1
Everything Will Change
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE IN WONDERLAND
A MOST UNUSUAL INVITATION
“Going all the way,” said Rick, dropping the phrase casually into our conversation. His serenely rising pompadour, the confidence he so easily slipped into the word all, and especially his knowing glance let me know that, alas, at age thirteen, I was still a child and that my neighbor, at a towering sixteen, possessed secrets of incomparable power. Although I hadn’t the slightest idea what he really meant (it was 1962), I knew enough not to admit it to anyone. Instead, I slinked away to where no one would see me, wrenched my belt buckle onto my left hip, and began Elvising an “I was born ready” pucker to some imaginary female audience. Five years later, after slipping out from a freshman college mixer with an equally enthralled coed, I found out what he meant.
On that lower bunk, while Sam the Sham roared on in the gym, veils were lifted and secrets disclosed. A new world of pleasures, precautions, and trepid anticipations surfaced, for I had (finally) gone “all the way.” At least, that is what I thought, until another eight years later, when a most unexpected event occurred that suggested a realm of even greater hiddenness and secrecy. Suddenly the guiding star of sex that Rick, I, and everyone else I knew were following so devotedly shattered into a pulsing darkness, and “going all the way” began to stretch out before me endlessly.
I had been quietly relaxing at a weekend yoga retreat: healthy food, plenty of exercise, and time for reflection in a peaceful country setting. It was Sunday morning, and I was listening somewhat inattentively to our instructor’s final talk on the ways of the mind and the needs of the heart and body: meditation, diet, self-acceptance—the usual topics for such an event. Suddenly the lecture took an unanticipated turn, and I thought I felt the room begin to sway:
Sigmund Freud was a very insightful psychologist. He saw very deeply into the sexual nature of man, but he did not see the whole picture. There are many stages of development beyond the teenager’s puberty, but if you want to get to them you will have to go beyond his theories, therapies, and ways of “liberation.” Are you ready to go on this yogic journey?
Beyond sex liberation? It was 1975, the time of free love, instant LSD enlightenments, the Age of Aquarius. Was this sparkling-eyed Indian yogi serious?
Not only was he serious, I too began to sense, as I had at age thirteen, that something mysterious and powerful was being revealed. And with that question, “Are you ready to go on this journey?” his provocative and fascinating words suddenly became a three-dimensional, outstretched hand that reached for my own. Should I take hold? It was only a lecture, wasn’t it? I didn’t have to do anything, did I?
Over the years I had heard scores of such talks, and I was always able to continue my life relatively unscathed. But this time I wondered if I would be walking away from something that, in Robert Frost’s words, would make “all the difference.” If this yogi was right, then was Western psychology wrong? If some “beyond sex” existed, why hadn’t I been told about it before? As these questions tugged and circled in my mind, one thing became alarmingly clear. I was actually considering stepping into a world of possibilities whose very existence I had never before suspected.
This step was something called urdhvaretas—a Sanskrit term meaning “a series of identity-maturing puberties, from perineum to pineal and beyond.” And our confident teacher suggested we take a catalytic, “candle to candle,” energetic transmission known as shaktipat that traced back two thousand years and “try it” by “marrying yoga, one-hundred percent” for a year and a quarter! “You mean me?” I gulped to myself, as a second barrage of feelings whirled through me: disbelief, challenge, fear, a solemn profundity, and then a deeply mysterious churning at the roots of my being, as if unawakened depths of my own body were being aroused and were also telling me, “We thought you’d never ask! Here, feel this, and this and this, see—there really is more and more and more . . .”
AWAKENING DORMANT SEED POTENTIALS
The first six months of this totally monogamous, ars erotica marriage to yoga practices were intense. Several times while driving, my spinal sensations were so great that I had to pull over and let them subside. I would sing simple mantras and break into tears of “homecoming” to my own heart. My daily yoga practice was stirred into action by the first glimmers of the predawn rising sun, as pervasive yearnings animated bodily stretches into familiar and unfamiliar yoga asanas that now poured out of my outreaching arms, circling wrists, gesturing fingers, arching neck, swaying spine, dance-stepping legs and toes—catlike, gracefully, playfully, with outbursts of laughter or ferocious roaring—as I moved from one posture into the next and the next. In some innately intelligent way the shaktipat-catalyzed urdhvaretas was projecting my entire romantic-erotic nature into this marrying of yoga that seemed to be “liberating” my body and mind from the scientia sexualis “grip” of modern sexuality and redistributing and universalizing my “libido” throughout my body, making yoga, chanting, and meditation into my “one and only,” most intimate lover.
