I don’t believe in happily-ever-afters anymore. And it doesn’t feel as though I’m speaking from bitterness when I say that. Just experience really. People have wandering eyes. It’s coded into our gene sequence, and it’s part of our physiology and psychology.
If that sounds extreme, this is going to sound even more extreme: I don’t believe in “love” anymore either :)
It’s all just compassion, filtered through the delusion of a fixed identity. Mangled into some juxtaposition of lust, greed, competitiveness. The compassion is still there, but it gets hidden by the extra, amplified feelings. They are unnecessary and inevitably hurtful. I can share compassion with anyone … e.g., the old guy I did tong-len for the other day. A forty-year-old mother of five. Myself. My dad. A fifteen year-old girl. Why restrict myself to “loving” them first? Can I have sex with any of them? Can I own them? Can I be better than them? No.
Would I want to, knowing that it inevitably causes suffering? No. I wouldn’t wish that on myself or others.
The good news is, when you strip all that away you aren’t left with nothing. You are left with compassion, which is more inclusive than sex or so-called “love” and other such chains we use to bind ourselves to samsara.
That’s not to say I won’t have sex again ;-) Just that I will be doing it for the right reasons. Not out of compassion for myself or others. Instead, it’s like having a shower or eating breakfast. Something we do by nature, leading to temporary bliss. When practised skillfully (and I mean that in all possible senses of the word), sex is another way of expressing ourselves.
But compassion is for everyone.
Note: this material was orginally posted as a reply to Phoenix’s comment on my previous post, Thoughts on Leonard Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep”.
Been thinking about this A LOT. I’ve decided that the penultimate paragraph in the original post is a bit fundamentalist, and unnecessarily so.
The way I think of sex now, for all of us, is that we must experience lust out of a desire to escape our own suffering. There’s this timelessness to the sex act that feels (at its best) like coming home. Like safety. We receive the ultimate in acceptance and validation from the other person. And we desire this because it counteracts all the anxiety we feel about being alone and not understood. There is an urge in us to be known, same as there is an urge to know.
We choose to have sex with another person, not to make them happy but to make ourselves happy. This is fundamental compassion for oneself, and nothing to worry about.
The problems arise when we begin to assign all sorts of unnecessary meaning to the act of fucking.
If I fuck a woman, it is because I want to feel blissful. She, in like kind, also seeks bliss.
Nothing wrong with that. It is natural to want some comfort and pure enjoyment in a world full of complications and unsatisfactoriness.
(Incidentally, this is where our notion of wanting /satisfaction/ during sex come from: if we do not end on a satisfactory note, then the whole thing is reduced in value to us, quite dramatically).
Just let’s bear in mind that this blissful state is temporary, and incomplete, and ultimately just sensations. Those sensations are not /us/. Like all things, they are just part of our experience.
Once this is understood, the pressure comes off, and sex can be either enjoyed for what it is (getting some form of bliss) or avoided altogether as an unskillful method for receiving compassion from oneself.
Those of us who regularly practice insight meditation know that there are more permanent realisations we can awaken to, that surpass the temporary states associated with sex and other such trance-like practices.