Refractions: Of Body, Sensuality, and Sexuality (Part 2)

If we reflect on sexuality, then I hope one of the most basic insights in relationship to it, as we reflect on it, is that of dependent origination and emptiness. In other words, that we're aware and we never lose sight of the fact that sexuality -- like anything else, like everything else -- does not exist independently of the way of looking. Sexuality doesn't exist independent of the way of looking. It has no inherent existence as this or as that. It's always, in other words, coloured and shaped by the way that we're relating to it, the way that we're regarding it, our assumptions about it, and our assumptions about the path, and about what is not it or in contrast to it -- spirituality or whatever, or morality or whatever. It's always shaped by that. A person could think, "Yeah, you might think this or that, but really sexuality is this." It's that 'really' that so needs to be called into question. This is the movement of avijjā, not realizing the dependent origination of things, dependent on the way of looking.

So when we talk about sexuality, it's like, what we're talking about is not a fixed, independently existent thing. No matter how much it seems to be just a biological fact, we're talking about something that we can't look at it independent of all kinds of assumptions, ways of relating regarding it, etc., and archetypal styles. How open is our imaginal context, if you like, for what sexuality is and can be? So, you know, if we just use the Greek sort of gods as archetypes, aphroditic sexuality, if you like, the attention to pleasure and sensuality, and the generative urge, as well, in terms of procreation, etc. -- how different that is than, say, the hermetic. Hermes is not interested in monogamy, for example. Or the Dionysian, with the ecstasy and the intensity there. And also the effeminacy, as much as the power in the Dionysian. There are all these different archetypes, or the archetype of the faithful, monogamous couple in marriage, etc.

So we bring both conceptual ideas, assumptions, and a kind of narrowness or breadth of archetypal lens, if you like, to what sexuality is. Some of that we get from the culture, from the wider culture; some of it from the sub-cultures that we move in. We're always bringing something. And we're not talking about something that exists independently, that really is like this, or really is like that. This is, if you like, a fundamental insight that we must keep in mind and keep in our consciousness as we're exploring sexuality and opening it up as a topic.

I remember when I was an undergrad, studying psychology, and it was the time just after Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Gene, had been released, and people were talking about it a lot, etc. I actually had him, Richard Dawkins, as a personal tutor for a very short time, which is a whole other story, but ... Anyway, a student colleague of mine, a student friend of mine was quite influenced by that book and that whole way of thinking. He used to say back then, "Love is just a genetic programme to release certain chemicals in your brain. That's what love is. That's all love is." It was this very sort of fundamentalist evolutionary/biological 'survival of the fittest' (genes, in this case) way of reducing things, way of looking at things that's very reductionistic. Or I mentioned, for instance, a person I knew, a practitioner, who again was very adamant that sexuality is just a biological impulse to procreation that's sort of been evolutionarily selected, etc. He was very intent on that conception of sexuality, and that was the same person that I described who described himself as addicted to internet porn. Is there any relationship there between the view and the behaviour? Is the behaviour kind of coming out of a certain view because it doesn't allow much more?

Or, for instance, Nicolas Chamfort, a sort of French moralist around the time of the French Revolution, and he said or wrote, "Love is nothing but the contact of two épidermes" -- that's the biological word for skins, two skins, two épidermes. "Love is nothing but the contact of two épidermes and the exchange of two pale fantasies."^[1] I don't know enough about him to know whether that particular aphorism was actually coming from a broken heart he had (his wife, I think, died), or how much it was just the view that he arrived at at a certain point in life. I'm not sure. But anyway, there is that kind of view. We talked about the Buddha, and what he's recorded as saying in the Pali Canon in relation to sexuality -- very strong language, very dismissive. There are views that reduce sexuality and lovemaking, etc., and even human love in different ways, and pigeonhole it either biologically or spiritually or this or that.

