無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

From Sex to Kosmic Konsciousness

I’ve been attending a book study on Think and Grow Rich given by Robert Taylor of One Amazing Life (the first and only English/Korean bi-lingual life consultant company in Korea), so I’ve been carrying around Napoleon Hill’s classic with me.

My first time reading over the book a couple years ago, I avoided the chapter on sex transmutation assuming that it would be a kind of moralistic tract that would try to convince me not to have sex. And I didn’t want to hear that, I wanted to have sex! But the truth of the text is deeper and more beautiful.

Finally reading this chapter on the subway just now was a quiet revelatory experience that I felt as it surged up my spine and bathed me in gentle, subtle energies that drew the gazes of a few who were subconsciously attuned to it as I walked through the bus terminal. It is amazing what simple text can do to inspire.

The Creative Impulse

Napoleon Hill states in so many words that sex energy is the source of all creativity, that can be put to either creative use or squandered. This is an amazing truth, but I think calling it sex energy confuses the concept with associations to its base physical expression.

Andrew Cohen speaks of the creative impulse (that I wrote about in my first post). I assume that this is the driving impetus of the Kosmos. The meaning of life! To grow and evolve through increasingly higher levels of expression.

I experienced the feeling of this evolutionary push at Integral Spiritual Experience recently in a breakaway session led by Craig Hamilton, one of Cohen’s students. He led us through a group meditation following the path of evolution from the Big Bang to human consciousness. We spoke, expressing the thoughts and feelings of the group. I felt a growing, surging creative force as we “evolved”. It was vastly powerful and constantly, urgently surging forward, infinitely pouring itself into expression. This is also a dangerous force, without direction it would veer off into destructive outlets just as easily as creative ones.

I believe this is the same force that Napoleon Hill speaks of. Sex energy. Creative energy. I will define “sex energy”, however, as being the physical expression of this force. It is, perhaps, the highest level of this force that our evolutionary ancestors and our animal cousins reached. Evolution through reproduction. But we are no longer limited to evolution through reproduction alone. We are potential masters of not only the evolution of mind, but of consciousness itself.

Sex and Attraction

Thus, sex without any other context than base animal desire, provides little or no spiritual or evolutionary value. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! It has its place, of course, but once you’ve fully indulged in that experience and have nothing more to learn from it, you are not growing and you are spending your creative energies. If you fixate on it and overindulge, you are in fact regressing and may even be engaging in self-destructive behavior. That is not to say that sex within other contexts is not spiritual. Sex with love is profound. And within some tantric traditions, spiritual practice through sexual intercourse, the manifest union of feminine and masculine, is the only way to reach the highest levels of consciousness.

Let’s take a look at attraction from this perspective. Men whose only form of creative expression is through base sex reduce their attractive potential to simply their physical traits. As humans, they have aspirations for creative expression, but they do not have a creative outlet for this energy and thus spend it only in sexual indulgence or other kinds of addiction. One of the fundamental reasons that video games are “fun” are they appeal to a man’s need to express himself through growing and evolving, “leveling up”.

Men who express their creative energy through artistic expression or business success are much more attractive. They are attractive at higher levels of expression. They have learned to cultivate this energy, so not only do they pursue higher levels of expression, they may have even more sexual energy for physical expression.

Men who are at the leading edge of consciousness not only ride the wave of evolution, but steer it. Kosmic kreative energy flows through them. They are manifest beings of creative energy. These are men who have presence that goes beyond simple sexual or romantic attractiveness.

(Here I’ve spoken mainly of men, but there are sure to be parallel levels of creative expression in women, it may just take different forms.)

Expression

Another insight from ISE for me was that negative emotion is often the result of blocked expression. Not choosing outlets for creative expression is unhealthy to say the least. At the same time it is, of course, perfectly natural. There is negative, so we can have positive. And opposites attract. If you desire to evolve and express yourself (and you probably do unless you’re dead), you can see your negative emotions and experiences as pointing out to you how you can evolve and where to express yourself. Indeed, greatest heights of insight and inspiration often follow from moments of greatest weakness and despair. All you need is the presence of heart to look up and see you are loved, oh but you are so loved.

