NMR ISSUE 14

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Sexual Energy Meditations

Concept-Free Sex and the Single Planet

Antero Alli

This is an introduction to the practice of sexual energy meditations, which attune practitioners to their own biological contact points for concept-free sexuality. Concept-free is just that—direct intimacy with energetic states that function independently of ideas, images or visualization. These meditations can be considered operative rituals, as they also work without beliefs or dogmas. The meditations will focus on certain properties in the psyche, in specific regions of the brain, and on points in the reproductive system.

This article hopes to make the reader aware of several levels of culturally conditioned images surrounding their otherwise innate experience of the sexual. The intent here is to detect any tendency to identify your essential sexuality with an image—no matter how socially accepted or powerful or secure that image promises to make you feel. By observing and studying the origin and nature of thought, it is possible to begin noticing our thoughts about sexuality. This is to say, we notice that which sets us apart from sexuality itself. By looking at our various maps, we can throw them away and traverse the terrain.

To start the process of sifting our thoughts about sex from sex itself, we turn to three distinct yet related areas of human ethics: the cultural ethos, the personal ethos and the transpersonal ethos. It seems the first two, the cultural and personal ethos, are primarily products of parental conditioning and widespread socialization. Under certain prevailing conditions, the third transpersonal ethos emerges as a spiritual outgrowth of the previous two. When all three areas are realized and integrated in the human being, they seem to naturally entwine and blossom forth as a kind of fourfold planetary ethos."

Each culture feeds the psyches of its people specific images, icons and myths in an attempt to regulate procreation by standardizing sexual behavior. This moral set of rules is usually held together by a strong negative pole in the taboo" and a strong positive pole, in the reward, or prize. Each culture defines its taboos and rewards differently; this includes each microculture, or family unit, within the larger cultural context. Sexual customs between cultures differ widely, reminding us of the vast multi-sexual bias of humanity. Each social order has its own indigenous and learned notions of what it means to be a man, a woman and a human being.

Australian aborigine adult males trade their wives as often as they deem necessary. Unless indoctrinated by the morals of a different culture, these women do not think twice about it. As extreme of an example as this is, it confirms how utterly different each person's and each culture's sexual realities are. It also shows how no one is qualified to judge and determine what is best for anyone else, sexually. To ones own conscience one must learn to be true?

This brings us to the personal ethos, which is just that—personal. It emerges as our own individual response to the cultural ethos of our immediate family, specifically their sexual ethics. Each family is bound by their own unique and sometimes idiosyncratic code of ethics. For example: if the father and the mother are given to conflicting moralities, this produces an ethos of conflict; and the children learn to expect fighting between the sexes. If a compatible morality bonds the family structure, a harmonious ethos develops. Either way, each child grows up in a specific moral climate as regards sexuality. It is how each child responds to the family ethos that helps define the child's personal ethos. The personal ethos is attached to the family ethos by virtue of its response to the family ethos—whether this response rebels against the family, or cultural, ethos, or embraces it, or grows indifferent to it.

The personal ethos seems to form a basis for the emergence of the transpersonal. An ethos is transpersonal when it sees beyond itself, thus permitting the existence of other vantagepoints while remaining loyal to the personal one; they are inclusive of each other. The transpersonal ethos is born out of the crystallization, or chrysalis, of the personal—to see past ego, one must have one. The transpersonal realm exists so far beyond the fringe of the cultural ethos, that it is all but impossible for the latter to appreciate the vantage of the former; it cannot even comprehend it, for the most part. Ironically enough, the integrated transpersonal perspective can permit all three views simultaneously.

Consider the example of the child raised in a fundamentalist cultural ethos (enforcing absolute laws, or dogmas): Suppose this child rebels and forms a personal ethos of rebellion" out of which a greater transpersonal ethos develops. Then, upon returning to the family for the holidays, this child (now grown) discovers a disconcerting one-way understanding: they see their parent's point of view while feeling the negation of their own. Traditionally, the only avenues open for traffic from the transpersonal into the cultural are Art, Religion and Science.

