The act of the sexual comes from the sacredness of what two people bring together. The sacredness lies in their intention. If there is bad intention..there is rape, it is not sacred. Let’s go even deeper…one way of talking about the sexual and the sacred is about the sacred intention for intimacy…for giving and receiving, for that entire way of exchanging. Even deeply, there is something in the sexual itself which is sacred, above and beyond any intention. This is about heart, the more you feel seen by your partner, the more you feel loved by them. The inverse is true, the more accurately your partner feels seen by you, the more they feel loved. Accuracy and description isn’t an intellectual thing, it’s a love thing…and IT MATTERS!
There can be a negative and a positive intention in sexuality…a positive intention, to give, to receive to honor, which creates the sacred…a negative intention, a coercive intention, a degraded intention, which is sinful. Negative intention wrecks the sacred, a positive intention opens up the sacred. I want to talk about the middle place, where we actually feel, in a deep feeling that there is something in the sexual itself beyond any intention which is sacred.
The sexual requires by its nature without any intention requires a number of things… The one I’m going to talk about here is some dimension of loss of control…which means that if you are fully controlled and there is not a point in which you fully surrender you are not fully engaged in the sexual, the sexual has a dimension of surrender which is built into its very structure. This is beyond intention and is built into the very nature of the sexual itself, the idea of surrender, of giving up control. That is why the sexual is so threatening to people because its a requirement that you give up control. When you have a partner that you feel is never giving up control, it just doesn’t work. Part of the reward of the lover is that the lover receives from their beloved the gift of being able to witness the beloveds’ giving up control. That is the gift…”I’m going to be your lover and I’m going to let you see me give up control.” This is not about intention, its definitional…its in the very essence and structure of the sexual itself that this thing is happening.
The shadow of the sexual is that I force you to give up control before you are ready or I force you to give up control when you don’t want to give up control. That is the great shadow form…Rape or sexual harassment being its shadow form.
The gift of sexuality is, when I surrender, not only at the moment when my body forces me to, which is moving closer to orgasm but I’ve actually surrendered to the entire process. I’ve actually extended or expanded the surrender beyond the 90 seconds of spasmodic, pathetic orgasm and I actually have a whole body experience, an experience where I’m giving up control all along and I keep deepening and deepening the giving up control. So that the intention of giving up control can deepen the intimacy or it can ruin it but the core of surrender is in the structure itself.