My testes and perineum tingled like an infinity of scintillating star-flecks vibrating within me, yet without any arousals, erotic images, or desires for sexual activity (even including the habitual teen-developed happy urge to masturbate, which just went away). My forehead throbbed like a hymen being pressed toward some mystical union and my tongue and throat quivered blissfully in wordless fullness whenever I relaxed and turned within (as they have continued to do for decades).
This lingual quivering began in a mysterious way. I was in a darkened movie theater in Atlantic City watching All the President’s Men, a film about the Watergate break-in, when all of a sudden this strange quivering broke into me and I grew mildly dizzy. A few weeks later I learned at another yoga retreat that a yogi in India (whom I had never met but who would become my main yoga guide and guru) had, at that very time, a decades-long maturational breakthrough in his advanced version of this same tongue-quivering puberty, known in Sanskrit as khechari mudra, and went ecstatically breathless for over an hour. My whole collegiate premed-instilled scientific paradigm of proximate causality began to shake, and shakes still.
Impossibly, or so I had thought until then, the entire frothy allure of swingin’ sixties freedoms exited stage left. In its place was an awakened wisdom that stretched back thousands of years and unlocked the meaning of all sorts of yogic practices followed by hundreds of millions of yogis, Buddhas, philosophers, and mystical saints, worldwide, and clearly centralized in the scriptures some of them had left behind. The vast ars erotica of yoga explains why the yoga and enlightenment scene that has since burgeoned forth to uplift millions of lives has also come to appear ever more limited to me and to a growing number of yoga teachers. Could that first wave of enthusiasts have been so far off the mark in their fitness-focused practice on the mat as well as off the mat, taking in only so much as their hip scientia culture could easily assimilate? When I asked the publisher of Yoga Journal about my concerns, he said, “We are promoting a holistic lifestyle to as many people as possible, not some Indian, authentic yoga.” Truth said.*9
In fact there are yogas with a deeper inner heat than the hottest “hot room yoga,” and intimate modes of attention more powerful than simply “being really present.” Yoga has always been a path to eternal values and freedoms beyond the latest fashions and touted teachers. Maturity in lifelong married life, with a partner, or in the mystic wholeness of inner marriage, has been the gold standard and essential meaning of hatha yoga—“to yoke, to unite the sun (ha) and moon (tha) within—for tens of millions of yogis for thousands of years. There are soul-seedpowers more fecund with creativity than the popularized “Ultimate Power of Now,” such as the “Father-activated, Kundalini Mother Power of lifelong maturation,” or the deepest seed-activated “Till death do us part Love Passions, and you’ll have to pry us apart, even then!”
And there are even more profound maturations whereby thousands of wise, charismatic, and loving Gandhis, Dalai Lamas, Buddhas, and hugging Mother Amma-jis might emerge from among today’s eighteen million yogis to uplift our overly materialist, vengeance-riddled, and earth-pillaging cultures into a world of one caring and sustainable family—if only they knew the way. Such a vision inspired Buddhist writer Robert Thurman to seek grants for an ivy-league-level professional school, the Second Renaissance Institute, where meditation and other spiritual practices would prepare such leaders.
For me yogic marriage made humanitarian service the purpose of work and the neediest of the world my closest family. With a degree in religion from Princeton earned during the heights of peace demonstrations and campus consciousness expansion (I marched on Washington, went to Woodstock, and was voted the “Tim Leary” of my class), I went on to spend the next forty years bringing grihastha family counseling and yoga to impoverished schools, locked-up kids, broken shack-homes, seedy Atlantic City flophouses where the homeless mentally ill just wait, glazed over, and into long-unvisited and withering elders in backwoods “rest-homes.” And in the years since 1980, I cofounded a $34M green development project; co-created the first electronics-driven kirtan band, Axis Mundi; have clinically directed a traditional counseling center; and have been bringing my own version of spiritually attuned counseling to thousands of marriage and family therapy clients and students in the United States, Europe, India, post-apartheid South Africa, and Russia.
You could say that I, like millions of others, had gotten unfamously “spiritual,” fueled in my case by this deeper connection to the universal seed forces (retas) of humanity, the empowering Mother Kundalini, and the poignant, “one family” purposes of why we are here. All the while, I researched the yogic map of complete maturation and ways to show others the limitations of the scientia sexualis, the happy but myopic and confounding sexuality that is everywhere. Foucault’s hope became mine, too:
In a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of [scientia] sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest confessions from its shadow . . . having us believe that our “liberation” is in the balance.1
In his reversed characterization of our modern era of “sexual liberation” as the “austere monarchy of sex,” Foucault goads us toward somewhere else, outside this ironic, compelled “austerity,” as I have tried to convey by writing in the kavi (poetic) yogic tradition, which you will find interspersed and page-centered throughout this book. Please read these verses, drink them, as guided meditations, in keeping with the path most famously employed by the ars erotica kavi-genius Rumi. Poetry tries to effect a transformation, like turning water into wine, in which ordinary words become “verse-wine,” engendering permission to love beyond the norms, by opening the heart-space of “the endless wedding feast.” (Sanskrit terms in the verses that are not defined in the text itself can all be found in the glossary).
