EIGHT

Tapping Eros Transformation

Embracing the miracle of life while embracing our lover brings us directly into union with the pure infinite pleasure of being one with our Creator.

The muse of marijuana is surely a devotee of the vast realms of delight and discovery that open to us every time we open our arms and hearts to provoke erotic adventure.

Sex and spirit are made for each other!

As we just saw, tuning in to the world around you while you are high helps you tap into the pure pleasure of being alive in a body that’s busy receiving multiple sensory inputs. As these sights, sounds, ephemeral scents, and tactile feelings stimulate aesthetic appreciation and artistic joy, they can also quite naturally encourage your awareness to drop down deeper into the feelings in your heart, and then on down into that most wonderful cannabis effect of all: sexual arousal.

Experiencing a sudden rush of sexual energy is, of course, not just a marijuana occurrence. A beautiful flush of eros is often stimulated by music and dance. It’s great fun to crank up the stereo and tune in to the muse of movement and rhythm, of harmony and disinhibition. And whole-body dance movements made in synch and proximity with your partner are definitely enhanced by marijuana, as unexpected energy comes surging into conscious enjoyment.

Through physical and emotional expression, this charge can be readily shared on the dance floor, especially if you’re in a living room, bedroom, or backyard where no one’s watching and the sexual muse is free to express itself fully. Other variations on movement, such as yoga and stretching, are also wonderful ways to shift into whole-body enjoyment. And of course, dancing, stretching, or doing yoga together can become just the first erogenous step into deep sexual union of whatever type you prefer.

Full sexual expression can unfold in a seemingly infinite number of spontaneous variations. The question here is: While you are high, what is the best way to mindfully approach and release such a wild, volatile phenomenon as sexual passion?

Specifically, when your erotic charge has been stimulated by getting high together, how can you flow with your sexual energies to maximize mutual satisfaction? In addition, what’s the optimum strain and dose for such sexually charged relating? And how can you integrate your sexual relating when you are high into other key components of a lasting relationship?

Research scientists are just beginning to have the legal freedom to conduct experiments exploring how cannabis impacts the sexual response. Dr. Monica Grover of Asira Medical, a specialist in family medicine and gynecology in Manhattan, reports conservatively, “Consumption of small quantities (of marijuana) prior to sex may increase libido in female patients, which in turn can release positive endorphins and increase vaginal lubrication.”¹

At Stanford University, researchers Dr. Michael L. Eisenberg and Dr. Andrew J. Sun recently conducted a study on the effects of cannabis on sexual activity: “68 percent of the women in the sample reported more pleasurable sex with cannabis, 16 percent said it ruined their sexual experience, while the remaining 16 percent were undecided or unaware.” In terms of men, “65 percent said cannabis enhanced their sexual experience, 23 percent said it didn’t matter one way or the other, 12 percent had no significant feedback.”²

In another survey, “72 percent of a female sample said marijuana always increased their erotic pleasure, while 24 percent said it sometimes did. Almost 62 percent said it enhanced the quality of their orgasms and their libidos in general. Additionally, 16 percent disclosed they purposefully puff pot prior to sex.”³

For both men and women, the drug most commonly used in association with sex still seems to be alcohol. In a British survey, roughly 60 percent of both genders said that they often consumed alcohol before sex. Cannabis was the second popular choice, with a third of men and about a quarter of women saying they sometimes used it before sex. Third was MDMA, or ecstasy, with around 15 percent of men and women having taken it at least once before sex.⁴

Different strains of cannabis will have various effects on your sexual experience. For instance, many people say that very-high-THC strains (rated at 20 to 30 percent THC), such as Sour Diesel, Harlequin, Dream Queen, Blue Cheese, Goo, Kali Dog, Shining Silver Haze, and Skunk XL, are best. However, there’s a great deal of constantly changing hype about which strains and hybrids are optimal, so don’t get too caught up in thinking there’s a “best strain” – in fact, it’s often best not to get overly blown away by strong weed when you hope to make love. Sure, keep the THC over 15 percent and the CBD considerably lower, but hold in mind that you have your sexual charge already in place, and the cannabis is just an additive to your natural erotic flow.

