Monotheistic religion has a fairly short history in terms of the life of our species. The idea of one God who created everything goes back about 2800 years. Before that, we were in direct relationship with the life force, which expresses itself in many ways in the natural world. People had a relationship to the earth, to the sun, to the moon, to the wind, to water, and fire.
Several thousand years ago, we began to personify some of these elements and to give them icons in human form. So we created the idea of Agni: the God of fire, Poseidon: the god of the ocean, or Thor: the god of thunder. This tendency to create human-looking gods who personified certain elements happened in the same time period in many different cultures all over the world.
The idea of one God who created everything emerged around the same time as the establishment of the city-state, monarchy, and institutionalized inequality. At that point, we had already created agricultural settlements and villages, which were each quite autonomous. The development of the city-state, with one ruler over a much bigger area, created the notion of a powerful Lord with obedient subjects.
In order to persuade people to be subjugated to a centralized authority, there had to be a way to make people feel weak and afraid.
So around the same time as we organized politically in this way, we created several different religions with more or less the same rules: it’s not okay to be sexually aroused, it’s not okay to be angry or rebellious, and it is no longer okay to use psychedelic substances, which had been fairly prolific up to this point. This was a political move that allowed people with power to dominate others. In order to get people to spend their entire lives working for the benefit of others, and to risk their lives fighting wars waged by these rulers, it was necessary to cultivate a disposition of widespread obedience. Different cultures simultaneously created the idea of a punitive God, who says you have to do this, and you can’t do that. It’s very simple. When people are sexually aroused, or angry, or high on mushrooms, they’re not going to obey you. They’re going to say, ‘screw working all day, screw your stupid war, I’m gonna do what I want.’ Once we create the idea of an angry, punitive Daddy God, who will punish you if you don’t obey and send you to hell as punishment after death, people get afraid, and they obey. The script of a puritanical mindset demanding obedience kept its widespread grip on humanity right up until the 1960s, and still does in many parts of the world.
You could say that when you talk to people about their sexuality, their disposition demonstrates one of these:
6 different kinds of relationships to puritanical monotheism
1. Natural
This was our original attitude to sex before monotheistic religion took hold. Sex is no big deal, it’s just part of life. We can talk about sex much in the same way that today we talk about the sexual activity of guinea pigs, or fleas, or dogs. There’s no taboo.
Perhaps you have heard of the temples at Khajuraho in India. They are famous for their graphic sexual images. Because this kind of openness around sexuality is so antithetical to our puritan inheritance, we tend to assume that this is a temple dedicated to sex. If you Google ‘Khajuraho’ and go to the images tab, you’ll find mostly sexual images depicted, leaving us to believe that the entire temple was dedicated in this way. In reality, only about ten percent of the effigies on the outside of the temple depict sex. The rest depict plowing the fields, cooking food, and building structures. Sex was just part of life, not to be accentuated, not to be suppressed. It would be more true to say that the temples of Khajuraho are dedicated to a balanced life.
The same is true of what we refer to as ‘’tantra.’ Today, when you hear someone is teaching a ‘tantra workshop,’ you probably assume that it’s going to be about sex. The earliest iteration of Tantra is in Kashmiri Shaivism, where the principal text is the Vhigan Bhairav Tantra. It contains 112 spiritual techniques taught by Shiva to his consort Parvati. At the beginning of the text, she asks him the question “How can we be absorbed more fully beyond space and time, name and description?” Shiva gives her 112 methods, including ‘paying attention to the breath,’ ‘expanding peripheral vision’, etc. Only five of the techniques he gives her reference sex, and often in an indirect way. That’s about four percent of the techniques. The earliest teachings of Tantra include sex, but they are not primarily about sex. The word tantra just means ‘spiritual practice,’ but now the word has become synonymous with sex, simply because sex was not excluded, in the way that it is with puritanical religion.
The same is true of the cults of Dionysius and Aphrodite in ancient Greece, the culture in Mesopotamia, and just about every other culture pre-dating monotheism. When anthropologists have studied indigenous people who have only recently had contact with the Western world, like the Achwar in the Amazon, or indigenous people in New Guinea or Tasmania, they have the same natural, no big deal attitude to sex.
The same is true of Taoism. It is not a monotheistic religion. The Taoists simply saw sex as energy, a part of life, no more or less important than any other. The ancient Taoists spoke about sex in a very free way. It was never vilified in ancient China; it was only with Confucius, in the fifth century BC, that attitudes to sex began to change. Confucius was more interested in social and political balance than individual (including sexual) empowerment.