Artists, mystics and scientists (and their hybrid, the magician) know, to some degree, the significance of personal ethos. They see it partly as a bridge between these extremes and partly as a way of orienting outside the family. Without a personal bias, it is almost impossible to know where one is coming from and where one is going as an individual. Within these three ethoses’ there seems to be three distinct sexual orientations: cultural sex, personal sex and transpersonal sex. (A little later we will include a fourth orientation—planetary sex.) In this light we will bypass the more external and popular use of sexual orientation" (hetero-, bi-, homo-, etc.) in the spirit of more open-minded concept-free sexual response. Heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality are overloaded with culturally conditioned images.

The biological basis for contact with the transpersonal realm is your very own Central Neural System (neural is intentional). Cultural sex is often nervous as there are so many expectations to live up to, so many images to conform to just feel attractive, accepted and loved. The institution of marriage provides an example. (My bias is neither pro-marriage nor anti-marriage; it's pro-choice.) Transpersonal sex has no real reason to be nervous—because there are no concepts or images to identify with. Transpersonal sex is concept free sexuality at its best.

Concept-free sex knows sexuality as it is: a reality to live, not a fantasy to imagine. The mysterious life force is a convergence of many living forces. The sexual energy meditations (leading to the opening of direct sexual response) distinguish four related currents: Formless Substance, earth energy, masculine force and feminine power. All four refer to the living force of nature residing within each human being regardless of sexual persuasion. We won't concern ourselves now with the cultural or personal definitions of these forces. In bypassing all images, concepts and stereotypes, it is possible to implement direct neural engagement. This is direct internal resonance with the underlying sources of energy and with the energies themselves (as represented by these four terms). For now, all we can do is walk through descriptions of these four forces and perhaps, for the willing, offer some exercises to activate them in the body.

Formless Substance

Without the ability to empty the mind and merge our consciousness with silence, no effective ritual is possible. Mystical traditions worldwide have many names for this silence: Kether, Potentia, Illuminated Void, Nothingness, the Fol, Cloud of Unknowing, Samadhi, Zero. Formless Substance has the distinct status of charging the meditation in the beginning diluting it (if need be) during the middle and discharging excess force in the end. Formless Substance acts like a multi-purpose tool in this way—for our purpose that is all it is: a tool.

Formless Substance refers to that part of our nature that is energy in its potential state or, that part of us that has not become anything yet. It is your comfort at being nothing, of being nobody-but-yourself. The intention of summoning intimacy with Formless Substance is to enter a profound state of receptivity, so that one may be vulnerable enough to be touched deeply by the more dynamic forces. The emptier the vessel, the deeper the well. For those who are not already in a resonant pathway of Formless Substance, I suggest the following exercise:

The Cloud of Unknowing

After centering yourself, imagine or sense or project a cloud, slightly larger than your body, above your head anywhere from three to ten feet. Imagine this cloud to consist of the purest essence of Formless Substance. Let it hover about you, suspended, while you empty yourself below. After at least two minutes of this, invite the cloud down. Do not direct or control it; invite it. Let it drift down at its own pace until it completely envelops your body. When your body is inside the cloud, begin merging with the cloud of unknowing. Be the cloud. Be nothing.

Practice this mediation until the state it produces can be summoned without the help of the cloud. Without Formless Substance, the other three forces can only be imagined at best. Inside this state, we can be relatively untouched by culturally and personally defined stereotypes and habitual sexual patterns. Its value as a transpersonal tool can never be overestimated. Concept-free meditation opens the natural sensitivity of the Central Neural System to real, live signals? Sinuous pulses? Rapturous wave forms? And natural forces in your body and the body of your beloved. To prepare for the evocation of feminine power, find any physical position where the spine is relatively erect and then reenter Formless Substance.

Feminine Power

WOMEN: Internally locate the region of your ovaries—touch them if this helps. These are biological contact points—conduits—and potent sources of feminine power in the woman. Attend to the flow of feminine power in the ovaries, without directing or shaping the energy. Commit to the current itself as it flows through the ovaries and allow this current to fill you.