The same holds true for combining pot and booze; remember what we discussed earlier about how alcohol impacts a high mood. Unless you purposefully have the urge to just blow all your fuses in a wild party night, do keep the alcohol down to a couple of drinks, in most cases, and the marijuana to a few puffs or the equivalent amount of tincture or edible dosage.

My observation has been that eating cannabis, rather than smoking or dabbing it, usually reduces sex drive, but there are the notable exceptions of couples who want a lazy, hazy long evening. . . .

BEYOND SEXUAL ROUTINES

You are, of course, a unique sexual being, but you also belong to a species with fairly definite sexual behavior programmed into your genes – and cannabis seems to have a preordained biological potential to impact your sexual activity. In this chapter, I want to delve into how you and your lover can tune in to THC-boosted sexual flows in the body. We’re also going to explore how to awaken all seven of the energy centers (chakras) in your body at once, so that they can fire off in unison during the pleasure of sexual relating.

Marijuana has been used for thousands of years in the kundalini yoga tradition of Hinduism and Buddhism to stimulate a higher sexual charge in the genitals, in unison with full-chakra meditation and mutual awakening.⁵ (For more details on kundalini yoga, see my book Kundalini Awakening.) A dozen or so years ago, my yoga master friend Dee Dussault originated the term “ganja yoga” (ganja being Sanskrit for “cannabis”).⁶ And currently a growing number of yoga teachers are including cannabis as part of the yoga experience.⁷

But even without any formal training, you and your partner can explore how cannabis naturally leads you into unexpected expansions of your erotic life.

You probably already know from your own inner experience that when you make love, it’s not just your genital region (the second chakra) that drives your experience. Certainly we hope that your heart (the fourth chakra) also comes alive and resonates energetically with your lower regions as you become aroused. And your fifth chakra region – in the throat, vocal cords, mouth, tongue, and lips – is also important in manifesting the sounds you make. The other chakras, too, each have their part to play in sexual arousal and activity.

But all too often, while we are making love we stay fixated in our minds, memories, thoughts, and imaginations. We run on automatic pilot with our lover, mostly acting out old erotic patterns. This is one of the main reasons that couples tend to share less sexual intimacy as time goes by – they’re simply tired of routine.

Couples can readily learn to use marijuana as a magnificent disrupter of such ingrained and limiting romantic behavior.

Sure, particular strains of cannabis might have a stronger effect on libido than others, but the primary activating element when you combine pot and sex is going to be your shared intentions, your willingness to open to new experience, and your readiness to risk the possible embarrassment of being caught psychologically and emotionally naked – but then, isn’t that what making love is all about?

If you like, we can take a moment here to consider your own habits and potential when you are high and making love. We saw earlier how human beings are always either busy doing something or doing nothing at all but easing up and just “being.” When you move toward sexual relating with a partner, do you ever first pause together and just “be” there with each other, without any action?

We saw in previous chapters the importance of quieting the mind, stopping habitual activities, and shifting into the “seeing everything at once” sensory mode. This is such an important shift when you are making love because it allows your whole system to drop out of past-future thinking, remembering, and imagining.

When you temporarily stop everything and “be” quietly still together, you drop deeply into your own body’s presence. With this “embodiment” shift, you tap into the full power of your sexual response.⁸

Everything we’ve been learning and exploring thus far in this book has led us to this point of applying a wise approach to mixing cannabis and lovemaking. We’re going to look more fully into interesting research on this theme, but first, to keep our discussion quite personal, here’s a beginning exercise you can do right now, if you like (you’ll also find this guided session on the High Together app):

After reading this section, pause for a few moments, perhaps close your eyes, tune in to the air flowing in and out of your nose . . . and begin to imagine that you’re sitting close to or are in bed with your partner. Now imagine or remember how you usually go into action to express your sexual desire. What are your habitual “moves” when you’re being intimate?

Now imagine that you both stop doing anything at all. Instead, experience just sitting or lying beside your loved one . . . breathe, and tune in to your inner sensations . . . set yourself free to do nothing at all. Just experience your own physical and emotional presence, and the presence of your partner breathing quietly with you. . . .