Far beyond the thrall of the teenaged awakening
Nature has hidden in us
numerous rare and mysterious erotic reflexes
and transformative puberties
(except for kundalini, completely unknown to modern times—
did we really believe we had discovered
everything there is about the erotic universe?)
the fleshy basis of all spiritual yearning that
only an ever-deeper passion might awaken:
shuddering genital reversals vajroli mudra, shakti chalani,
that emerge in meditative depths
or only after the second hour of embrace,
spinal surges kundalini shakti, davening,
Quakering, Shakering, zikr-ing, holy ghosting,
involving spellbinding novitiates of seed-retas maturation,
excessively devotional surrenders
requiring an ease with tears
at the thought of it all,
and even more distant throat-choking pharyngeal hypoglossal arousals,
khechari mudra,
soaring into consummate pineal emissions
soma rasa, nectar of the gods,
inebriating the inmost soul
with breathless beauties everywhere,
completing itself perhaps a dozen lifetimes from now.
In a different economy of bodies and pleasures
we might call these awakenings “postgenital puberties”
as in this ancient name for Yoga: shamanica medhra,
“the going-beyond-genital-awakenings”
—but beyond into what?
As urdhvaretas maturity opened me over the decades to the realm of fully seed-infused erotic pariyanga or boudoir yoga, it was like heaven and earth combined, fueled by naturally entheogenic passions far beyond that “austere monarchy” of scientia sex:
Two people chained to one another in endless causality
by their reverberating attractions to one another,
endless irresistibility inciting endless irresistibility,
chemical fusion reactions of the entire polarized universe.
Every glistening retas-permeated cell poised aimed at him, at her,
and nothing else is what every living gendered fiber wants,
has ever wanted,
a hundred a thousand a million years.
After fifty-two years I have come to believe that I have seen and gone “all the way” to erotic places Rick and I never dreamed were possible back in the hot-rod and belt-buckle era of 1962, “when we was fab.”
URDHVARETAS FIRST BURSTS IN THE MODERN WEST
The current studio yoga and “Now” enlightenment scene is like merely putting a toe into the sandy shores of the further-out, oceanic depths of the Eastern truths of the body and consciousness accessed through an urdhvaretas “marriage to yoga, one-hundred percent.” Consider the description given by the modern-era Indian yogi and author of Kundalini, The Evolutionary Energy in Man, Gopi Krishna, of his own perineum-to-pineal urdhvaretas awakening of Mother Kundalini. He had merely turned the right keys and “mushroomed” (without substances) into what yoga calls the anandamaya-kosha, “quantum-causalbliss-body” (see chapter 5 on yogic ars erotica anatomy), which I call one of the many “rooms” or “inner spaces” of the intimus, the most interior, (in chapter 8):
Suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord. . . . The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder, I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. . . . It grew wider and wider, spreading outward while the body, normally the immediate object of its perception, appeared to have receded into the distance until I became entirely unconscious of it. I was now all consciousness without any outline, without any idea of corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light simultaneously conscious and aware at every point, spread out, as it were, in all directions without any barrier or material obstruction. I was no longer myself, or to be more accurate, no longer as I knew myself to be . . . but instead was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed in light and in a state of exultation and happiness impossible to describe.2
Krishna’s many books captured the attention of scientia-trained clinicians such as my predecessor, Lee Sannella, M.D., cofounder of the first “spiritual emergence” service, the Kundalini Clinic, and author of the 1977 meme-setting book, Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? which helped other transpersonal colleagues to modify the American Psychiatric Association’s bible, the DSM-IV.*10 Sannella’s book opens by comparing kundalini awakening with the often difficult but profoundly meaningful seed-force throes of childbirth. Indeed, the Cross-cultural Disorders section of the DSM-IV lists a variety of seed concerns as being noteworthy for many Asian cultures but ends there.