I think I've told this story before in another context, perhaps many years ago in a talk: I remember teaching a retreat at one of the major retreat centres in another country. I was sitting at lunch with a few senior teachers and some others around, and something came up, because it had come to their attention that there was a sort of sub-group of teacher trainees, I think, elsewhere in the country who had started a group or were affiliated with a group -- I can't remember what it was called or exactly what they did, but it involved something like mindful sex, a group for mindful sex or something like that. It may have involved mutual masturbation. I think that was -- I'm not quite sure of the details, but it was something like that. They were promoting it as a sort of spiritual practice to integrate sexuality, to explore and open sexuality mindfully. So I was just listening, really, because I didn't know much about it, and watching the back-and-forth of the conversation. And what I was struck by was the immediate dismissal of this group and this idea, and the wanting to be clearly disassociated from it and make sure the Insight Meditation world is clearly not in any way referred to or associated with, etc. Then some strong statements about how the Buddha taught, that we need to let go of craving, etc., so this couldn't be related to the Dharma, etc.

And then in the very same mouthful, in fact, the teacher who said that commenting on how this was such a lovely meal that we were being fed by the retreat staff, and how this was in fact their favourite meal, etc. And just struck by the obliviousness or seeming obliviousness of those two statements: one is around the area of sensuality around sexuality, and one is around the area of pleasant-tasting food, and one was completely okay, seemingly, to just declare one's enjoyment and that one had a favourite there, and one was really not okay. So this struck me. All this struck me very much at the time. I remember being struck mostly by the seeming lack of openness and questioning there. And then, of course -- I can't remember if someone said this about ethics -- it's very easy in our world, the Insight Meditation world, etc., to regard issues around sexuality as being ethically much more grave than other ethical issues. So, for example, just be aware of how much discrepancy there is between the kind of consternation and outrage and tutting in relation to sexual ethics and choices, etc., versus the almost complete lack of the same with regard to the ethics of something like climate change, or the lack of people speaking up and teaching ethics around that, or willing to speak up and take a position, a strong position, whereas in relation to sexuality it really draws a lot of heat, consternation, outrage, strong statements, very black and white, etc., people very ready to speak up.

[11:50] So really I'm just wondering, as part of all this, if sex, if sexuality, and the relationship with sex and sexuality, and the views that we hold and others hold of this, are we -- and I'm including myself in this question as well, please, so -- am I, are we, are you and I exploring this deeply enough, the relationships with and the views of sex and sexuality? Or are we just kind of, again, absorbing, drinking in, being indoctrinated by some kind of unquestioned or not fully questioned legacy of, for instance, Western Christianity that saturates the culture? Even in the secular culture, the ethics of Christianity remain for the most part, as I think Nietzsche pointed out. So we're saturated by a Christian-influenced ethics, which have a certain view of body, sensuality, sexuality for the most part, and also Pali Canon Buddhism, Buddhadharma. My inquiry here is really into: how open is my questioning, how open is our questioning about all this, about the relationships and about the views? I'm absolutely not advocating some kind of moral nihilism like there should be no ethics, anything's fine around sexuality -- no, please, I'm really not stating that. I'm more questioning how much questioning -- and I don't know -- how much questioning is there in regard to the relationships, views, attitudes to sex, sexuality and sensuality and eros.

As I said, for me as well, can there be an exploration rather than kind of contracting, cutting exploration short and contracting down to just, "We know the answer. This is the answer. This is the decree"? For me, I don't know. It's an open exploration. There is not, as yet at least, any arrival at a final answer there. But to say something like, "Sex is a distraction. Sexual thoughts, sexual images, it's a distraction" in a Dharma context, to say something like that already implies a view. Already wrapped up in such a statement, such a sort of apodictic statement, there's already a view wrapped up in there. Anything can be a distraction, anything at all. Food can be a distraction, pleasant food. Ideas. Whatever it is. Anything can be a distraction. Ideas about the Dharma, whatever. And again, by saying that, I'm certainly not advocating not having ideas, and being (quote) 'non-conceptual.' It's just that anything can be a (quote) 'distraction.' Or just, "The Buddha said X," or "The Buddha said Y," again implies all kinds of views. Can we unpack the views behind such a statement? "The Buddha said X, therefore X." Views and fantasies, a lot of fantasy wrapped up in such a sort of compact-sounding statement.