Now, see if you naturally, without any thoughts, “shoulds,” or preprogrammed sexual intentions, begin to respond internally to the presence of your loved one. Your body and your partner’s body are energetic powerhouses; they resonate and radiate with emotional energy even when you’re doing nothing at all. Tune in to this natural resonance of attraction between the two of you. . . .

And now . . . begin to imagine what might happen when you let your body move effortlessly into subtle action . . . let your whole being shift into its natural flow of sexual expression, all on its own. Notice whether you like this spontaneous approach to the beginning of a sexual interlude as you delve into the infinite mystery of erotic attraction and union. . . .

REEFER MADNESS REVISITED

Traditionally, the combination of “sex and drugs” has had a bad reputation in mainstream America, even though the same combination often carried very positive associations for many young people. Slowly we’re gaining factual evidence that will help adjust attitudes appropriately, but many people still harbor entirely outdated prejudices against mixing weed and orgasm.

In 1936 the U.S. government released a propaganda movie, called Reefer Madness, that was designed to frighten everyone away from ever even once trying marijuana, which the movie portrayed as a narcotic that drove you crazy and made you a sex fiend. For decades this movie was the main reference point for parents trying to make sure that their kids never tried the “killer weed.”⁹

When I was studying the impact of LSD on the brain in the late 1960s, parallel research was also being funded by the NIH to see whether pot reduces testosterone levels and libido levels – that is, whether it’s bad for sex. That’s what the government wanted to find, and sure enough, an initial research paper claimed that marijuana reduces blood levels of testosterone dramatically, by up to 50 percent.

This was an upsetting statistic for pot smokers at the time because testosterone fuels the sex drive in both men and women. The study was loudly reported in the news media and cited hundreds of times as a proven fact by law enforcement and education, as well as religious and government officials. It’s still cited today to scare kids away from smoking grass. After all, who wants to lose their sex drive?

But then more studies were performed in several countries, and a flurry of reports on marijuana and testosterone were published in the late 1970s demonstrating zero significant suppression of testosterone by marijuana and also no significant loss of libido or sexual impairment even when the herb was used frequently. A number of highly respected studies in the 1990s expanded on these findings, showing that the biochemical and psychological effects of pot on lovemaking are both diverse and often unpredictable.¹⁰

Specifically, what they found was that for some people, some of the time, cannabis can be strongly sex inhibiting, whereas for others it’s definitely sex enhancing – with far more people reporting enhancement than impairment.

One study showed that over two-thirds of subjects reported increased sexual pleasure and satisfaction, along with an enhancement of emotional closeness and enjoyment of the more tender aspects of sexual intimacy. However, over a quarter of the subjects reported a reduction in sexual focus and activity while they were high. These people tended to be introverts, personality-wise; they withdrew from social relating while stoned, and often they withdrew from their own bodily awareness as they turned inward to imaginary fantasy adventures inside their minds.

In a 2003 study, Canadian researchers interviewed 104 adult cannabis users about their sexual reactions to marijuana. Did it increase libido? One-quarter said it “often” or “always” did; 40 percent said “sometimes”; and one-third said “seldom” or “never.” About half called the drug sex enhancing, but almost half said it was not. One-third said sexual enhancement was a key reason they used weed, while over a third said sex played little, if any, role in their use of the drug.¹¹

In another study, about half of the interviewed subjects claimed that marijuana boosted their libidos, increased their sensitivity to touch, and enhanced their erotic pleasure, while a quarter said it reduced these factors. And in a recent Psychology Today survey, 68 percent of the responders reported that marijuana enhances their sex life, whereas 12 percent reported that pot shut down their sex drive. It was generally agreed that dosage and the strain of marijuana definitely influenced the sexual experience, with most agreeing that as dosage went up, sexual activity dropped.

So what’s going on here? Obviously, cannabis doesn’t always induce the same sexual response in everybody all the time. Your mood, energy level, expectation, emotional involvement with your partner, and other factors strongly influence the sexual outcome.

