarding an extremely sexy dress a university student was chastised for wearing at an off campus event “Ultimately this is about “dress sense” and has nothing to do with insulting Thai culture. I go with the adage that one should dress appropriately according to the situation…the climate, the country,your profession, where are you going, who with, what will you be doing etc? Your dress sense is a reflection of character and personality unfortunately dictated by society’s idea of ‘the norm’.”

That seems fine advice for someone to take upon themself. Fit in – it makes life go smoother.

But I can’t understand why anyone would want to force that kind of advice onto anyone else. If someone is prepared to risk being negatively labelled, why not let them?

Unless one doesn’t believe in individuals. Unless one believes that we exist only as social creatures, and must obey social mores.

Perhaps we should all dress in Maoist Green Uniforms? All this indiviality is too troubling.

Momo on Thaivisa.com said: “Jockstrap and sandals are fine on the beach but not at work, flesh flashing to extremes will always offend some people no matter where you are.”

This is something that I honestly do not understand. I have never had the emotion of being made uncomfortable by seeing other people be sexual. And I’ve seen plenty. It is completely beyond me why some people get this feeling. I can only imagine that they have repressed their own sexuality, and so get uncomfortable when they see sexuality that is not repressed.

Personally I have no embarassment or shame whatsoever about my sexuality. I’ve demonstrated as much in rather extreme ways, and it seems to me that the world was made a better place for it. Fun memories for all.

Some people think it is immoral to provoke lust. To show an ankle could inflame libido. So Burkas are enforced. We have birth control now, and one can practice sex relatively safely to avoid disease. Driving a car is more risky than sex with a new partner. There is no reason to avoid inflaming libido. Libido is not dangerous or bad. Burkas are bad.

So some people don’t like her libido inflaming dress. Prudes – why not enjoy the thrill of her? How can you get too much of such a pretty thing? I have never felt that emotion of wanting to put Burkas on other people.

There are limits to everything. Perhaps. But sometimes testing the limits is a good idea.

Generally I prefer to benefit people, make them happier than they were. There is an art to scandalous public indecency. It can be done in ways that titilate others, rather than offend them.

The stories I could tell. I’d love to share them, but I’m familiar enough with how uncomfortable many people are with the subject of sex to know that I’m not allowed to say. But the stories I could tell. Wonderful, super charged passionate stories. More than one smile was given to others, and plenty of fun gossip was fuelled.

I won’t post the stories, but perhaps I can get away with mentioning some locations.

In a crowded pub, underneath the big T.V. which everyone was watching a football match on. In the foaming shallow surf on a crowded beach. On the rocks outside the water on another. In the center of the street in daytime. Underneath a skirted table, with peoples perusing the wares for sale above, wondering where the vendors are, their ankles visible. In the front drivers seat with company in the back. In the back seat with a driver in the front. Riding up an escalator. And then all the more usual locations, such as on the beach or in stairwells or public restrooms, or in the forest or in the ocean or on an open field or conceiled behind an open car door. These memories were gifted to me by several quite naughty wonderful people. I guess nearly every girlfriend I ever had was into some public naughtiness. It’s pretty common, I suppose, but still, gotta love life with events like that in it.

Not all the scandelous behaviour in those locations was of the deeply penetrating kind. I don’t think I could have safely pulled that off on the escalator, or under the TV. Jaw droppingly scandelous enough to get the yellow highligter treatment in my personal history though. In the most extreme category, her palms only touched pavement for 15 seconds, but what was witnessed to happen in the middle of the street by two security guards chatting to each other on one end of the road near my apartment, and two people rounding the corner of the other, is seared forever into my memory cells. And then strolling past the security guards, to go out. I can’t imagine ever going farther than that. All to the greater glory and public good. Shopping mall security guards were involved in one incident. That was extremely humorous, and we made fast friends with them. Needless to say we were greeted with big smiles every time we returned.

Sex on the 1st date?

Sure, I have started several relationships with sex.

I don’t underestimate animal magnetism, because I have very hairy goat legs, and I carry a flute.  My lower half is connected to my upper, and it trods on hoofs rocks and dirt, and I smell of musk and exude pherermones. Pan.

If I didn’t want to consumate my lust on the first date, the chemistry lacked vigor.  Not much reaction.  Yin tepid and yang tepid.  High school science class mentioned the formula that heat gained equals heat lost, meaning that the greater the temperature difference between hot and cold, the greater the exchange of energy.

So yes, sex on the first date.  Means something.  At least that part of the relationship works.