Likewise, in complete congruence with the frothy scientia sexualis sixties and since, Krishna’s emphatic inclusion of the essential role of the retas seed forces in kundalini processes “to feed the inner man” has been continuously ignored. Thus, today, many in our scientia sexualis culture talk of and teach about their “kundalini awakenings” or their “ultimate Now awakenings,” but do not include or live in the urdhvaretas mystery. Scientia sexualis has indeed reigned as an austere monarchy, ignoring centermost profundities within the ars eroticas of other cultures and simultaneously blinding itself to even its most liberal critics.
For example, as early as 1932 and without much of an alternative in mind, psychedelic initiate and humanistic spiritualist, Aldous Huxley wondered if the nascent scientia sexualis liberation might be a premonition of a darkly fraught “brave new world” of easily accessible sexual liaisons and eugenically efficient reproduction that masked a perditious narrowing of human warmth and intimacy.
Likewise, Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse saw the scientia sexualis as a “repressive de-sublimation” of eros into a mushrooming of “desire” that fueled an unsustainably rapacious capitalism, a hypothesis explored in the cogent BBC four-hour documentary, The Century of the Self, on the creation of advertising “spin” by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.
“Spin” has proven to be the most insidious exploitation of natural bodily arousals since the Jesuit Inquisition, not as a “repression of wayward passions,” but as an exploitative despiritualization of love and beauty itself in order to (like a hip drug dealer) sell more of what we are told we “gotta have!” For “it’s not how long you make it, it’s how you make it long” (the double-entendre advertising spin used to launch Winston’s long cigarettes*11). Marcuse’s proffered response in Eros and Civilization in 1955, though vague, was a “spiritualization of the instincts.”
Even Marty Klein, past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and a chief architect of the scientia sexualis for forty years, has recently written in Sexual Intelligence that the narratives, theories, and stories we create about sex are more powerful than “sex” itself in determining how “sexuality” unfolds in people’s lives—not the mere freeing up of an unswerving “sex-desire.” Freud, who excommunicated Jung from the psychoanalytic fold for putting “sexual energy” into a spiritual context, would be rolling over in his grave to read Dr. Klein’s blasphemy.
As a first step toward the ars erotica, hipper sectors of the scientia sexualis now speak of “the spirituality of sacred sex.” The prolonged, nonejaculatory, and passionate “fucking one’s partner to God” of field leader David Deida counters Reich’s centralized “function of the orgasm” with an endless karezza sexuality for men and multiple, deep orgasms (not shallow “monkey orgasms,” as Deida quips) for women. Rajneesh-Osho’s teaching “that brahmacharya is diamond and sex is coal” was eschewed, leaving him with the also true reputation of being the “sex guru.” Thus, too, Pulitzer winner and New York Times science page journalist William Broad, chose “thinking-off ” (touchless fantasy masturbation) as his hint-of-a-step toward the “deeper” aspects of yoga and tantra in his scientia yoga book, The Science of Yoga, which was featured on the front page of the Times.
In contrast, the following are full steps forward in the shift from monarchical scientia sexualis (including the neo-tantras) to ars erotica terra firma:
Based in overarching historical and linguistic analyses, language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted how theories create self-enclosed “forms of life, language-behavior games,” Martin Heidegger lyricized how language itself “conceals, as it reveals,” and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm analysis showed how dominant theories ignore and even squelch any contradictory information. The fact that conservatives and liberals cannot even agree on when respect for life processes should begin or what “natural” adult love is or is not shows the self-persuasive power of one’s ideological paradigm or “group language-game.”
Thus, consider the complete transitioning from our current desire-centric scientia sexualis world into an ars erotica world. In such an ars erotically liberated culture, all the elements of “eros” would change. For example, the current Internet space occupied by a mega-industry of cyberpornography would instead be filled with spellbinding ars erotica websites because, as Foucault would note, “profundity” feels better than endlessly repetitive and more extreme cyberporn permutations of (de-seeded) sex-desire (not because it is “morally superior”). There would be other changes too, such as in flirtation and dating, gender identifications, child conception, love songs and musical energizations, lifelong marriage, asana instruction, enlightenment, the treatment of charismatics, and the exploration of currently discarded monastic developmental esoterica underlying all universities. The value of “normative” sexological statistics and the chronic conservative vs. liberal sexo-moral debates would all also change. Indeed, “everything” would change.
Such radical cultural changes represent the dramatic power of a “techno-paradigm shift”—like the mere forty-year shift from typewriters, written/mailed letters, and libraries to laptops, e-mail, and Google. Just as the LSD serotonin rush of consciousness-truth threatened the popularity of feel-good alcohol in the sixties, entheogenic ars eroticism will test the simpler, de-seeded testosterone and estrogen allure of sex-desire.
