love, sex and celibacy
What is love?
Love is our longing to evolve to light, to be consonant with God and truth. Love impels humanity toward enlightenment. Love is why we treasure living and seek to preserve and nurture our own existence, the lives of others, and the life of our planet home.
When we love ourselves, we weed out the defenses that would block the flow of the life-force, the love-force, through us. When we confront and discredit the negative voices that would thwart our development, we are self-loving and affirm our unity with God. Loving ourselves, we grow into the fulfillment of our gifts, including our homosexuality if gay, and share our talents with the world. As lovers of life, we do our part in the evolution of consciousness.
When we love others, we affirm their existence and nurture their growth. We support our loved-ones, hoping they will grow into their full stature and capacity. The people who cross our path in life can count themselves lucky, for we aspire to treat them all with the life-affirming energy of love. Romantic “love”, fueled with sexual desire, is often mistaken for true love. But romantic love is based in projection of unmet needs from the past. True love in its purity does not have a hidden agenda or expectations.
When we love God, we align ourselves with the source of life. Aligned with God, love-energy flows in us and through us. We become physical instruments for God’s expression of love on earth. One with God, we use our existence as a channel for the surges of God’s love-energy to animate the world into enlightened living.
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God’s love
The love that will sustain us through a lifetime is God’s love, our connection to the divine through our true self. Human love will always be limited. Others come and go in our lives. Even those we cherish the most will one day leave us as we grow in different directions – or sadly die. Our own self-love will be uneven. It is hard for us to always be consonant with the true self. There will be times that we feel bereft of love.
The love of our families and parents was inconsistent growing-up. Families have always been limited in the ways they endorse their children, and in particular their children who are original and defy the contraints and compromises of a emotionally deadened family.
We are grateful for any expression of human love in our lives: from a friendly bus driver, to a best friend, to a parent, who finally understands. We are deeply grateful for a new love or a lifelong partner – certainly for a healing guide or an enlightened therapist. The expressions of human love are a great gift -- a treasure and measure of God’s love coming though. But human love will always be limited and come and go in our lives, since we are all passing through, with wounds to heal, paths to follow, and sadly mortality to face. Our humanity limits our consistency and capacity to love.
The one true love, who will be there with us from beginning to end, is God, residing in the depth of our being, enlivening our true self. Until we rest in God’s love, our search for an all-fulfilling love in life will end in futility. Only in God’s love will we find the peace we’ve sought in the arms and understanding of others. There is a great comfort in the consistent covenant of God’s love in our lives that holds us with care and concern from our first to our final breath. I rest always in God’s love at the core of my being.
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True love
True love comes through the true self. The perfect conduit for love is a person, pure of heart, healed of trauma. For love, originating from the mystery of the life force, to come through us without distortion, we must not be barricaded by defenses or poisoned by wounds from the past. We must be a clear vessel for love to come through truly.
If we are not living out of our true self, but from a defended, distorted reality, we will fail to love truly. If, in childhood, we have hidden our true selves from the crippling clutches of our parents and a world that would crush us, our expressions of love will be distorted in adulthood. Until our true self is redeemed, love will be filtered through our child’s murky memories of terror and betrayal and will always have a hidden agenda, an unconscious need for rescue or revenge. We can not love purely when we are emotionally crippled and will be incapable of affirming the fullness of life in those we claim to love. We will even doubt our own lovability and withhold affection from ourselves.
The source of our compromised ability to love is rooted in the necessary defenses that we built in childhood to protect our pure essence from the compromised love we received most significantly from our parents. Until we carefully dismantle our defenses through a painful grieving process, they will cloud and distort our expressions of our love and life force. If we refuse to heal, our attempts to love will never be true, but filled with need.
If we deny and perpetuate the neglect that crippled us as children, our love will never be true. Only those healed of childhood wounds can love truly.
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The perfect partner
Ultimately the perfect partner is a co-traveler to truth – to God. He or she is striving just as hard as we are to know and complete himself in enlightenment. Ideally, our partner knows, as we do, that by definition he or she is essentially perfect, despite their defenses, and is consciously evolving into a true connection with the spark of divinity within.
