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Entering the Mystery

Moving from Cynical Certainty to Spiritual Intimacies

SOMETHING HIDDEN IS GOING ON

In 1985 I published a study of the sexual experiences and beliefs of people who saw themselves as sexually liberated or who were practicing neo-tantric or brahmacharya yogas. As I listened to my interviewees, I heard how each one was being allured by something hidden within her- or himself, within another, or within the greater universe. I concluded that drawing-closer-to-something-hidden is the essential erotic act, whether by means of conventional sex, neo-tantra, or brahmacharya yogas.

Thus, the concealing-while-revealing powers of the double entendre and the discreetly veiled gesture serve erotic intentions very well, for they all deftly convey that something hidden is going on. The sense of ambiguity inherent in such communications alluringly and undeniably signals that we are moving from nonerotic to more intimate domains. A tingle here, a spark there—from the suggestive smile of a lingering stranger whose eyes stir our secret hopes, to the Buddha’s trace of a smile hinting at a spiritual bliss barely veiled by the play of worldly illusions.

The question “What exactly is this hiddenness?” led me more deeply toward the essence of eros—into the feeling of mystery itself. Sex feels hidden from us not because any authority or moral code has hidden it but because it is, intrinsically, archetypally, and ontologically, of the Hidden. For eros is not a “thing” but an essential quality-that-allures, which, like retas wisdom, unfolds with deepest DNA mysteries or even deeper than science has yet grasped. It is the secrecy within any secret, the hiddenness within anything veiled, the possibility of a sexual or talisman fetish in every object, and the Mystery within anything suggesting further revelations. From that magnetically suggestive glint in your parents’, your grandparents’, and their parents’ and grandparents’ eyes when each couple first met, to the retas fertility possibilities of your future grandchildren “inside” you and another being, alluring you to inevitably meet.

From endless tabloid exposés to the latest anatomical discoveries, we muse endlessly about eros, not merely because we are so liberated (or addicted), but because suggestiveness grips us, as if in a page-turning mystery, with always another page to turn: hemlines go up, then down, then up again, for the curtain must reveal and conceal. Interpretations can ever shift, too: a Freudian penis in every cigar and cosmic lingam (fertile awe-inspiring phallus) in every penis, a vagina in every Freudian concavity and a yoni mudra (nurturing womb source of all beings delight mind gesture) in every vagina-womb or in the meditative darkness when you close your eyes. The ambiguous “come-up-and-see-mesometime” and “have-you-seen-my-etchings?” serve as covert invitations into the intimus, where the more intimate of rites might be revealed, including secret, two-thousand-year-old yogic energy transmissions of shaktipat that can open invisible channels in your perineum-to-pineal path to Shiva-Shakti inner bliss. Hiddenness, mysteries, and powers beyond “the mundane” peek out everywhere, too.

The redefinition of eros as mystery adds the living touch of mercurial and multilayered nuance to a sexual liberation that has been painted in broadly political strokes. Within this context of an ever-broadening mystery, a sexuality of great secrecy emerges—not because any person or dogma has repressively kept it away from us. The mystery grows deeper as we step out of the overly familiar grooves and conventions of current sexual knowledge. We don’t know what we didn’t know until after we have learned something new!

FIVE DEGREES OF APPROACH

There is always more to consider, even physical immortality, as was the central aim of all yogis some six hundred years ago, or a utopian world in which all live together in peaceful, one-creative-family rapport, perhaps the deepest longing of everyone now alive. As D. H. Lawrence noted in The Plumed Serpent, “How wonderful sex can be, when men keep it powerful and sacred, and it fills the world! Like sunshine through and through one!” To understand eros we may need to leave the realms of certainty to study everything we can about mystery, on its own terms.

Sit quietly with your eyes closed and feel the many pulsings in your body. Become aware of your most immediate erotic sensation; feel the sensation pulsate, shift, and move throughout some bodily locale. Go more deeply into the details of this feeling without doing anything about it.