In such a context, urdhvaretas converts will then roll their eyes and, as Foucault put it, “no longer quite understand how the ruses of [scientia] sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of [scientia] sex” for so long. Perhaps another glimpse into pariyanga will explain and allure:
With the secret spinal passageway spiraling upward
you could ambrosially lap and hungrily devour all the way up to my mind
so your perfect feathery lips were now in my mind
licking the interior darkness billowing responsively in being licked,
my mind licking back, leaving wet radiances on your lips,
carefully reaching into the billowing Infinity
Your back purrs should I even glance at its central groove
arising hidden and dark from the violet-tinged perineal trikonam
cresting up and smoothly down into the sacral well
reaching forward between your praying shoulder-blades
then burying into your softest neck flesh beneath the wisps of child hairs
diving into brainstem where seething rhythms of the sapient universe
flare invisibly a milky-starry conflagration of electrified axons dendrites
filled with tigers’ movements, panthers’ eyes,
a million million combinations
to trigger throbbing hips upstretched hands hearts lips
Who was I who you? For those hours,
it no longer mattered who was who,
loving each other’s hungers as one’s own.
I looked out my eyes and was you, but you floating in us.
Happy feeling how beautiful you are from the inside,
become those silky shoulders I love to caress,
that smile now mine,
not the slightest worry of losing my way back,
what difference would it really make?
We would as well be each other as ourselves,
so in love in awe of each other were we.
If the modern yoga and neo-tantra of the current eighteen million enthusiasts is reunderstood as seed-infused ars erotica, with a few dozen senior urdhvaretas master teachers giving profound shaktipat energetic initiations to a few hundred thousand of them, a massive paradigm shift will shake and quake and holy-ghost throughout the entire scene of studio yoga and nearly bodiless “Enlightenment Now” pop spirituality.
REENVISIONING FAMILY LIFE
It was not until 2009, after nearly forty years of teaching that family life is a kind of “melodrama” to test one’s actual spiritual growth, that Ram Dass, the coiner in 1970 of the “Be Here Now” galacto-meme, awoke to a critical error in his teachings on soul love and familial relationships. Via his DNA-verified paternity and grand-paternity and family reunion, he “developed a deeper understanding of the love parents feel for their children and began to see that personal and soul love are not mutually exclusive but can coexist in nourishing ways.”3
In the ars erotica, family life is neither a Freudian-conflicted hothouse nor a sidebar melodrama. It is the primordial retas seed mystery naturally embodying, procreating, and nurturing life itself.
Within grihastha, family life is a day-to-day “urdhvaretic meditation on life itself” of lovers or spouses beholding, delighting, and arousing one another toward heart-and-soul adult puberties; facing life issues, parenting conundrums, and paying bills together as helpmates; parents musing about their gestating babies, beholding the birth and daily maturation of their children and of the latter looking with love and respect upon their aging parents; and, decades later, the meditation upon the marriages of one’s children; and the supernourishing glow of newborn grandchildren and perhaps mega-glow of great-grandchildren and the poignant caring for wizened elder parents, unto their often incontinent, gaunt, and overwhelming deaths by their now-adult and ever-aging “adult children,” tracing forward and back in time, ad infinitum.
In this highly nourishing rasa-juicy ars erotica universe, lifelong creative marriage becomes the natural order of the sun-moon-stars universe, for the vast majority. The ars erotica universe gives humans more than most all of us need to create lifelong loves. Indian, Tibetan, and Navajo divorce rates of 1.1, 3.8, and 4.8 percent respectively speak of an ars erotica bonding that rarely breaks,*12 in contrast to U.S. and all major scientia sexualis cultures worldwide, with rates fluctuating between 40 and 50 percent over the past twenty years for first marriages and statistics of 60 percent for second and 70 percent for third marriages in the United States, and such high rates of nonmarried breakups that we normalize them as a lifestyle of “serial monogamy.”4 Even allowing for a tripling of the low divorce rates in ars erotica cultures to accommodate troubled, intact marriages, the rates are a fraction of the scientia sexualis cultural rates.†3
In a different economy of bodies and pleasures
each couple a universe unto themselves,
sheltering their children, grand- and great-grand-children
in expanding overlapping bio-radiant fields of gender worship,
all growing magnificently in love and awe.
Ten-thousand couples become a sangha (community),
ten-thousand sanghas a pradesh (state),
ten-thousand states a loka (realm),
ten realms the world, Vasudaiva kutumbakam—
“The world is, indeed, one family.”
One billion vibrant planetary households,
sacred grihastha, the center that holds each and all
the lion with the lamb,
the endless wedding feast,
gender worship on high,
manifested on earth as it is in heaven.
Throw open the secret passage!