Meanwhile, research in Australia has now clarified quite solidly that even long-term use of pot doesn’t erode a person’s biochemical sexual drive or ability. Sex hormone levels aren’t different in marijuana smokers versus nonsmokers.¹²

I haven’t yet found any research examining whether eating cannabis has a different effect on sexual expression than smoking it. From related studies, we can predict that results will vary greatly based on the person and the situation. I personally find my libido dropping considerably when I eat cannabis (which I seldom do). In contrast, smoking it, especially when I haven’t made love in a couple of days, predictably nudges the experience toward a sexual expression, with the THC serving as a strong positive sexual additive.

Especially when a person eats pot or takes a high-CBD mixture, the higher the dosage, the lower the sexual charge will predictably become.

By the way, you’ll find loads of new cannabis products purporting to boost your love life. One of them, a candy bar called High Love, mixes cannabis with several other supposed aphrodisiacs – and, of course, chocolate.¹³ Feel free to experiment with such products, holding in mind that your expectations and current overall energetic condition will determine much of your experience.

CANNABIS FOCUS CHOICES

In the midst of all the unanswered questions related to cannabis and sex, we can still identify a set of choices that help determine whether you will feel sexually excited when you get high. At the heart of these options is the most obvious choice: whether you focus your attention inward and away from any social or intimate physical involvement, or whether you choose to stay tuned in to your partner’s physical presence as you shift into the marijuana mind-set. You can easily go either way – into social withdrawal or into sexual intimacy. And that choice is always present, especially if you remain mindful of your options as you get high.

These options of where, how, and whether to engage sexually are often determined by how you feel inside your own skin – by the level of energetic charge you’re packing, and especially where in your body you’re holding your focus of attention.

Clearly, if you focus entirely on a buzz of thoughts and imaginings that are happening at the top of your spine (the fifth and sixth chakras), you’re probably not going to notice or stimulate anything happening down at the bottom of your spine in the second chakra, the sex center down in the genitals.

We’ve already seen that when getting high, most people tend to allow their ingrained focal habits to manage their attention. If there’s an obvious genital charge or an eager sexual partner, attention will drop downward naturally, but often people stay caught up in that initial head buzz, with habitual thought flows dominating and lower-down sexual regions receiving no stimulating attention at all.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with head-tripping when you’re high, nor with letting your attention randomly shift here and there with no conscious intent or direction. Jumping spontaneously from one mental focus to another is one of the true gifts of the marijuana muse. However, most people in an appropriate situation with their sexual partner do often want to focus on the immediate physical pleasures of sexual relating.

One of the best ways of consciously choosing to focus on erotic rather than intellectual realms is to move through a quick mental refocusing process that leads you down through your body from head to genitals. Here’s the process, in case you want to do this as part of a high experience (it’s also available as an audio guide on the High Together app):

Sit or lie comfortably, side by side if you’re doing this with your lover. Let your eyes close, if you want to . . . and notice where in your body your attention and energy seem to be focused. . . .

Now consciously shift your attention to the air flowing in and out of your nose or mouth . . . and allow this focus on your breath to expand to where you’re also aware of your head . . . and your throat . . . and your lungs as they expand and contract with each inhalation and exhalation. . . .

Now expand your awareness to include your chest and your heart . . . notice the emotions you feel arising as you experience your whole torso. Relax your tongue and jaw, and let your breathing deepen . . . and see what feelings you have in your heart right now. . . .

Now expand your awareness another notch to include both the feelings of warmth and love in your heart and also the feelings of power and desire in your belly . . . take a few breaths to really settle down into your body and focus on whatever rising energies you might discover. . . .

Now go ahead and expand your awareness downward to include the sexual realms awaiting in your genitals . . . let your pelvis rotate a bit as you inhale and exhale . . . feel whatever charge of sexual desire and passion you might tap into with each new breath. . . .

Now, to activate all seven chakras at once, bring your attention to the top of your head, and allow your whole-body awareness to drop down step-by-step from the top of your head . . . to your throat and mouth . . . and on down into your heart . . . and into your belly . . . and down into your genitals . . . and all the way to the bottoms of your feet. . . .