As sexual-love fantasies come and go, sense one nuance or tonality of sensation arise, throb, stir, and pass in loins, penis, vagina, testicles, womb, ovaries, prostate, anus, legs, chest, gut, throat, eyes, fingertips, toes. Feel the warm rushes and their fleeting evaporations, the currents of excitement with their cresting heat and their withering falls, lighting up again in some other, deeper visceral dimension. This seething flow of feelings, when traced to its subtlest levels, is the elusive erotic seed mystery about which we articulate our numerous and divergent interpretations and opinions and from which we enact our manifold forms of love and pleasure.

From smitten allurement and well-meaning plans to reverential awe, and then to disappointments and cynical bitterness and back again, such are the meandering thoughts and passions that filter through the innocence of our awareness. In the next sections we will trace the hopes of erotic mystery from their too-common deteriorations into shared moods of cynicism and misanthropy to those throbbing with living hopefulness and creative power that allure with the possibilities of an ars erotica heaven-on-earth for all.

• The bitterly opinionated passion of cynical certainties nursed on personal resentments and the media’s magnification of our culture’s more lurid desperations and tragedies
• The more hopeful, temporarily useful but overgeneralized demystified certainties of sexological science, popular psychology, and traditional moralities that in strangely divergent ways try to guide us toward better or healthier habits of living
• The pulse-quickening and alluringly alive waters of suggestive ambiguities, which will always rock our demystified, pat certainties and crack even our most cynical rigidities with their siren calls of possibilities hidden betwixt and between more decisive erotic viewpoints or theories
• The profoundly shuddering and captivating flickers of evanescent subtleties, which make us feel quite awesomely that right Now, you and I are the inexplicable, living, aging, creating, and dying-away mystery itself
• The meditatively spellbinding hush of the innermost intimus, where eros-as-sheer-mystery unfurls in a shimmering sanctity and where the deepest energies of Mother Kundalini and urdhvaretas awaken entheogenic puberties in us, which, even in these times of yoga and “Now” enlightenments, lie both far ahead and exquisitely nearer than the nearest.

I have charted five degrees of approach to the urdhvaretas mystery in the figure on the following page. Each mood is guarded from the next by the dubious warning, “Beware! That next degree is too wondrous to be true!” This attitudinal gatekeeper of our wavering hopes and credulity must maintain certainty in our current erotic knowledge and skepticisms, for maintaining our orderly and familiar beliefs is her job. However, at the same time, she wonders; she knows better; she suspects there is more.

Entering the auras of mystery

So she opens the first gate, and we proceed. Then, having given up her grim outpost in cynicism and, after that, her persuasive, authoritative uniform of demystified certainty, she nakedly flings herself into suggestive erotic ambiguities, evanescent subtleties, and, finally, the wonders of mystery itself. The gatekeeper, we find, is our own focusable yet oft wavering ego-mind (endearingly called “the monkey-mind” in Buddhist literature). And our pathway to her erotic freedom? It is our willingness to believe in the ars erotica scriptures and our “yogic experiences,” however distant and rare, more than in the reigning scientia sexualis that is everywhere.

Cynical Certainty

On the outer edges of eros, wounded, disillusioned, and estranged from perceiving our own innocence and that of others, is where we sometimes stand, having grown cold, bitterly so, and cynical in our too-certain pronouncements about the subtle warmth inside. Indeed, cynical certainty has become ubiquitous in our modern, post-Father Knows Best, and romantically broken culture, amplified in numerous “the darkest ways must be shown” Fatal Attraction type of movies, “it’ll end in tears” type of songs, and horrific news stories that both reflect back and shape our knowledge of “life.” With privately resentful grumblings or loudly strident sexo-political railings and counter-railings, the cynical ones scoff, “The real truth is on tabloid TV; it’s all sex and power. And remember, the wages of sin are death!”