Aligning Yourself with the Creative Impulse: The Birth of 無/有

Some spiritual philosophers, like Andrew Cohen, teach that it all began with a creative impulse, a “must” akin to God becoming sexually aroused to the point of imperative action. He argues further that the universe has a direction, an evolution that we are not only part of but indeed responsible for. But the creative impulse, that is the stuff universes are born of.

Flow

Can we get a taste of this universal creative impulse as individuals? Can we drink from the celestial creative juices of the Gods? But of course, my love. We often feel the creative impulse coursing through our being when we are “in state”, when we experience “flow”, or the “nimbus” as known in some seduction circles. 

Creativity and Competence

Creativity is the defining characteristic at the pinnacle of achievement. It’s almost cliche. The highly-educated physicist who receives an insight from a chocolate doughnut in a dream. The free, flowing improvisational technique of a jazz guitarist after years of calloused-fingered training. In NLP, they have a model for competence within a deep skill: 

• unconscious incompetence – unaware that you’re a bumbling fool
• conscious incompetence – aware that you need a lot of work
• conscious competence – aware that you’re kickin’ ass, and knowing how you do it
• unconscious competence –  not even thinking about it how you naturally excel

Flow occurs, of course, when you have reached unconscious competence. A few people seem to be born naturally in touch with the creative impulse, most of us can reach it by training in a skill or art until we’ve reached unconscious competence (yet again few do, I urge you to be one of those few, commit to your love of an art or other deep endeavor). And nearly all of us have had a glimpse of flow no matter how skilled or not we may be at the time, just as many of us have had glimpses of higher levels of consciousness from time to time before, if ever, we reach them (see the work of Ken Wilber).

Following the Creative Impulse

There is, though, another way to feel the flow of the creative impulse. That is simply to do what you want. When you follow your passions, you are driven by a rush of motivation and creativity. This begs the question, though, what do you really want to do?

Here you have to trust your heart, I’m afraid.

Going Astray

Several months ago I decided to start a blog. I wanted to express myself in writing and make some money on the side, as it were. I had a few different ideas for blogs, this being one of them, as well as an English language blog about investing and personal finance in Korea. I talked to some friends about my ideas, and most of them suggested I start the investing blog. It did indeed seem like the most practical route to go.

It was fun setting up the blog and at first it was satisfying to publish articles that could potentially be of help to people. Over time, however, the articles I wrote got fewer and far between.

Researching and writing articles for the blog began to feel like work. It had become a burden I’d placed on myself, taking time away from doing the stuff that really inspired me. Now I’ve decided to put that blog aside altogether. I still think there is a need for the information the blog aimed to provide, so I hope that someone else will take it over or start something similar, but my heart, as they say, is not in it. 

Finding the Way

My main interests for the past couple years have been in spirituality and self-development. In the Fall of last year, I was browsing through the Integral Theory websites and found one that offered Integral Life Coaching classes. Looking over the program, I realized I really want to do something like this. 

That seed of an impulse started as an interesting idea that I was toying with in how I could integrate my various interests and practices, but over the months, it has grown now into my mid-term life goal. I started to tell others about this goal, tentatively and almost embarrassed at first, now fully and confidently almost as if it was so apparent that the question didn’t need asking. I have made this goal part of my identity.

Defining Identity to Refining Action

The more I identify with this new role, the more I am driven to take action to actually manifest it. The area where I seek to specialize in is in integrating various interests and areas of your life so that they have a synergistic rather than antagonistic relationship. This means that I necessarily will be continuing with my diverse interests and practices, but I realized that some of my activities, like the investing blog, were diverting my energies away from my passions. 

Aligning with the Creative Impulse

When I started thinking about writing down my thoughts in the form of this blog, I began to feel excited and happy about the possibilities. When you are filled with such positive energy, you know that you are indeed aligning yourself with the creative impulse.

My point is this: take the time to evaluate your life and where you are directing your energies. When you strip away all that you “should”, all that is “work”, does your passion emerge naked and radiant, free to embrace you in the flow of the creative impulse?