What's the most important thing? What's the most important thing? Is the most important thing being a Buddhist? What is being a Buddhist? Is the most important thing freedom? And what does 'freedom' mean? How many kinds of freedom are there? Is the most important thing soulmaking? Freedom and soulmaking? What's important? And how does what I'm thinking and saying to myself and to others -- does it actually reflect for me the most important thing, or have other things got tangled in there, and I've not realized the assumptions, the views, and the fantasies operating there? Any time anyone says "Buddha said" [laughs] there are a lot of views, and particularly fantasies. What are they? Of path, of awakening, of Buddha, of tradition, all that. All these things that we've touched on, wrapped up, usually not seen.

So, you know, is it really true that sex, lovemaking, sexual arousal, energy, sexual images prevent samādhi? Is that really true, for example? I could relate for myself and for many students who have told me and shared with me many experiences -- actual or imaginal -- where the sexuality, the sexual energy, the sexual images, the actual lovemaking, sex, whatever, actually is really quite supportive of samādhi. Doesn't leave a kind of stickiness or craving or contraction of the being at all. Or people kind of -- this is something we'll return to -- "Either you are open to sex and sensuality, or you're going for the Unfabricated. Either this or that." Is that really true? Is that really the case, that it's either/or? All we would need to do to disprove that is find some celibate people who have not realized the Unfabricated and who may want to, and some people who are not celibate who have realized the Unfabricated. This is certainly quite possible. We get into this either/or thinking. There are all kinds of things wrapped up in our conceiving and assuming around this. Or what happens is there's a real polarizing, a kind of -- maybe it goes back to Plato and even Neoplatonism and that stuff, or the Buddha in the Pali Canon -- rejection of sensuality and sexuality in favour of knowing the transcendent Unfabricated, or a rejection of anything transcendent. We'll come back to this later; we've touched on it. The whole field polarizes: "Either this or that." Is it really the case? Is that really true?

[19:18] So we can compare, for instance, such views as we were talking about before of my undergraduate fellow student, or this other person who described himself as addicted to porn, or what Chamfort said, or what seemed to be being articulated by the teachers around the lunch table, etc. Compare that with views of sex and of sexuality -- whether actual physical sex or imaginal -- with, for example, what we touched on the other day: the view of sexuality and sex participating, our participating in that, through that, participating in, mirroring, echoing something much larger, something cosmic, and even perhaps creating or healing the divine in that. What a different view that is, of what sexuality is or, should we say, could be, can be, how it can be transformed, again, by the way of looking. Really quite a different view.

And I wonder sometimes if that kind of view of participating in something much larger, something more cosmic through sex, participating in something much larger or more cosmic, if that sense is actually perhaps -- I don't know if this is true -- easier for women because of the cycles of menstruation, for example, and because of the potential, at least, if not the actuality, of pregnancy. One really feels one is -- or I've been told by some women -- you're subject to something there in the cycles, and in what is being born in you and coming through you, and what your body is subject to, your whole being is subject to in menstruation, in pregnancy, etc. You're subject to something much larger. You can feel, or there's the possibility of feeling that in a very different way, much more embedded cosmically, reflecting the earth and the cosmic cycles and something bigger than you are. Whereas, potentially at least for the male, it's possible to scatter one's seed, sow one's seed, enter and leave, and not have that sense. If you like, it would be a sense of just, so to speak, dipping in and out, and not being caught up in something or at the centre of something much, much vaster, much more multidimensional, much more cosmic in its order. It's much, perhaps, easier for the woman to feel that, for the female to feel that than it is for the male, perhaps.

But compare those kind of views that I was talking about before with that kind of participatory view. I'm going to read you something from the myth of Inanna. Inanna was a Sumerian goddess, and her courtship with Dumuzi, the shepherd, who may have been a mortal -- it's unclear; I'm not an expert on this myth at all, but may have been a mortal who, through lovemaking with Inanna and coupleship with Inanna the goddess, may have become divine. There are all kinds of parallels here to what we've been talking about. I'm going to read you -- it's actually quite long, but because it's so different than the typical ways we regard sexuality in our culture or cultures, I think it's worth reading at length, just to get a completely different sense of the regard, the reverence, the texture of what sexuality is and what lovemaking can be in the view:

Inanna, at her mother's command,

Bathed and anointed herself with scented oil.

She covered her body with the royal white robe.

