Posts tagged integral spiritual experience

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.