Regarding homosexuality, homophobia and internalized homophobia prevail. Intoxicatingly passionate, such cynical certainties can rule one’s life for decades. In heterosexuality, misanthropy and misogyny have tango-danced themselves into a litigious-like frenzy of distrust and hopeless passivities or retaliations.

“There is no love! Just take what you want!” or “Just forget it all, go celibate!” “The fallen gurus and priests prove that any form of celibacy is an impossible pretense! Or maybe they just can’t perform!” “Trust no one, for they’ll use you every time!” Such are the pained, wounded, and soured pronouncements of cynical certainty.

But perhaps someday a curiosity arises; we read a self-help book, begin therapy, or take up yoga classes in a church basement. Perhaps a Bible is looked at or a liberating report is published, and our eyes are opened. We shed tears of remorse, and our lives turn toward more alluring radiances. Something “too good to be true” is glimmering as a “maybe so.”

We come across the old wine of salvation-seeking in the new bottles of psychology: be more grateful, forgive more, slow down and smell the roses. Some titles do betray lingering cynicism—Smart Women, Foolish Choices—or overblown images of vast differences—Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus—but all these teachings mean well. With innocence renewed, we enter demystified certainties.

Demystified Certainty

Inside the portico it is a bit warmer. We feel more hopeful, willingly guided by an expert voice with clear definitions about good habits and exercises, the “good news.” We learn of “natural drives,” “four-phased orgasms,” “scientifically verified differences (or similarities) between men and women.” “Doing yoga,” we hear, “is really good for you.” “Family values are critical!” “Gay marriage must be legalized!”

We are inside the sociocultural system now, collectively rooting for our particular left, right, or mid-road sexo-political agenda. Regarding abortion, for example, liberals take to the streets, knowing it to be rightful and necessary, while conservatives form human barricades, convinced it is unquestionably evil. Regarding a more solitary matter, masturbation is celebrated by one group as a self-loving relaxation and shunned by the other as a wasteful vice. Porno is a fifth amendment right and exciting and healthy or it horrifically objectifies women and dehumanizes sex and should be heavily restricted or banned. Such demystifying certainties about everything erotic impassion and guide each adherent, as best as possible, given these demystified, constrictive circumstances.

Lists of discrete “emotional needs” are drawn up by the popularizing psychologists, and the healing way of the inner child is outlined in step-by-step fashion. All of the difficulties of erotic life seem to be easily explained by one morality or school of therapy or another or by the proper sociopolitical analysis. Insightful, compassionate, and encouraging, but still far too certain, these generalizations and formulaic approaches to eros refresh us but are overprocessed and deeply embedded in the binary limitations of scientia sexualis: right/wrong, or repression/expression, or sexual/spiritual, and so on. Yes, clarity and lists of “my feelings, my needs” can be temporarily helpful, but if we do not move on to the greater ars erotica mystery, the usefulness of these recovering, rehabilitative ways becomes stagnant.

Like the strict certainties of moral codes of an older vintage, such clarity can become well-intended help that binds. Becoming too confident, we can even find ourselves using pop formulas such as “All love is just an addiction; everyone is a codependent” against ourselves and others when they don’t really apply.

As in the demystified certainty of the scientist, the partisaned conviction of the politico, and the coolness of the sexual sophisticate, an aloof confidence lets us know we have to go further than unambiguous generalizations to enter the living currents of erotic mystery. We must surrender more of our certainties and uncover the ever-shifting subatomics of the erotic matrix of suggestivity, evanescence, and the well-guarded intimus. Indeed, we are allured by the very mention of such things.

Suggestive Ambiguity

Suggestive ambiguities, given their greater proximity to the seed-infused mystery, are indeed far more powerful than demystified certainties of pop therapists, no matter how renowned. This class of ever-beckoning erotic communications includes double entendres, vocalized innuendos, veiled gestures, synchronous coincidences, and foreshadowing dreams. In their inherent ambiguity they imply and allure with suspense and excitement, but not without also radiating daring moods of uncertainty and trepidation.