She readied her dowry.

She arranged her precious lapis beads around her neck.

She took her seal in her hand.^[2]

So she's a goddess, remember.

Dumuzi [the shepherd; he's becoming the king through this lovemaking] waited expectantly.

Inanna opened the door for him.

Inside the house she shone before him.

Like the light of the moon.

Dumuzi looked at her joyously.

He pressed his neck close against hers.

He kissed her.

Inanna spoke:

---What I tell you

Let the singer weave into song.

What I tell you,

Let it flow from ear to mouth.

Let it pass from old to young:

My vulva, the horn,

The Boat of Heaven,

Is full of eagerness like the young moon.

This is an aside: I read a short interview with Diane Wolkstein, who translated this not too long ago, and she was talking about translations made first in 1937 of this Sumerian myth. They kept the words like 'vulva,' etc., in the Latin, because back then you just could not publish such things in English. The culture was not ready, she said, and she thinks we're more ready now. But she found that kind of amusing as well.

[25:29 -- 34:12, reading myth cited above and linked in references, section (4) from "My untilled land lies fallow" through (9) "Decreed the fate of Dumuzi", then from "Ninshubur" through "Now, my sweet love is sated."]

So it's possible, I suppose, some people could hear that, interpret it, and deconstruct it historically: "Ah, yes, well, at some point agriculture was very important to this civilization, and this was just their way of not understanding agriculture, so they kind of presented a myth of how the crops grew. They prayed so that the crops would not fail then, and the floodwaters would come and irrigate the soil" and all that. There's a kind of way of hearing it that, again, puts it back, reduces it to some kind of biological, evolutionary impulse from an ignorant time where they didn't understand the science of agriculture, etc. Or you can hear in that, in that poetry there, as I said, the very different regard for lovemaking, for sex, for sexuality, for sensuality. There's nothing there that implies any kind of dirtiness, or 'less than,' or demeaningness. It's juicy. It's completely holy because it's tied in with the cosmos. It's full of cosmopoesis. Yes, it's full of the earth, and references to the fertility of the earth, and the agriculture, and the blessings of that, honey and wine and orchards and fields and milk. Yes, absolutely. But this whole thing is redolent, pregnant, overflowing with multidimensionality of divinity, of spirit, of reverence, of a sense of participation, of the sense, I feel, of the sexual act and the human sexual act reflecting divinity, reflecting the vision in cosmopoesis there, reflecting, echoing, participating in the cosmic. Very, very different sense, and gives rise to a whole different sensibility in regard to sexuality and sensuality there.

It's interesting. We live in a different time now, and a very different culture, etc. When we come to sex, it's interesting to kind of see what the intentions that nowadays are -- what we can kind of use sex for, or what is the intention in entering into sexual acts, sexuality between people. One, it's possible, it's certainly possible that sex is just reduced to wanting to experience pleasant sensations, or that that's a part of it: I want to experience pleasure, pleasant vedanā, basically. It's also possible that we may be using sex, to some degree or as part of the mix there, for a kind of what we might call ego-gratification, or to prop up or try and inflate a certain self-view, a certain ego-image, if you like (in the poor sense of the term 'image'). And either that's through making sexual conquests, wearing them as a feather in one's hat as a kind of ego-gratification, or using the sex, kind of interpreting it as an indication of one's own desirability or one's own loveability: "He loves me, she loves me, whatever it is, they love me. How do I know? Well, because we had sex." So it's either desirability or loveability or some mixture there. All this is possible.

And, you know, frankly speaking, sex can be for political reasons. Certainly in the history of different cultures, marriages and liaisons have been arranged for political reasons, for empire reasons, all kinds of things. But even within a relationship, there is, if you like, the possibility that sex is granted or withheld or used in a kind of strategizing, manoeuvring for other stuff as well. Sometimes there's the possibility that one is approaching the sex, either just or in part, seeking a release of stress, a release of tension, whether it's work or something around the home or something or other. There's a certain amount of energetic stress that accumulates in the body, and tension, and certainly orgasm or whatever can kind of discharge that. So sometimes actually one is driven by that. And then psychologically, it's interesting, just in terms of what's giving rise to that stress in the first place. There can be all kinds of psychological factors that have nothing to do with how busy we are or how much stress there is at work or whatever it is.