Let yourself feel how the sexual energy in your genitals naturally merges with the power and desires in your belly . . . and feel how this raw sexual hunger rises up spontaneously into your heart and merges with the more subtle but essential feelings of yearning and compassion there. . . .

When you’re ready, you can end this whole-body focusing process . . . and continue to enjoy and express the great feeling of balanced whole-body charge and presence. . . .

WHOLE-BODY DOPAMINE

When you focus on thinking, a lot of blood immediately flows up into your brain to fuel this mental buzz. We saw earlier how cannabis often stimulates excited talking about great ideas, memories, imaginations, and plans. In this chapter, we’re seeing that you can shift your focus elsewhere in your body and, in so doing, generate quite a considerable change in how you feel and relate.

Regardless of where you focus in your body, cannabis provokes the secretion of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins (the happiness hormones), which, in turn, impact the brain. This same biochemical effect is also happening throughout your whole body because your bloodstream carries the dopamine everywhere inside you. This hormonal shift actively enhances your overall sensory experience and propensity to get excited sexually.

In fact, a complex symphony of chemicals orchestrates that radical flush of sexual arousal associated with a cannabis high. The human sexual response is definitely a whole-body event.

ENTERING ETERNAL TIME

There’s yet another element that influences high sex: the curious way in which your sense of time becomes altered when you are high. Scientists are still trying to understand what this subjective feeling of time distortion is all about. What we do know is that cannabis can make the flow of time seem to stretch out so that just a few minutes can feel like hours. This feeling of floating in timeless time, free from the mind’s usual linear time construction, often elicits the experience of pure bliss . . . a sense of timelessness where the past and the future are almost entirely gone. In this expanded state, even the slightest touch from your lover can seem to last a lifetime and bring truly remarkable pleasure and intimacy.

Many people report that they definitely seem to experience more pleasure sexually when they are high. This runs parallel to the general sensory and emotion-heightening effect of weed.

I began my therapy career in the tradition of the great Austrian sexual scientist Wilhelm Reich, who considered regular weekly orgasms and ever-deepening intimacy to be a prime element of mental and physical health.¹⁴ I no longer practice his specific approach to therapy, nor am I as dogmatic as he was regarding the necessity of overt sexual fulfillment for a satisfying life. There are certainly many other paths. But I do find sexual intimacy to be a healing balm and primary blessing to the human species. And using grass to enhance your sexual experience can have considerable therapeutic value.

People often ask: What about a situation where one person gets high and the other, for whatever reason, doesn’t? I’ve found no research on this, but my personal experience is that it usually works quite well. There is a definite psychological phenomenon, sometimes called the “contact high,” in which the person who isn’t high picks up the general resonance of the person who is and spontaneously shifts into that mind-set. This happens especially with couples who are familiar with both states.

Traditional Newtonian science would scoff at the idea that we radiate a palpable energetic resonance that can influence another person’s mind-set or emotions, but the new quantum physics model of reality indicates that, yes, we are in fact made up not of solid matter but of energetic waves. (For further discussion, see Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Physiology, by Arnold Mindell.) These waves move outward from our physical bodies and engage with the resonant broadcasts of other people. So if one of you is high and the other is not, getting a contact high is a very real possibility.

Many women especially value both types of orgasms – high and not high. The two experiences do seem in several ways different. Questionnaire studies have documented that many women experience more clitoral excitement when they are high, compared with a deeper vaginal experience during a not-high orgasm.

As for men, many report that marijuana enables them to relax and take longer before coming, as they learn from the high experience how to tune in to the more subtle “feminine” softness that makes very slight sensory experience seem to explode in pleasure and expand into timeless time. . . .

On this note, over and over I’ve heard women praise pot because it helps their male partner slow down and let the sexual encounter delve into unique new realms of intimate relating. Based on the chemical effect of cannabis on sensory sensitivity and time distortion, this makes perfect sense. And of course, this theme has many unique variations depending on your personal sexual preferences.