The lecture hall is packed, with all eyes upon the gesturing figure at the podium who is expounding on the demystification of the ways of love. As the speaker’s words, “mystified relationships cannot stand up to the natural pressures of reality” resound boldly, that strikingly attractive individual in the fourth row catches your eye and your heart begins to swell, and everything else fades away.

When he turns in your direction and your gazes meet in a stunning shyness and with quiet, eyes-dropping smiles, only the throb of a mystery stirred brims in your every cell. What does this mean? You imagine your first date with each other, lovemaking, moving in with each other (will we have the same tastes?), even the hair color of your children. Simultaneously, the lecturer’s amplified words of demystified certainty drift high in the air: “Too often we engage in relationships based in some form of romantic fantasies. . . .” But you are only awaiting the break when you can go down to the fourth row.

During the break, you ignore all the lecturer said and approach him. Your first flirting question is a gift for both of you—it is a gift that you give yourself and a gift to him too: “I like your tie, where did you find such a tie?” He will thank you (for the gift of your courage and willingness to merely ask the first question and for complimenting his tie, and—and this is the most important part—for moving with him toward this fleeting, energized romantic space where two people can become special to one another, among the thousands of others).

As he answers you, he is making you special to him, in that moment. When he tells you where he bought it, you can go a little further into this seed power–infused space by making the compliment more personal by saying, “I like the way you answered my question, so direct (or with such humor, or with such surprise, or . . .).

It is not merely his verbal answer (the name of the store) that you can respond to, it is the way he responded that you should also notice. Now, you are really talking about him, his way of doing something: this is very personal. (Of course, cynicism can emerge in this ambiguity: “This is just a pickup line; what a slick player!” Or, “This line works on chicks, all the time!”)

If you merely say, “I don’t know that store, where is it?” then you are talking road maps and helping the store location to get well known. Who cares about that? Not you. If you say, “Oh, I also shop at that same store,” this makes a little more connection. But if you watch and listen to him as he answers, you will have something to say about his very way of being. For example: “You know, your smile lit up when you told me the tie was a gift from your favorite aunt. I felt very happy for you and for your aunt that you could smile like that when you thought about her, even for a moment!” Now you are enjoying his life, his family, and projecting yourself into his aunt’s “shoes” and letting him know that his love of his aunt is a wonderful thing. You are almost in his family by now!

If he gives you the compliment of saying back to you, “What a lovely thing to say about me and my aunt!” then you have a great partner who already knows the grihastha alchemical dance. If he continues, “I thoroughly enjoyed imagining my aunt seeing your smile,” he will have added another powerful churn to the heart-opening rasas. And then you say, “You have an amazing imagination!” And he says, “Thank you for saying that; it makes me happy for you to appreciate my imagination! Can you guess what I am imagining now?” (Here the seed-energies of eroticism emerge within the veils of a not-so-simple question, and partners begin making tentative pledges within the creativity of two people believing in the “good intentions” of one another.)

And you say, “Not only can I imagine it, I am with you in it as well!” And he says, “The rest of the world has faded away. It is only you and me in this dream together that is Real.” And you say, “This is a dream that I have been waiting to wake up into for my whole life.” And he says, “Yes, this is just the beginning!” With the lifelong developmental map of urdhvaretas to guide the two of you, the untapped, entheogenic powers of your intercatalyzing ways will make good on these promising feelings that live in the Ultimate Romantic Story that “makes the world go round.” But you must go much deeper into the living waters of the words-and-life connection to activate them fully.

Try looking in a mirror at the end of a long day. As you gaze at your face, repeat each of these phrases a dozen times and watch how your face changes each time: “true dignity,” “quietly courageous,” “sad weariness,” “persevering strength,” “irrepressible sparkle.” See how each phrase brings a different nuance to your own face. This can show you the interactivity between the domain of suggestive ambiguity and labeling, thus the importance of eventually leaving the oversimplifications of demystified certainties. If we stay there too long, we are in danger of assuming the identity of a particular label.