[40:06] So all these are possible factors or kind of intentions within our sex, possible at times in different proportions. And then we mentioned, you know, there are many -- the accumulation of energy. So some people, they're actually consciously entering into sexuality as we described in some tantric practices or some views of what tantrism involves. It's actually entering into conscious sex with another, or actually with oneself, and trying to accumulate, gather the sexual energy in certain channels in the body, and either that opens up the consciousness, or there's just gathering the bliss, etc., instead of discharging it in orgasm. And of course, the reason for having sex can be to do with love, expressing love and feeling the connection, the heart-connection of love between two people, of course.

And sex can be, if you like, for the sake of soul and for the sake of soulmaking, to some degree, or that can be involved in it. And in that case, I would say the imaginal is involved. Just based on everything we've been saying about soul and eros, the imaginal is involved. So we can come to sex or want sex with all these different intentions, and mixed together, and probably lots more besides that I just can't think of right now. But if we're talking about soulmaking in and through sex, and sex in the service of soul -- and again, that doesn't need to be to the exclusion of any of these other things, I suppose -- then that involves, soulmaking involves, implies, the presence of images and the engagement with images and all of that. So if we are interested in soulmaking, and interested in the soulmaking going into every direction and dimension and domain of our existence, then that will include sex. And if we're interested in opening up sex and sexuality and sensuality, then it means allowing the soulmaking and the soulfulness and the imaginal and the erotic to imbue the sex. Because remember, we can have sex without eros, right? So it involves this meeting and this pervading of each other, the imaginal and the sexual.

And then the question, if we're interested in soulmaking with regard to sex, what allows, what supports, for example, memories of sexual moments with -- could be on one's own, again; could be with another -- what allows memories of sexual moments to become images? In the sense of imaginal images; that's, again, mostly what we mean by the word 'images.' What allows just a memory of a sexual moment to actually be, if you like, elevated, or to have the fullness of the imaginal? Or during the actual sex itself, what allows and what supports the perceptions, the experiences in the present, to become imaginal, to become image, to have that kind of iconic sense to them, that sense of the eternal, that sense of dimensionality, divinity, participation, all of that? What allows and supports a perception, in the present moment, during the lovemaking, during the sex, that reveals the multidimensionality there? What allows the multidimensionality to be revealed? What supports the multidimensionality to be discovered or revealed?

To me, that's quite an interesting question. What allows the soul -- not just talking about heart, not reducing soul to heart; that's a not-separate question, or rather it's a connected question, but it's a different question. We're talking about soul now. What is it that allows the sex to be soulmaking? Is it a matter of speed? Do we need to slow down to allow that dimensionality to fill out, the perception to fill out into the dimensionality of the imaginal? Maybe. But I wouldn't want to be formulaic here: "Does that mean you always have to have slow sex?" And by slow, that doesn't necessarily mean the actual physical movements, just the pace of the whole thing. Perhaps a better way of saying it: is it that we're not too carried away in a certain momentum of, if you like, goal-orientation towards orgasm -- or carried away, contracted in a certain view or a certain intention? That's maybe a better way of putting it. So again, it has everything to do with contraction, and that's not just of heart -- contraction of view, contraction of vision, contraction of sensibility. Yes? So the heart could be open, but the sensibility and the soulmaking sensibility or vision, way of looking, can actually be quite narrow, closed, contracted, restricted to a certain view.

So maybe the question is more about being either carried away in a certain contraction towards whatever goal we have, whether that's orgasm or whatever it is, for me or for the partner or whatever, or the view or the intention get contracted. But if they're not, and we're not carried away, and if it's not contracted, then there's the possibility perhaps of perceiving imaginally, of the soulmaking dynamic, eros-psyche-logos, actually in the moment expanding, having a life, filling out, the fire spreading or the water filling it out, plumping it out and spreading, so that the dimensionality comes, and the cosmopoesis comes, or the vision of the other, the vision of oneself, the autoeroticism, all of this that we've touched on, because we're not contracted in some kind of greed, some kind of craving, or some kind of contraction of view. As I said, I wouldn't want to impose some kind of rule or formula of exactly how that happens, you know? But this is, to me, it's a really interesting question.