Today, I sometimes encounter this natural, ‘no big deal’ attitude to sex in what we could call ‘children of hippie parents.’ I’ve worked with people born in the 1970s and after, whose parents went through the sexual revolution of the ‘60s. As children, they saw their parents wandering around naked, and sometimes, maybe even overheard their parents having sex. Unless they got it from school, religion, or other influences, you can meet people today who have no negative conditioning around sex.
The central question with a natural attitude to sex is “What’s the big deal?”
2. Repressive
This is the attitude people have when there is still a strong influence from monotheistic religion. Sex is often thought of as dirty, shameful, and wrong. It’s not okay to be naked, particularly, you can’t show your genitals. Sex can only be indulged in for procreation, once the union has been sanctified by both the church and the government. Otherwise, it’s off the table.
It’s actually a strange idea to believe in an omnipotent God who gave humans intensely pleasurable feelings in the genital area, but then right away made those feelings dirty and wrong.
Many people who carry a strong Puritanical attitude toward sex still carry guilt and shame.
The central question with a repressive attitude to sex is “Is it allowed? Is it wrong? Are these feelings I’m having in my groin sinful?”
3. Rebellious
This attitude to sexuality became prominent in the late 1960s. Along with all of the other aspects of the counterculture revolution, people started to question What exactly is wrong with sex?’ It was in the 1970s and the decades that followed that people started to explore sex parties, threesomes, and indeed everything and anything else that appeared unconventional. I’m going to have sex with anyone and everyone I want, maybe with many people at the same time, with any gender, in any and every location. No limits. Let’s do it in the changing room at the clothing store, let’s have sex at night in the confessional at the church. What is the wildest thing you can imagine? Let’s do it!!
In a rebellious attitude, we are still tied to the Puritan ethic, but now rebelling against it. Sex is tied to novelty and excitement, so it often involves high levels of dopamine and norepinephrine. Excitement. Novelty. When people are engaged in a rebellious disposition around sex, often breaking free of the restraints of their past, there may be an increased interest in anything and everything that might shock their parents and the priest back home. I want to use needles and knives. I want to try everything. I want to have sex with a gerbil up my ass. Whatever we can think of, I want to try it. I primarily meet people with this strong, rebellious attitude to sex who are in the process of untangling themselves from a previously repressive culture.
The central question with a rebellious attitude to sex is “What are your wildest fantasies? What have you not tried yet?”
4. Performance-Based
In this disposition, we become overly influenced by the commonly held myths we have all been exposed to from the movies, porn, and locker room bragging. Sex becomes something to be good at. In an ironic way, the rules and dictates of repressive puritanism have now been replaced by the rules and dictates of doing sex right. Performance-based sex places an excessive importance on a man being hard at all times and being able to give his partner multiple mind-blowing orgasms. For a woman, a performance-based attitude to sex is most often centered around being orgasmic. Emily Nagosaki is probably the best-known and most widely read sex researcher on the planet today. It’s this kind of attitude to sex that she primarily aims to unravel in her excellent books: replacing the quest to ‘do sex right’ with being able to enjoy it.
The central question with performance-based sex is, “How did I do? Did I get you off? How would you rate me as a lover?”
5. Pleasure-Based
In this disposition toward sex, the question shifts from ‘what are your wildest fantasies’, or ‘how am I performing?’ to ‘what feels good?’ Nagoski advocates forgetting about what may or may not be considered ‘normal’ and to center pleasure.
Pleasure-based sex means establishing good communication. How does that feel? How about this? Shall I do more of this? Or more of that? Touch me there, oh, that’s right. Deeper, now pause oh… That feels so good.
Nagoski, Kleinplatz, and many others leave us no room for doubt that a pleasure-based attitude to sex is infinitely preferable to the other dispositions we have described so far. Couples can actually enjoy their time in the bedroom in a way that strengthens their connection. “The couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades,” says Nagosaki, “are not the ones who crave sex; they’re friends who decide that sex matters in their relationship.” Both her books are abundant with inspiring stories of couples who stop trying to be good at sex, or to conform to some ambitious idea of what should be happening, but relax into sharing pleasure.
Probably, pleasure-based sex is as far as it goes for the great majority of people today. Once we’re both enjoying it, once we’ve relaxed the shame created by repressive ideologies and the pressure to conform to ambitious ideas from the media, it’s a relief to relax and have a good time. What more could they be?
6. Cultivated
The limitation of a pleasure-based attitude to sex is what is known as the ‘law of diminishing returns.’ Let’s compare it to ice cream. If you really enjoy a good ice cream, and so once a week you go down to the ice cream shop and treat yourself, it’s probably going to be a consistently great experience. You’ll look forward to it, and it will give you pleasure. But if you were to get a job working in the ice cream shop and then eat twenty ice creams a day, you may not get the same pleasure from the twentieth ice cream as you did from eating it once a week. Whenever you center pleasure in anything, the more you have of it, the less return you get. Research has shown that the same is true of money, expensive gizmos, and fame. The more you get, the less pleasure it gives you.