Then there are the nuances of love’s ever-shifting promises, as made most famous by Shakespeare’s langorously romantic Duke Orsino:

That strain again! It had a dying fall;
O, It came o’er my ears like a sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor! Enough, no more!
’tis not so sweet now as it was before.

TWELFTH NIGHT, I. I.

These fickle ambiguities allure by twists and unpredictable turns, forming the moment-to-moment currents in which we create, uncreate, and re-create our erotic meanings and choose our erotic actions. The details of our internal dialogue with suggestive ambiguity go on and on, down to the wire: “Can I say this, ask for this?” “Will it last afterward?” For when you put your body in the hands of another, even by the fingertips (as in tantric pariyanga), you are giving over a whole delicate web of hopes, possible embarrassments, and dreamed-upon images that, through the passions of your innocence, have made their way into your body, into your dreams, feelings, and thoughts. It is never only “sex” or “tantra” that we are having with each other. We are exposing, receiving, and touching, tentatively or boldly, each other’s innocence.

If we try to ignore such alluring subtleties in whatever form they may arise, we risk cutting ourselves off from the seed-mysteries that reverberate everywhere. Then the ars erotica practices of yoga devolve into cut-and-dried how-to exercises. If we stay in the realm of flirting, the boilerplate ideas of new age clichés and scientia desire-sexuality can take hold and foreclose the entheogenic rasa maturations. And since modern sexology and psychology do not map lifelong maturation, we feel our little egos must make the whole trip. That is why we quake, causing others to quake, and then others, as well, in tense dramas that are amplified in movies and soap operas.

If we do not awaken the charismatic pathways (which are barely known in modern cultures), and instead quake only with debilitating fears, we can quickly fall into cynical certainties or cling to some demystified certainties. With the map and yogas of urdhvaretas, we can instead be invigorated to mature and become equal to a whole lifetime of challenge in which we can become holy to one another in myriad ways.

Indeed, anxiety or angst, as term-coiner Søren Kierkegaard first meant it, is the feeling that matures us, after we take “leaps of faith” into life, into “believing.” Yoga adds the insight that, as our concentration “leaps” from chakra to chakra, the feeling of angst settles in each chakra for a while and matures each energy center a little further into its own blossoming. Adding mantras for each chakra adds more faith and ars erotica wisdom. Thus, our anxieties and concerns can “grow us up” into the yogic faith of chakra-maturity known as shraddha.

Evanescent Subtlety:
The Living Passage of Erotic Life

Going beyond the hopeless certainties of cynicism, the championing certainties of demystifying simplifications, the shimmering allure of suggestive ambiguity, we come to innocent erotic wonder, fleeting-in-this-moment, reviving-in-the-next. God-Dionysus, chief celebrant of these elusive living mysteries, of the ever-renewing springtime revelries (which, contrary to modern opinion, were not “sex orgies”) warned Pentheus, representative of demystifying order and accusational authority, not to try to trap his primordial vitalism in Pentheus’s stultifying grip.

Pentheus: Seize him! This man is taunting me and Thebes.
Dionysus: Don’t bind me I tell you. You need control, not I. . . .
He was binding me—he thought—yet he neither grasped me nor touched me. Hope was all he fed upon.

EURIPIDES,
THE BACCHAE
 

In our next movement toward mystery, the ambiguous yet compelling communications of suggestiveness dissolve in the allure of the unknown future and fascination with living impermanence. Even the exciting realm of erotic fantasies and beguiling innuendos seems like a dreaminess compared to these more vivid yet imperiled and eye-glistening beauties, mercurial blushing charms, and primordial longings.

Gaze with your partner at one another or feel each other’s pulse in silence for ten or twenty minutes—it’s right there, the fleeting and returning mystery.

In the opening stanzas of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu describes this entranceway, deeper and more refined than the suggestive innuendo:

Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.