And even then, what's amazing and what we can be thankful for is even sometimes if we miss some soulmaking in the moment, the beauty of the emptiness of memory is that it can get, if you like, made soulful, and dimensionality can be revealed and discovered and opened, later in the memory, interestingly enough. This doesn't go just for sexuality, of course, and sex; it goes for anything. It's like, sometimes the vision in the moment is not consciously open enough, and yet as the memory exists for us -- maybe the next day or whenever it is -- it can actually start to gather, if you like, imaginal reality, imaginal dimensions. To me, this is just interesting as an exploration to open up. It's like, what about not just heartfulness, not just love, and not just all the other stuff that we mentioned, but what about soulmaking? What supports the soulmaking in the sexuality, and the sexuality to be soulmaking?

[48:48] Related to everything that we said, if it's soulmaking that we're interested in in the realm of sexuality and with respect to sexuality, then it might be that it's more obviously soulmaking when the sex -- whether we're talking about actual sex or imaginal, erotic-imaginal, sexual imaginal -- it may seem at first easier when the sex or the image has a certain flavour or a certain tone or a certain kind of character to it. For example, it's very light, kind of melty, and sort of very warm, etc., obviously warm and tender. It might feel like that's obviously soulmaking, again, whether that's imaginal or actual. But I would say in the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, because of the expansion, can we -- and some people will find this easier at certain times than others, for lots of different reasons -- but the movement is to expansion and inclusion, so that there will be not just the light and the melting and the sort of warm, tender sexuality that is obviously soulmaking, but also, as we said before, the darker, the more voracious, etc., the less normal. So this, too, there's a lot of soulmaking potential in that, or potentially there can be a lot of soulmaking potential in that.

And again, we said this before, but don't jump to assuming so quickly -- some people will assume, just because of the norms, because of a certain amount of indoctrination, because of the cultures, that that kind of thing must be disrespectful; that kind of thing, we assume that there's no love there; that kind of thing must be an objectification. "I shouldn't objectify people." What does it mean to objectify? To me, part of what it means is not seeing and valuing the totality of the other person's being. Can we look again, look more closely, look more openly and without assumptions, and actually question, is it disrespectful? Is there really no love here? Am I objectifying, etc.? Is there perhaps a holiness, a divinity, a sacredness here, whatever words we might use, that's actually palpable and evident if we just kind of open our eyes and attune the gaze, notice it, perhaps relax the gaze? Because it's not something you can force; you can't go gazing at this image or this experience forcing a kind of sense of sacredness there. We don't want to be heavy-handed with this. Remember, the poetry of perception, the art of perception. Sometimes that's more a matter of kind of being more open, more spacious, more receptive, more attuned, more subtle, more light. There's a time for heavy-handedness. There's a time for sort of laser-beam attention, all that. And there are other times where more is revealed in the art of perception through much softer, less pressured approaches.

But again, if we're talking about soulmaking -- and we talked about the three different ways that, for instance, the sexuality and the sexual images and language in tantric Buddhism could be interpreted: as just a symbol, that it's only symbolic, referring to spiritual reality, certainly not bodily or sexual ones, or certainly not sexual ones (maybe energy body or something). There's one interpretation. But if we're really interested in, again, bringing the soulmaking, allowing the soulmaking to fill out, to change and to open and to give dimensionality and beauty and divinity to our sense of sexuality and our experience of sex and sexuality, then we have to go beyond just this view, "It's only symbolic," that sexuality can only have a symbolic function in the path, in spiritual teachings, etc.