There are compatibility issues when committing to a partner: but the most important aspect of compatibility is our common interest in wholeness and holiness. This “perfect partner” reminds us of our own inherent perfection, and we, in turn, remind them of their perfection. We use our time together to journey away from the limits and wounds of the family to come closer to a conscious embodiment of our perfection.
If our issues from our childhood remain unresolved, we will always act them out with our love partners. If we remain unhealed, then underneath this most adult activity of courting, marriage, and sex will be the damaged child negotiating through our adult bodies to get the love we missed from our parents. Manipulations, arguments, and over-reactions with our mate are fuelled by the unmet needs of the abandoned child who at last has found a target to act out the neglect of long ago. Or we may sink into emotional compromise and depression as a couple, when traumas from the past remain buried.
We must undergo extensive healing of childhood disappointments to not play them out with our partners. When we are sufficiently centered in our own value, not seeking a surrogate parent, we are ready to be and have a perfect partner.
It is difficult to return to God alone. We need co-travelers – friends, companions -- even lovers -- to remind us that the journey is real, and that our goal is to grow into enlightenment. One way to journey home is with a perfect partner.
The marriage within
The marriage within is a state of inner dialogue of opposites and harmony. We become our own husband and wife -- our own mother and father. Our masculine and feminine energies are wed working in harmony to create a dynamic energy at our disposal. We have both empathy and we have power.
Enlightened adults are married within. We become the mother and father we’ve always needed. We save our wounded child through our own care and nurture, and promote and protect him with our own strength. We do not look to externals for our salvation.
In enlightened living, we ask how to approach sex and relationships? One answer is not to dissipate sexual energy outside of ourselves and remain continent. This conscious celibacy preserves our sexual energy to do the work of spiritual evolution, since physical evolution through generations of childbearing has run its course -- and amok. We become our own husband and wife. Our primary relationship is with our true selves. We do not need another half, since we seek to be whole. We are self-fulfilled and centered – and no longer eccentric. We meet our own needs for love and protection. Neither do we split off our masculinity or femininity and project them onto a partner of the opposite gender and/or sex, but integrate these seeming opposites within ourselves, and into a unified whole. We are no longer twain, but one.
This self-marriage doesn’t imply social isolation. We need companions on the journey. We needn’t go it alone. But we become in a fundamental way our own partner, and the energy we create from inner consonance is compelling.
The world pressures -- if not demands -- we have a spouse or partner. Even the old definition of mental health and successful maturity was marriage -- heterosexual marriage to be sure -- with children. Yet we have to rethink this model. As we look around at our planet, we are an overpopulated and unconscious world. The dyadic model of partnered with children has proven a way to short circuit spiritual energy in a couple and away from our salvation. The married and insular couple may be our downfall as a species.
The marriage within is a powerful, revolutionary paradigm. Inner consonance generates potent energy needed to escape the gravitational pull of the norm and its conformity. We need to enter a new, original orbit if we are to avoid extinction. return to top of page
There’s a reason Jesus was single … or that the Buddha became enlightened apart from his family as a celibate. They needed this singularity to experience the marriage within and the impact of their lives still ripples through our world.
Sex with love is the ideal -- and extremely rare and difficult to embody. For sex to be wholesome, love must come first and must come from the true self. Only enlightened adults can hope for a mature, sober, and honestly satisfying sexual relationship -- and a sane relationship to sex. For meaningful sex, a spiritual union within each partner must precede a physical union with the other.
When we achieve enlightenment, physical sex may become moot. The enlightened adult may not choose to be overtly sexual at all, but maintain continence and sexual celibacy. That way, we use our sexual energy, beyond intercourse, procreation, and physical pleasure, to energize our true self to serve other creative and inspired people and purposes.
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Conscious celibacy
Conscious celibacy releases the life force in ourselves and in those we love into spiritual fire. Instead of procreating a baby, or exciting physical pleasure which dissipates, we generate a spiritual being. We birth not a baby, but a child of God, the true self, within ourselves and within those we love. Like the archetype, the Immaculate Conception, we make love with God. Through conscious celibacy, we give birth to the child of wonder within. And physical pleasure transmutes into spiritual bliss.
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