Wholly temporal, erotic mystery is in the infinity of details and nuances revealed in our ever-changing, unfolding-into-the-yet-to-be contact with each other. No wonder we want to hold onto each other; no wonder we reproduce ourselves in “sexual embrace”—the mortal urgencies of time passing, not some bio-instinct, is in our very blood and marrow.

Walk quickly up a flight of stairs and then look into a mirror, or sit across from a partner and allow your heartbeat to pulse freely in your relaxed face and eyes as you gaze out. The visual world will pulse, pulse with your own living currents. In a few minutes, you will begin to see the pulsings of life in your own face in the mirror or in your partner’s face. Think, “This moment goes, another comes, this moment goes. . . .” Spellbound, realize, “This is the passage of each unique moment of our ever-moving-into-the-unknown lives.” Note how this comment brings out a poignant beauty in your mirrored self, or in your partner, who sees you likewise. Thus your partner’s face, like a living, interactive mirror, reflects your poignancy back to you and you spontaneously respond with yet another blush, then so does your partner, and then and then. . . .

It is in our constantly deepening, temporalized, and detailed perceptions, not through some unconscious drive, that we experience the intimate and spiraling mystery of beautifying and re-creating each other. Erotic intimacy is a matter of penetrating all generalized perceptions, opinionated characterizations, excited fantasies, and, finally, our distractions to enter the unbroken flow of impermanence, until, ultimately, some incomprehensible duration after one’s last breath and heartbeat, into that Mystery. Shared—deeply shared and ever-passing beyond our grasp—impermanence is the serpentine fundament of the erotic: that which allures us mysteriously by seeming to slip away from us while also beckoning us anew. Such soul-stirring intimacy is the result of touching beneath the stories, issues, and patterns of the relationship to each other’s utterly unique, aging, re-creating, and one-day-dying presence here.

The limitations of money, time, space, family compromises, and human mortality can be enough to cascade partners into cynical certainties of fear and darkness. Or we can uplift these mundane matters into a spirituality of respect, sharing, and gratitude that is equal to the ultimate stakes of fleeting impermanence that too often threaten to overtake love: fights over money, sharing work and decisions, and all the rest.

Thus, as a therapist, I see noble struggles within trying situations—drug addiction, affairs or “am I lovable?” insecurities—beneath any labels of “dysfunctional families.” Indeed, I once guided a counselor intern in uplifting a two-generation incest-laden family from heartrending perpetrator apologies and victim’s forgiveness to planning a whole-family picnic, within a three-hour family therapy session, as the intervening courts looked on, as amazed as I was. Every few years, I check in with that counselor to be sure all this really happened, and she assures me each time that, indeed, it did.

Try sitting across from your partner, lightly touching fingertips, and begin to gaze at each other. Think to yourselves: “This person cannot be explained. His presence is a living miracle. This is the only one of him there is, and this, now, is the one, evanescent passage of our life-mystery together. That look of tender awe in his eyes is living vulnerability and innocent courage. He sees me seeing this in him; his eyes wince. My awe is tinged with fear of unknown possibilities of each and all the next moments. My fear is soothed by the sharing. I feel tingling in us, an echoing into the future of new lives. We are singular mortals and, yet, possibly more.”

Even as you separate and close your eyes, be careful not to misinterpret the experience of slipping-by impermanence as “abandonment,” especially at times of saying goodbye to someone you love. Impermanence is heightened at such times, but no one is causing it, discarding us, or abandoning us. All moments pass and, blamelessly, we are always saying goodbye to the impermanent present and hello to the unknown future. Such are the constant poignancies of erotic evanescence.

