Open your eyes

From Robert Masters' March 09 newsletter, The Crucible of Awakening, an article entitled, "No Longer Using Sex To Distract Us From Our Suffering":

"As we awaken we realize, more than just intellectually, that what we do to another we do to ourselves; then behaving ethically is not so much a choice as a necessity, a sacred duty, a commitment. So long as we can sexually mess around with and manipulate others for our own ends (sex here being not much more than a matter of making ends meet), and frame the whole messed-up scene as not being messed-up, we are only fucking ourselves, regardless of the tantric robes in which we wrap the whole thing. It’s no accident that one of the many meanings of “fuck” is getting exploited.

"You cannot have sexual maturity without a corresponding emotional, moral, mental, psychological, and spiritual maturity. Those who are cognitively very developed, but whose hearts do not yet see, will not be sexually mature, tending to either be shut off sexually or to indulge in erotic fantasy (utilizing their minds to jack up their sexual excitation). Those who are spiritually and morally relatively advanced, but who are emotionally immature, will not be sexually mature, tending to dissociate during sex, or to burden it with tantric expectations. And so on.

"Sex does not need to be — and in fact cannot be — crystallized out from the rest of our experience (as those overly focused on the mechanics of sexuality often try to do, both in conventional and tantric contexts). Rather, it needs to be seen, felt, and lived in vitally embodied, openeyed resonance — and relationship — with everything we do and are, so that it is, as much as possible, not just an act of specialized function, nor an act bound to the chore of making us feel better or more secure, but rather an unfettered expression of already-present, already-loving, already-unstressed wholeness.

"If you don’t want to get fucked, you’re going to have to disturb your slumber, and rub the sleep out of your “I’s” — and this is more often than not down-in-the-trenches hard work, a true labor of love, asking much of us."

For more on the work of Robert Masters, visit his website: www.robertmasters.com