Supposing you took an exclusively pleasure-based attitude towards food in general. It’s all about how it tastes. Many people do that. Oh!! Try this, it tastes amazing!!! Now taste this one!!! Sooooo good!! If your entire attitude towards food was based only on pleasure in the taste buds, it could become almost addictive. Then you might get curious: is there something more to eating than just the taste? You might get interested in nutrition, and about how eating the right way could improve your health and make you feel good, not just for a minute or two while the buzz of fleeting pleasure is in your mouth, but throughout the day.
For some people, a pleasure-based attitude to sex eventually becomes limited. We have to look beyond pleasure to have a sustaining, compelling, inspiring reason to invest time and priority in sex. Beyond pleasure, we can find something more that can tap into our very deepest longings, which blend into self-actualization, mysticism, and devotion. I often meet couples who’ve been together for a long time, and who feel that something is wrong because they’ve just run out of mojo. Yes, it still feels good to build to release, but how much fleeting pleasure is going to remain compelling? For some people, the thought creeps in: Is there more than this?
This sixth attitude to sex I call ‘cultivated.’ It means we get deeply curious: What is the potential in this situation that I might not even know about yet? Is there something beyond pleasure?
Now, don’t get me wrong here. We need to feel pleasure and desire in sex. It’s essential. But pleasure can also be a gateway into something more, and it is possible to get stuck at the gate.
Developing a cultivated attitude towards sex requires both curiosity and humility. “Curiosity combined with motivation, dedication, commitment, and reflection seems to be a crucial combination in the quest for optimal sexual experiences,” says Kleinplatz. “Extraordinary lovers acted as philosophers and scientists, questioning and studying their own lives. They had spent significant time reflecting on their own experiences so as to make sense of them. Most of their responses were thoughtful and nuanced, and the memories they shared of optimal sexual experiences were strong and detailed. Many self-identified as lifelong students who were passionate about learning in many aspects of their lives.” We also need the humility to recognize that there may be things we do not yet know about.
When we allow this curiosity and humility to infiltrate our attitude to sex, we become curious to discover what might be beyond the building of pleasure, and release centered in the genitals, AKA “Orgasm.” If you learn some specific disciplines that cultivate the capacity to move energy beyond the genitals to include the rest of the body, what is the potential? This is not going to happen just through centering what immediately feels most pleasurable. It may require retraining hardwired instinctive responses. As we discussed earlier, the genitals, particularly for a man, are quickly aroused, so energy builds fast. But they can’t contain energy for very long, so there’s going to be a release, sometimes accompanied by ejaculation, at which point it’s all over. If you make your sex centered around what feels good in the genitals, it’s going to be very orgasm based. When you learn to open up channels so the energy can expand from the genitals into the rest of the body, a whole different world opens up.
Based on extensive research done at the University of Louisiana, the website OMGYES.com offers education on how many women enjoy postponing orgasm, through ‘edging’ and ‘teasing.’ Now sex is no longer going for pleasure as quickly as possible, but entering into cycles of arousal and relaxation, so that it can spread.
The Taoists have this down to a fine art: when sexual energy is cultivated and spreads into the rest of the body, it can be the springboard for exceptional health and longevity, for emotional healing, and for spiritual awakening.
My forthcoming book, The Tao of Love, Sex, and Deep Intimacy, expands this into the impact of sexual practice on the quality of the relationship itself. How can these Taoist practices increase feelings of trust, respect, appreciation, and adoration, all of which are qualities that have now been determined to lead to exceptional intimate relationships?
Emily Nagosaki points to this possibility in a chapter in her second book called The Magic Trick. Kleinplatz and others also refer to expansive states verging on the mystical, which many people stumble upon by chance. But this is generally described as somewhat hit-and-miss, like buying a lottery ticket. That’s a reasonable conclusion, because probably these researchers and authors didn’t have training in Taoist practice, nor were they interviewing people with that kind of training and practice for their research.
Taking a cultivated attitude to sexuality is still relatively rare at this point. Realistically, it takes time, discipline, and shared prioritization and dedication with another person. This was something about which all contemporary researchers agree. “It is unlikely that optimal sexual intimacy will become a reality without noble efforts,” says Kleinplatz. “Great lovers are made, not born…. If two people set their minds on having great sex together, they will probably have it.”
Although evidence-based research universally concurs that great sex requires this kind of dedication of time and shared intention, it’s not always clear what couples specifically need to do to have great sex, besides setting aside time and communicating about what feels good.
This, in my opinion, is what Taoist practice has to offer us, not only for Magnificent Sex, but also for truly fulfilling relationships.