To see someone following the shifting glimmers of our never-happened-before self will always present us with a daring and blamelessly difficult paradox. We are both totally allured and hard-pressed not to turn away in shy trepidation or sudden awe of what we see and of being seen so profoundly. Like any mystery, erotic intimacy seems elusive, softly beckoning us with no little quaking, for evanescent subtlety is the entrance to “where the mystery is the deepest.” Beth describes the heightened closeness that she and Gary discover in the subtleties of feeling that, ironically, live most poignantly in the moments when they turn away from each other:

We were talking about moving in with each other, marriage and family. At first, I was angry and disappointed in Gary because he seemed afraid to really commit to the relationship. Then I saw that it is because he had invested so much meaning in our possibly having a future together that he was sort of overwhelmed by the possibilities, as was I. When he told me of his roller coaster of feelings, I realized how very involved with me he was. I started to feel that we really are in the same uncertainty of life, together.

I realized that I had been shyly turning away from him at the very moment his feelings of hopeful uncertainty would be the strongest because, in seeing him that way, my own similar feelings would seem unbearable. And the same was true for Gary. He would see my hopes and fears rise and would bashfully turn away in the moment just as they peaked.

Then we began sharing these “turning point feelings” without turning away at the last moment, not as listeners and speakers but in a silent meditation. We began experiencing this amazing flow of feelings that, ironically, was always being disrupted by our talking about our feelings, or in that most critical moment when we would actually turn away from each other. I felt a spiritual quality, a faith in each other, that the divine is real and eternal. We were in some kind of time flow.

Through the meditation, we shared the ride we were already on, rather than fighting about who was to blame for the hilly parts of the ride. Sharing our fears this way converted our blamings and differences into precarious yet intimate unions.

In this vignette, what is often pathologized as a fear of intimacy emerges under closer examination as a plethora of fluctuations and innuendos that, fortunately, no amount of “clear communication” or assertiveness can dispel. Only by devotedly paying attention to each fleeting moment do we deepen this kind of intimacy. We see and share this existential-erotic mystery in our quivering, not in spite of it or by subduing it, and certainly not in our personalized guilts and blamings. That we are mortal is no one’s fault. The depths to which we mature more and more, year after year, decade after decade, must be given ensouled ars erotica bodies, far beyond the maps of the scientia sexualis.

The endearing blush of self-consciousness as we just look at each other begins to reveal this fragile yet utterly charming rapport. Somewhat uncomfortably embarrassed, we want to look away and have often used a seductive move, or even an argument, to do so. But if we refrain, we can begin to share these feelings of the impermanent, more vulnerable self, stirring myriad unnameable passions before our most heartfelt meditative regard.

In this phenomenology of impermanence, that most innocent of feelings, shyness (and its pink nuances of embarrassment; azures of an alluring coyness; silvers of over-delight; rosy, hoped-for acceptance; brazen, yet trepid curiosity; and, once purged of popular pejorations, many dark-velvety folds of shame) is the wavering eminence of the now concealing, now revealing soul and serves as the emotional illuminant for all greater being-in-the-world.

By this point, the spellbound gatekeeper of focused awareness has given up all of her cynicisms, demystified certainties, and exciting imaginings. To continue, she gives up even her rapt wonderings that sparkle and fade, again and again. She now aspires toward the inspired awe of romantic-poetic revelations, meditation, and surrendered spontaneous worship.

In the ars erotica, couples feel challenged to become comfortable hearing or saying such things as: “I revere you. You are beyond the beyond. I can taste the taste of you from here and you taste like fire and jasmine. I feel so happy, I might cry. The smell of your yoni, your breasts, the allure of your neck where your pulse surges and vanishes is making me high, stop it, no, more, more. It’s all so perfect. Your eyes are blossoming like prowling tigers, your arms are like a summer breeze all over me, your heart is as glowing and welcoming as the Home of all homes, the Wish of all wishes, the Birth of every birth.”

Such sentimental, even poetic expressions often require getting over shyness or feeling too corny or unfamiliar. We might feel we are giving up a whole life-mode of cynicism, sarcastic humor, and bashfulness and going into mushland. But when you are together in this fleeting romantic realm that reemerges from time passage itself, you just might say all such things, in spite of yourselves. If not, at the very end, most of us will surely wish we had, and more. Thus, the Grand Yogaverse says we reincarnate back to new births to “do better next time and the next and the next.”