Mantak Chia, and the yuuminess of yummy.

I have most of his books, in PDF and word doc format. I’ve only read a few of them.

I think he has some good information and techniques, but find his books filled with unnecessary repetition and metaphysics. For instance his first book about sex has a few good excersises, and much repetition of why it is important not to come, and a lot of not very clear metaphysics around that. His concept of chi is quite muddled, mixing up ideas of breath, and pseudo-scientific physics, along with subtle energies.

But the nuggets are good. I hope to approach the rest of the books, and find which practices are strongest for me, and perhaps attempt a re-write of some of that from my own perspective.

I really appreciate energetic practices, and I can understand his enthusiasm for wanting to promote them. I just don’t see that we need to fill in the blanks of what we don’t know with a lot of pseudo scientific “explanation” for what chi is. We have no idea what chi is.

I’ve had Daoist and Chi-kung training with maybe 6 teachers. Some were quite advanced. But I resonated most with an energetic healer, who taught us maybe a dozen forms, of which I focused on three. I find that one, very simple form, if done slowly and with deep mindfullness can open up worlds. Many teachers feel, for instance, that simple standing chi-kung is the strongest and most effective form.

When practicing some standing chi-kung movements, I usually start with these few basic forms, and then go free style.

I appreciate that I have some training in moving energy about not using movements. I don’t use the forms I was trained in though, such as going from organ to organ, and instead focus lately mostly on the central channel. This last year I don’t focus much on the spine. I’m mostly involved in having all chakras light up and resonate with each other, and opening the central channel to above and below the head. And sometimes I play with the spark between those poles.

All forms were “discovered” , and I’m not shy to discover also.

Regarding sex, I have discovered a few things I’ve never read about:

1) Mixing with a lover in the lower dantien, especially in her cervix and in the second chakra, is not only intimate, but can allow a person to share the energy there, giving and receiving, and use a lovers energy for making love with her.

2) The energy has to rise up to the heart before you get your big powers. Only after intense love happens does the full flow start.

3) After energy is rising all the way up, it is VERY important to be able to go below the feet. Just as you can have sex, as a beginner, with your attention above your head, to awaken Kundalini, so you can have sex with energy below your feet, you can hold a chi ball below your feet, and keep your sexual energy there while having sex. This is very powerful chi kung, and rather advanced, but it is accessible.

4) Partners make a huge difference. A young man or woman has excess vitality, and can learn from and be inspired by much older lovers, while an older person gets more juice from a younger lover. Men especially. As one Indonesian I met remarked “I don’t like men my same age, as I already know what they know. An older man has wisdom that I don’t have, that I need. And the man gets to have the energy from the younger woman”. She was no meditator, just a sensitive 22 year old. And the way a partner holds their energy, especially how they orgasm makes a huge difference. Some women dissipate their energy out when they orgasm, and this can be nearly as draining as ejaculating, as energies resonate, so you dissipate with her. If the woman does not naturally come into you, she can be taught to. Sex embodiment devotion. When I ejaculate I encourage her to “drink it”, inside her cervix, emphasising that she can absorb that energy, as food for her, as a little gift. And sexual chemistry can’t be faked. For myself, I require a hyper-feminine woman, as I am slightly effeminate at times – I need the polarity of a very feminine woman to get a big spark. With one lover I may be near impotent, and with another have undying passion and unstoppable passion.

5) You can get a full flow through the central channel, through to above and through to below, and all chakras light up, and this can be so intense that you MUST scream. The lion posture may be spontaneously taken, palms flat, back arched, perhaps tongue sticking out. And the mark of a full flow is a feeling of intense POWER.

Update: I really should get in the habit of at least giving a once over read to my posts before hitting the send button.

I meant to say “I’m mostly involved in having all chakras light up and resonate with each other, and opening the central channel to above the head and below the perinium, and below the feet.”

I could add that opening the “bubbling brook” points in the palms of the feet took a while, but I’m finding it much more difficult to get a strong flow through the legs.

The points in the palms of the hands very often glow, mostly in resonance with the heart, but increasingingly everything seems to resonate together, and in my palms I can feel apana, and the forehead, and the perinium. And in my perinium I can often feel the crown chakra, and the forehead chakra.

Lately I’ve been working on a soft feeling in the heart, and
flavoring everything with an open heart. Getting that chakra more awake and giving its input.

All of that is sex, to me, and with a good lover, the practice is put into high gear. Sex is chi-kung, and chi-kung can be powerful sex.