MEN: Internally locate the hindbrain region which is your medulla oblongata. Locate your point of contact with your source of feminine power as it resides in this area, gradually allowing its current to descend and pervade the rest of your receptive body. Don't push this force. Like the cloud, invite it down and let it find its own pathways and spirals throughout your internal systems. Learn to serve the feminine power as it moves around inside you.

This meditation is to help you discover how much feminine power you are willing and able to absorb and circulate in your body at this time. If you wish to increase and deepen the current, connect your breathing to the source of the energy (ovaries or medulla). For greater absorption, deepen the inhale. For greater circulation of the force in your body, deepen the exhale. If you wish to diminish the current, mix small amounts of Formless Substance to dilute the potency of feminine power. Once you complete this meditation, return the feminine power back to its respective sources while breathing in more Formless Substance to help neutralize its charge. We begin and end each meditation with Formless Substance as a way to clean the slate, to begin anew.

Masculine Force

Enter the routine of Formless Substance first and then follow through with the same kind of commitment as before to the sources for masculine force:

MEN: Locate the source of masculine force as it's concentrated inside each testicle. Connect your inhale to each with a focused breath? Drawing it out and into the rest of your reproductive system and beyond.

WOMEN: Locate your contact point with masculine force as it's focused in a point of light where your brow meets the bridge of your nose. Don't force it; if you get a headache you're trying to hard (cool it off with the Formless Substance). Simply rest behind this point as if from inside your brain and receive its radiation. Absorb the light. Don't push the point, rest behind it.

Whether it is feminine power or masculine force that you contact, it is your willingness to surrender your entire body to the current that determines the results of this meditation. After practicing alone, you can then bring the current into the arena of sexual intimacy. You can activate it on purpose as an offering of your own energies to the play of forces between yourselves. Once again, good ritual common sense informs you to return to the formless state after you're done. This helps train consciousness to return to its Higher Source after completing its commitments to the experiences of this world, in the body. From the formless we come and there we return.

Earth Energy—Planetary Sex

Much of how we experience the dynamics of interpersonal relationship is horizontally based: we relate across space with each other. This works energetically as well: I give you energy, you give me energy, and we enjoy each other's energy, just you and me. By introducing the earth below as an additional contact point (a contact to a living, breathing, intelligent entity who has incarnated as this planet), we begin including a vertical reference to our relationships with each other. The earth below is a supply of vertical force (up/down) or earth energy. With the earth, there are now three energy sources: you, me and the earth below. This triple circuit forms a basis for what I'll affectionately call a planetary manage-a- trois—the romance of a planetary ethos. This can happen when two individuals have self-realized enough to see beyond their strictly personal vantages and, from a trans-personal state, include each other and the earth below as a unified field of living forces. These conditions can then coalesce into planetary sex, where in sexual intercourse (physically or as energy fields) generates biopsychic energy that is eventually directed down to feed the earth's core. The first step is learning self-stabilization through:

Earth Energy Meditations

After entering the Formless Substance, relax your grip on your body so that you are also relaxing your desire to control things in general. Loosen the grip around the base of the spine and the anus so this area dilates and breathes. On the inhale, suck up earth energy—from the earth below—through the base of the spine and the arches of the feet. On the exhale, circulate the earth energy throughout your body. Continue this process of cycling earth energy through your body to discover how much you are willing and able to absorb and contain. Experiment with sending this energy back down to the planet, through your exhale and out your hands, arches and the base of the spine itself.

Once each individual knows how to access earth energy on their own, each can bring more of its presence into the mix of masculine, feminine and Formless forces—within their own persons and as an offering to the general mix of lovemaking. Just to breathe the earth energy into your body while engaging sexually is enough to begin feeling the difference between personal and planetary sex. When both parties connect energetically with the earth below while engaging sexually, it opens a possibility for nurturing the planetary ethos—one that includes the planetary entity as lover, as friend and as gateway to greater unknowns.

This is an edited version of a more experiential, instructional cassette by Antero Alli, which initiates listeners to more in-depth contacts with the forces described in this article. For information on how to obtain this tape and others, write to Antero Alli for a free catalog: PO Box 45758, Seattle, WA 98145.