OUTERCOURSE

Among the more intriguing elements of “sex while high” is the current media buzz about “intercourse” versus “outercourse.” Outercourse refers to all the sexually stimulating things a couple can do together without overt penetration and naked intercourse. (It used to be called foreplay.) With the addition of cannabis to the intimate equation, almost invisible orgasm experiences and sexual “skimming” can easily be engaged in if both partners are open to experience the more subtle and even etheric levels of sexual enjoyment.¹⁵

Danielle, whom we heard from in earlier chapters, gave this report:

Getting high with Jim made me feel sexually like I was fifteen again, very bashful, like I’d hardly ever been kissed before. Jim seemed to feel the same way because after our giggling fit, we just lay there on the rug, breathing together, our bodies touching here and there – and even the slightest movement, the gentlest touch, seemed to set us both afire. He was in a very soft, loving mood, not pushing for intercourse – and I just loved it! I must say, without hardly any overt rubbing at all, time seemed to expand and my orgasm went on and on, almost entirely inwardly. We’d never made love like that before. We were on some new plane together. It seemed as if there were no boundaries at all between us . . . and I felt like every cell in my body somehow came.

I’ve since learned that a lot of couples sometimes slip effortlessly into this sexual bliss zone, coming together even if they’re not having full intercourse.

In fact, when people get really high, to the point that they hardly want to move at all, and they certainly don’t want to get the steam up for acrobatic sex, this “outercourse” approach to orgasm can prove to be remarkable – it’s soft and subtle, and every chakra fires off, over and over.

SOLITARY HIGH

And now . . . what if you don’t at present have a sexual partner? Do you lose out on all this potential pleasurable healing power of sex? I want to speak openly about the traditionally negative but definitely universal occurrence formally called masturbation or self-gratification. For many hundreds of years, both the Catholic and Protestant stance on masturbation insisted that self-gratification was a sin against God and nature. We’ve come a long way since then, but many people still consider giving themselves sexual pleasure to be somehow negative or demeaning, even though they can’t stop from doing it.

Numerous studies have shown that even among married couples, 70 percent of both men and women also masturbate in addition to having sexual intercourse.¹⁶ And this seems perfectly normal, because baby boys often play with their genitals and get erections, and little girls often seem to derive pleasure from masturbatory activity. And health-wise, men who masturbate tend to have a lower incidence of cardiac disease than men who don’t.¹⁷

Wilhelm Reich was right – loads of good things happen when we orgasm regularly. Masturbation is considered a cardiovascular workout, as it gets the heart pounding, the breathing expands, and healthy hormones flush the system to generate relaxation and a sense of overall well-being.

Getting high does often make people feel seriously horny, and even if a self-administered orgasm might not be as deeply engaging or heartwarming as a mutually shared one, the act does generate the same basic aftermath of hormonal flooding through the body. At the peak orgasmic moment, some pretty remarkable things happen throughout the body, whether you’re having the experience alone or with a partner. And high or not high, when you get sexually aroused, twin neurohormones called oxytocin and prolactin are secreted in the brain and flow throughout your body to each and every cell, especially to the gonads and breasts and ovaries, bringing a rush of pleasure and sense of well-being.

Endogenous morphine, another strong pleasure elicitor, is also released into your bloodstream during orgasm.¹⁸ It quickly penetrates every cell in your body, generating that remarkable postorgasm experience of total relaxation and bliss. During this bliss phase, the cerebral cortex temporarily experiences less metabolic activity, the buzz of the brain becomes silent, and a bit of true inner peace is naturally experienced.

As I suspect wise folk have known for many moons, marijuana naturally expands and enhances this whole-body bliss experience, and in this regard it’s definitely a marvelous and valuable herb.

SEX AND SPIRIT

Studies show that beyond the overt sexual rush that accompanies the high experience, there’s another dimension that makes this entire discussion especially meaningful: it seems that a great many cannabis users around the globe discover a special link between sexuality and spirituality when they are high. This naturally causes these people to approach the cannabis effect with a sense of reverence.

I wrote a book a while back, called Sex and Spirit: Merging Heart and Soul in Love, that explored this sex-and-spirit connection in depth – but I didn’t include cannabis in that discussion. Let me say here that I find my sexual experiences while I am high of equal value spiritually as when I’m not high. As long as I stay aware of my breathing when I’m high, I benefit from deep spiritual insights in much the same way as I do when I’m not high.