Can we, is it possible -- and I think it really is -- to resanctify sex and sexuality? Our whole relationship, something that has been deemed dirty and kind of low, etc., or just received a modicum of soulfulness in its relation to heartfulness and "I really love this person," etc., which is wonderful, but can we actually resanctify it? As I said, that means not just the light but also the dark. Yeah? Not just the insubstantial but also the dense, not just the gentle but also the ferocious, so that the whole range of possibilities becomes opened. We're not shrinking down, limiting the soulmaking dynamic with regard to sexuality. Of course, in that, that third possible interpretation of sexuality in tantric Buddhism, that it's only a vehicle, that it just happens to be the most expedient vehicle for rechannelling the energy body energies so that the consciousness opens to emptiness or clear light, or so that you get a more intense bliss or ecstasy -- yeah, that's all good and fine, and possible and certainly valuable to explore, and (what should we say?) not that impossible to explore, but in the way we're talking about all this, it's also a vehicle for soulmaking. And that means the cosmopoesis and the divinity is wrapped up with it, as we said, in this whole sense of participation. It's not only symbolic, and it's not only a vehicle for bliss or energy or emptiness.

So resanctification, I would say, of sex and sexuality actually involves the imaginal. It involves the imaginal. This is what will open a multiplicity, a multidimensionality of sacredness in the perception of anything, once the relationship with that thing becomes erotic-imaginal. As we alluded to before, what can easily happen is, instead of the relationship with sex and the conception of sex and the view of it and the way we regard it, instead of being soulmaking, and the sex itself and the whole way we conceive of it and relate to it, it can very easily become about the ego. That's different than soulmaking, isn't it, because it's got this reification thing, and it's got this tight self-view thing -- "ego" is not a word I use a lot, but let's say that -- versus the dimensionality, the openness of the imaginal self-view, and the knowing image as image that happens in our definition of soulmaking.

I think I mentioned early on Michel Foucault and his history of sexuality. He did a lot of these studies where he called it 'archaeology,' sort of tracing movements, political movements or certain discourses in modern Western societies and modern Western culture, and how certain discourses grew or took certain directions, and certain institutions developed, and ways of thinking and political laws and all kinds of things. One of the studies he did was in relation to sexuality. He also did something similar in relation to madness and other things as well. So he traces through the nineteenth century (and perhaps before) the sort of upsurge, swelling in the kind of discourses on sexuality that started in the nineteenth century. Suddenly there's this sort of burgeoning of discourses on sexuality. Particularly among these discourses, they focus on sort of details of what was regarded as sexual perversions from the norm. So that suddenly started being fascinating for people, and chronicling it and dividing it up and diagnosing it and all the rest of it.

He traces certain kind of institutions, if you like, that were part of that process, and concentrated that process, and kind of crystallized it. One was the Catholic confessional. Of course, people go and, "Father, I have sinned," and "What have you done?", "Well, I've masturbated," or whatever it is. And then also Freudian psychoanalysis, where there was this intense sort of scrutinizing of sexual fantasy and sexual behaviour, etc., and put in quite a rigid interpretive framework, as was, generally speaking, the Catholic confessional and other things, other institutions and discourses, if you like, that emerged then in that time in the nineteenth century. I mean, Catholic confessional goes back before, but there was perhaps a growth in that then. Foucault was quite interested in power dynamics and what happens to the whole notion of the human subject. So in this archaeology, he traced "the emergence of a series of discourses and practices" that actually either were deliberately designed or intended or inadvertently had the effect of making the self, the subject of these discourses or these procedures or institutions, "more reliably and extensively responsible for itself." I'm actually quoting someone called David West now who wrote a book on certain philosophical streams in the twentieth century and before in Western philosophy.^[3]

So Foucault was quite interested in this. Something was really not much of an issue; sexuality was promoted in this process from a relatively unimportant fact about bodies -- like, I don't know, going to the toilet, or digestion or something -- to something decisive for an individual's sense of identity. It's really quite interesting to me. Sexuality promoted from being a relatively unimportant fact about bodies in Western culture of a certain time, to being something decisive for an individual's sense of identity -- again, not for everyone, but quite a lot. So it becomes something quite loaded and quite central and intimately connected with the whole sense of self and identity.

Wrapped up in that is this whole power dynamic, which Foucault was particularly interested in, so that, for instance, in the Catholic confessional or in Freudian psychoanalysis, you are now responsible for this. We're opening up this territory. You're talking about this experience. We're interpreting it a certain way (in Freud's case, as something very dangerous that civilization needed to keep a lid on, so to speak, and maybe let out enough steam so the sort of boiler doesn't blow; but generally speaking, the id and the sort of instinct of sexuality needs to be repressed to a certain extent, or controlled, at least, to a certain extent). And again, in the Catholic confessional, it has a certain interpretive view of sexuality, and so this is now getting the subject, this self or that self, to be, in West's words, "more reliably and extensively responsible for itself."