Meditative Knowing:
Entering the Intimus

In the steadied gaze resulting from spellbound rapture in the heart of our existence, some might say, “We are in the hands of deity. This is a miracle. I see you as sixteen and glowing, as twenty and vibrant, as one hundred and radiant with the soul’s beauty.” Others will merely grow silent and trace the pulses in your veins as they surge and vanish. Rasa, entheogenic experiences, emerge that need no further confirmation, that grow profusely and wildly (that is, innocently) from within ars erotica bodies and the souls that “ensoul” them.

Like the softly arriving first light of morning stars that soothes this wrinkled earth unfailingly just before each dawn, the etheric glow of the soul emerges as the undying and merciful sentience within each other’s eyes, and yet is beyond that. For this primordial witness to all realities is both within and beyond sight, hearing, touch, and life and death.

Infinities of impossibly weathered times and immeasurable joys have left their mark as the muted receptivity just behind the eyes’ sparkle. But behind, before, and after all the events of life that have affected us—in the eyes and souls of the newborn, to be sure, but also in those of the aged and dying, the quiet neighbor, the impassioned artist, and even the sullen criminal—are dark pools of eternity; this is the inscrutable liquid depth from which all lives emerge and into which all converge. In this inner sanctum, a meditative intimacy yields to reverence and worshipfulness and urdhvaretas fructifies as unencumbered and unswervingly as the sperm-ovum union of two twenty-five-year-olds conceiving madly, as divinely guided as Mother’s gestational, incarnating movements.

High and bemused one afternoon,

we dreamed a dream of going off

blending into the trees wind streams

churning the hours the months lost

in the upward igniting of bodies within bodies

each body waiting for us to devote everything,

for that’s what it takes,

what eight hours a day are for.

One day the pineal cocoon engorges cock erect,

takes off her shirt nipples forth,

sunbursts inwardly blinding

like that first emission or menses everything suddenly

changed from one moment to the next

gone forth beyond mere fertility

flooding the full-moon suffusing everywhere

radiating into the permeating world

imbuing the living dharma^*13

while all else grows hazy and remote,

we in the thick of it

the fecund mystery of incarnation

undistracted

making each other real.

Far beyond the “deployment of sex,” these hidden ars erotica passions begin to flower in earnest within the surrendered, meditative intimus as mudras and asanas, as shaktipat activations, trance dancing as ecstatically alive while “gone from this world,” rasas dripping down the corners of your mouth. Your eyes become orbs of gratitude, your bones breathe invisibly down to the very marrow, which sings with newly born blood cells, all bathing you in their nourishing, red pulsing warmth. Testes and ovary follicles quiver like a million scintillating star flecks singing a midnight gamelan of infinite splendors.

Within the lifelong inner marriage of the advanced kundalini-awakened yogi, the ars erotica puberties described in sacred yogic texts manifest wildly; that is, as naturally as bee-intoxicating wildflowers in summer’s heat:

When, with spellbound awe over thousands of hours of yoga practice one’s whole being has matured, there arises effortlessly of its own accord a natural tumescence that moves one heel into the perineum and the other heel above the genitals in the equipoise of “conjoinedmatured cosmic powers” (siddha-asana) and then the tumescence of the triple lock—the root lock of the closed anal-perineal muscles [violet-edged perineum, mula bandha), the flying-up lock [under the lungs diaphragmatic tumescence, uddiyana bandha], and the water-holder lock [chin-pressed-to-chest, brachial-swelling-veinstumescence, jalandhara bandha]—also occurs in this natural way. There is no other tumescence like the siddha-asana tumescence, no other mindspace than the embryonic mindspace become fully wizened and mature, no other delight gesture like the tongue-to-pineal tumescence [khechari mudra], and no other charismatic beauty like the blossoming of ubiquitous divine ecstatic sound-feelings [anahata-nad].¹