As I get older, the union of sex and spirit continues to get stronger. As we’ll discuss in more depth later, more and more people are discovering that moderate use of pot can extend sexual potency further into old age, and it can also help make that experience resonate with deeper spiritual overtones. Also, as we get older, we tend to sink into ingrained sexual patterns of belief and behavior, rather than staying open to new experiences and perspectives; cannabis can help with that.

Cannabis is definitely a positive interrupter of ingrained sexual behavior because it shifts the mind into exploring new realms of experience and growth.

For a balanced discussion, it should perhaps be noted that some people become addicted to sex, and especially to masturbatory sex, as a way of regularly stimulating the secretion of natural morphine-based hormones into the bloodstream. This is a natural way for all human beings to attain momentary transcendence, but when people retreat into chronic self-stimulation habits and use marijuana to help enhance this pattern, to the point that the behavior becomes an acute isolation pattern, then they’re probably in need of helpful therapy.

But for most people with or without a sexual partner, using marijuana to enhance sexual stimulation and even perhaps to tap a bit of spiritual revelation seems both natural and healthy.

We’re always being challenged to be 100 percent human and earthly and rooted in our natural biological presence, while at the same time we aspire to transcend everyday mortal consciousness and find eternal oneness in spiritual awakening. How can we do both?

I often repeat the following story, but it’s always relevant because it expresses a possible resolution to the paradox of being 100 percent human and 100 percent divine: When I was in my twenties, I studied for four years with a philosopher in San Francisco named Alan Watts, a flawed but wonderful and inspiring teacher and spiritual pioneer who embraced marijuana and psychedelics as helpmates on the spiritual path.¹⁹ He said over and over that we must see ourselves and everyone else as 100 percent human and also 100 percent divine – and in order to do so, we must expand our definition of reality to include two 100 percent truths.

The traditional yin-yang symbol of a circle with an S drawn inside it, dividing the circle into two equal parts within the greater encircling whole, expresses this leap into a 200 percent reality. Our entire universe operates as a dualistic system, but for me, a greater unifying force and consciousness beyond the seeming duality must exist to hold the entire physical universe together.

Nowhere is this a more obvious truth than in sexual intercourse. When we become sexually aroused, we regress into raw animal urges and behavior, while at the same time, during orgasm, we often experience total transcendence of normal consciousness and feel as if we’ve entered the kingdom of Eros – Heaven. Yes, scientists can partly explain the orgasm/bliss phenomenon through biochemical models, and yet scientists cannot explain what consciousness itself is.

When we get high, often we encounter deep spiritual ideas that seem to make perfect sense to our high perspective of reality. This expansive sense of inquiry into the deeper nature of the universe seems to naturally accompany the cannabis buzz.²⁰ And as one well-known scientist who openly lauded marijuana’s power to stimulate scientific and spiritual insight, Carl Sagan, concluded in his later years, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

We live in a dualistic three-dimensional physical world in our mortal bodies – but our minds can sometimes encounter a nondual quality of consciousness that totally transcends physical reality.

To the extent that cannabis and sexual relating together can help us experience a spiritual awakening, we’re very lucky that earthly creation has somehow included the cannabis plant, and that humans finally mastered fire and discovered that if we smoke it (or cook it and ingest the herb), we can become temporarily lifted into spiritual realms of being.

LOSING IN ORDER TO GAIN

As we’ve been exploring, making love is all about temporarily letting go of the past and future and instead focusing entirely on the sensory present moment. For a brief time, your usual adult fixation on what just happened to you and what might happen in the near future gets mostly lost. Instead, you surrender this function of the mind and become acutely focused on all the present-moment sensory events flooding into your brain.

This is definitely a major mind-set shift – and it makes sexual relating come alive! The marijuana muse leads us off away from our minds and reawakens an early-childhood sense of total engagement with our overt bodily presence. Young children tend to experience the world as constantly new and exciting; everything seems worth exploring and learning about. Because youthful minds aren’t yet stuffed with limiting attitudes and beliefs, little kids are naturally very much in the present moment rather than mired in memories about the past or worries about the future.