Something that hadn't been this whole area that one needs to fret about and think about and control, actually it becomes now an area either to worry about, to feel guilty about, to obsess about, or -- and what's more common nowadays -- it's central to my identity. A lot of identity construction revolves around sexuality, sexual expression, sexual style, sexual manifestation, sexual experience or lack of experience, this or that sexual prowess, whatever it is. Again, I probably wouldn't make this too black and white. I'm sure these were all seeds that existed in Western culture anyway, but what's interesting is how they get amplified and drawn out and connected with the sense of identity.

This is related to something I've touched on a couple of times over the talks: that our whole sense of self, our whole notion of self and our whole actual sense of self, like who I feel I am, who you feel you are, what we feel is involved in a self and important in a self, is actually enlarged in modernism or with the advent of modernism to include, in this case, a new delineation: sexuality. What kind of sexuality? What's the sexual expression? What's the sexual style? What's the sexual domain of experience, etc.? So the larger point is that the self that we experience as so natural, and in many cases problematic, is actually a different kind of self-experience than, say, that the Buddha was addressing in the time that he was teaching in India, Pali Canon Buddhism. We now have a whole kind of complexity and range and kind of landscape of psychic interiority that didn't really exist for people before these delineations were made -- whether it's sexuality, or this or that, or whatever. The whole complexity and range, etc. Making these delineations makes the interiority more complex and more stretched, if you like.

And then all this plays into questions about identity, and our fretting about identity, or our celebration of identity, and all of that. Now, I'm not actually judging this, or even the rise of individualism and identity. I mean, it certainly has a shadow side, and we don't need to rehearse that again, go over it; it's pretty obvious, especially if you've been exposed to any Dharma teachings. But go back to what we were talking about, making delineations, near the beginning of this course, and Epictetus, I think it was, saying "everything's got two handles; beware of the wrong one." When we make delineations, for instance, the whole fretting of identity can get hold of it in a way that's actually, yeah, like a double-edged sword. It's problematic. It can be problematic. There has been a proliferation, according to Foucault, and even beyond his time, around sexuality and its relationship with identity, and it's become something decisive for an individual's sense of identity. Not for everyone, and certain generations maybe less so, but certainly for beyond a certain date, let's say, in Western society. People may not talk about it so much, but that may also be wrapped up in reasons why we're not talking about it. There might be someone not talking about it, but actually there's still a kind of identity-view around that. Not for everyone.

But this kind of proliferation, if you like, of delineations, and of the whole emergence into what it means for the self, and what a self is, and the interiority and the complexity and the identity there, it is, as I said, a double-edged sword. There's a growth there which we could regard as papañca. Or we could also regard it as exactly the eros-psyche-logos dynamic expanding, in terms of making delineations and thinking about these things, having fantasies and images around all that, and even the eros in regard to sexuality -- in other words, the erotic relationship with sexuality, in the meaning of the erotic-imaginal, filling it out. So it can be that, and it can be that for the individual, or it can be a snag for the ego -- get too tight around this whole identity business, and fretting and worrying or feeling constrained or whatever it is. As always in our way of thinking, I'd say the test is, is it soulmaking? Is it soulmaking? And if it's not, can I actually find a different relationship with it that opens it up as soulmaking, rather than it leading to kind of neurosis or worry about the self and the identity, and alienation, pressure to conform, pressure to perform, whatever it is, or pressure to be interesting or unique or whatever? All this is the concrete, narrow, contracted self-view, or ego, if we use that language; it's not soulmaking. Can soulmaking be the test here?

You know, it shouldn't need saying, but it's actually important to say: there needs to be kindness with all this. How easily we can get either very self-judgmental with this, or kind of down on ourselves, or worried about ourselves, or actually quite militant and rigid in our thinking. Again, it's just too much concretization, too much literalism, too much reification. But really in regard to all this and the possibilities in our relationship with sex and sexuality, you know, we really need kindness in the exploration. Yeah? So that's really important to say that, to realize that.