Rationality and chi-kung

The differentiation between pre and trans rational has been promoted and popularized by Ken Wilber. One of his most engaging and easily accessible books is titled “A Brief History of Everything”

A pre-rational skill is identifying a thought with an object. Children do this. Magical incantations are often based upon this lack of differentiation between the idea and the object. Pre-historic hunters used to draw a picture of a deer in the sand, dance around it and then stab it with their spear, killing it, before the hunt. The deer was considered already dead by this act. Some people don’t like to say fearful words, for fear of bringing about the real event.

Pre-rational magic might actually work. Just because the thought visualization is not as clear and distinct as it could be, doesn’t mean that it can’t work at all. But it can also just be wishful thinking, and nothing more. And it has a hard time telling the difference. The hallmark is superstition.

Transrational skills begin at the edge of rationality, what is called “vision logic”, where a person can not only hold a point of view, they can not only at the SAME TIME see another persons point of view, but they can hold and array of views, even an array of arrays, see the whole broad landscape at once.

After that point we get into seeing divinity, not as an idea, but as directly perceived and felt.

Then we move closer to causal awareness, and then back out to the fish market with non-duality.

Chi-kung can be practiced either through the cognitive lens of re-rational, or transrational. A pre can be a strong chi-kung practitioner, but usually, it is only in the transrational cognitive development stage that wide and full mastery is available. There is less confusion and greater differention for someone who does not equate an idea with an object, and so a person can weed out facts from fictions, and feel into things with greater subtlety.

Rational mysticism, part 2.

I’ve been chewing on a few ideas this last year.

One is that expanding awareness is making creative connections between more and more of experience, including memory and knowledge. This is felt as the muse. A creative writer comes up with remarkably strange yet strangely apt metaphors. A musician pulls together different styles, and adds a dash of some exotic new tang. A scientist will “discover”, in a flash of creative insight, a pattern that was never before seen.

To do this, one must deeply respect truth. Trust that cognitive dissonance, that creepy feeling we get that something is making us uncomfortable, that sense of disgust or aversion towards some aspect of life, trust that cognitive dissonance points to an unresolved tension.

One such tension that has grabbed me lately is the tension between impermanence and the human search for meaning. This is a seemingly irresolvable tension – like a koan. I hold it and chew on it, because I trust that the tension can resolve, if I can widen my being and see clearer. It doesn’t do just to choose one point of view for pragmatic, religious, or emotional reasons. I must find out what is true.

A tension I tried to introduce to these forums, especially the jhannas and kundaliniheat forums, is the one between OBEs seeming meaningful, valuable and real, and the studies that have been done that show that they do not see the same world that walking and awake people see.

Another tension is between the notion that the world is similar to a dream, and the many verified facts that show that it is not.

I find it valuable to not be a true believer, and yet to still adopt the attitude you mention – if there is a blank space in experience that does not match theory, leave it blank and put a big “I don’t know” sign there.

We don’t want to be like creationists, who, in the face of opposing evidence, strengthen their “faith”, because without that, their life loses meaning and purpose.

I think we can, indeed have a duty, to find a purpose that includes the widest possible co-ordination of the facts.

That is the job of the muse. To organize all these disparate facts into a cohesive whole.

And we must include science. Science changes, sure, but usually it builds upon itself in increments, as the physical sciences are based upon measurements, which are usually reasonably accurate. Science is the creative theories that tie together these measurements. Many of these theories can rub up against our ideas, to produce wonderfully troubling and enriching cognitive dissonance. The stuff of life. A big foot for our grapes, so we can face a little death to become something nobler.

Yes, it’s true that energy work can have effects that we have no theory for yet. There is no need to limit our experience to what is explainable.

But I don’t think we have reason to extrapolate from some non-local effects full power over all objects throughout time and space. Just because a nine volt battery can produce a spark across its terminals, is no reason to speculate it could light up all of time and space. The non-local effects of our minds may be limited. It gives a dreamy feeling to believe otherwise, but the proof is in the doing, not in the dreamy feeling.

Regarding infinite possilities, I’m reminded of the plotting of a mathematical function onto a piece of graph paper. Remember that from high-school? You can graph something like X to the power of 3, and you get an infinite number of answers, depending on X, but they all fall upon a line. The infinity of answers is limited to that line.

And so objective reality, although it can be interpreted in many ways, constrains which interpretations are possible. Coffee is never going to be interchangeable with blood – that interpretation is not open to us.

Energy work may have effects we don’t understand, but as far as we can see so far, they are not infinite. They seem constrained by objective reality also, even if they can be non-local.