Marijuana seems to temporarily induce or reintroduce a similar youthful experience of suddenly seeing everything as fresh and new – as if for the first time.

This seems to be what happens with sexual relating when we are high. THC gently forces us to relinquish all judgmental comparisons and associations with past lovemaking experiences. By totally indulging in the pleasure of the moment, we’re able to discover the newness in each moment.

The associative function of the mind is, of course, a truly remarkable and valuable process. It enables us to plot and plan and judge and react to the present moment – but it also separates us from directly experiencing and appreciating the ongoing pleasure of the now. When everything we encounter instantly reminds us of something we’ve encountered before, there’s very little freshness or adventure attached to our present-moment encounters. When they are not high, many people are unconsciously stuck in this pattern while making love. Then, when they get high, it all changes.

The cannabis muse helps us to once again look at a flower and experience the pure multisensory presence of that flower.

This shift in mind-set is invaluable when you are making love, particularly if you’ve made love to this person a dozen, a hundred, or even thousands of times before, and all your sensory inputs in the present moment remind you instantly of almost identical inputs you’ve had in the past. I’m not saying that we need marijuana to stay satisfied and eager when making love for the thousandth time with the same partner – but it can surely help.

POSTORGASM BLISS

I might mention a final benefit from combining marijuana and sex: the expanded depth of experience that can last for quite some time after orgasm. The cannabis effect will often continue to stretch out your sense of time or even generate a sense of timelessness as the aftermath of orgasm flushes your whole body with a cacophony of pleasure hormones.

There’s nothing quite like relaxing and indulging fully as every cell in your body receives a chemical hit of ecstasy and release.

Many couples report that their deepest experiences of intimacy happen during this quiet, motionless ecstatic phase when they’re both sated and yet still together in their hearts, just breathing and staying in touch with their feelings. Sharing space . . . and love.

CONSCIOUS SEXUAL PLEASURE

To sum up this chapter, let’s consider our universal sexual predicament: most people don’t want to be told how to make love. But at the same time, when making love, we tend to get continually caught up in so many thoughts, memories, associations, and future projections that lovemaking sometimes seems quite robotic and overly predictable. Our encounters are not as fun and moving as they could be because we’re being dominated by the mind rather than the body. No sexual situation can be satisfying or uplifting when the two people involved are busy in their minds trying to figure out what to do next, or are habitually judging what’s happening based on previous encounters, or are imagining being with someone else . . . and so on and so forth.

We need to somehow break free from all our ingrained mental-sexual habits and quiet our mind for a while so that we can become more spontaneous in our erotic lives.

Whether you are high or not, erotic heart-to-heart fulfillment begins and hopefully also ends by tuning in to your own body and at the same time focusing on your partner’s living, breathing presence. As we’ve seen, the trick is to focus on just being together, breathing together, letting everything drop down to a silent shared still point. This is most easily accomplished by the primal act of letting go of all ego control. Here’s a guided experience that lets you experience inner quiet, right at the very bottom of your exhalations (you can also listen to the audio on the High Together app):

Get comfortable . . . and choose to do absolutely nothing for a few minutes – just let your next inhalations and exhalations come and go . . . and stop and start . . . with zero effort. Trust the life force to continue breathing for you as you surrender to pure stillness deep inside.

Now, on your next breath, pause for a moment at the bottom of your exhalation . . . then let your next inhalation come rushing in until you’re full . . . and now exhale completely again . . . and at the bottom, experience being entirely empty of everything – air, thoughts, feelings, intentions, hungers.

Now allow your next inhalation to come rushing in, without your making it happen in any way . . . continue with your next exhalation to the bottom . . . and right at that zero point, experience pure peace and quiet . . . and continue breathing freely. . . .

At some point, your body might begin to feel a slight hint of a delicious stretch that’s forming all on its own. Breathe and surrender to this urge to stretch . . . and feel all the thousands of sensations rushing to your brain as you move freely until you’re thoroughly satisfied. . . .