Sex Magic
Gonzo orgasm-promoter Wilhelm Reich—him of the famed orgone box—once argued that mysticism was just repressed sexual feeling. This is a bit ironic for Reich also speculates orgasm as a kind of metaphysical substance pervading the cosmos, like if the force from Star Wars were made out of pure horniness. Anyways, I can see how mysticism and sex might get conflated; for if sex is what tears philosophy, what resists rational thought absolutely (even while occupying our thought ceaselessly) then it is not so far removed from the unknowable twilit realm called mystical (if not the same thing).
Reich’s caveat is probably a better way to think about sexuality than it is to think about mysticism. In other words: who needs spirit if you have good sex? But if we reduce sexual feeling to just feeling horny, then we have really missed the boat, for obviously there is a vital continuum between the kind of sex that we want to have (even if we don’t know it yet) and the most basic and oldest formations of our psyche—that uncanny entity known as the soul.
It has always struck me as odd and amusing how the universal diminutive in all of pop music is baby. What is this common need to infantilize the love object? Likewise there is that impossible desire that Lacan mentions somewhere, in which the lover needs to encompass (and be encompassed by) the lover’s body; as if the lovers could not touch each other enough; the lover becomes a kind of pool in which one desires, frantically, to submerge. A dark pool in which one may swim for only moments at a time, if ever.
Sabina Spielrein suggests in her 1912 paper, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, that oceanic feeling is nothing but sexuality—sexuality beyond the limit, and absolutely spiritual. Avgi Saketopoulou, the foremost contemporary psychoanalyst continuing this project, refers to this as both limit consent and traumatophilia. From this standpoint the sexual is the premier object of psychoanalysis.
And yet the mystical pursuit of oceanic sexuality has been known from time immemorial in the ancient Tantra tradition as the left-hand path, and more recently as sex magic; this is sex in the service of unbinding; where the true model of sexuality is not the release of horniness as exemplified by the reproductive teleology of the male climax, but rather the pursuit of tension, the destinationless excitations of feminine sexuality: non-reproductive, essentially erotic, free, multiple, polymorphous and, in the last instance, non-gendered.
Certain points along the surface of the body may be regarded as gates or portals to a strange land out of time that we are not usually aware of—if we are aware of it at all. These embodied vertices have the weird power to bind or unbind the psyche. That Tantrikas refer to the vagina as a sacred temple is more to the point; they don’t mean “sacred” in the chastity-belt sense of the word, but rather as the entrance to the universe.
Nevertheless the implications of the polymorphous is such that the “erogenous zone” is not confined to any one location but rather makes the body itself an energetic vortex—so the famous “full-body orgasm” that you may have heard of.
If the drive is an unlimited source of energy that is usually bound up by the defensive apparatus known as ego—and so made pathological—then the unbinding of this energy, in the brave exploration of your desire, may be experienced as nothing less than mystical; the zone where perception meets the drive; where the goddess Kali Ma dances over the shattered ego. Should one wish to unbind this libido, however, as Saketopoulou warns, there is risk involved. As with the clouds of unknowing, the dark nights of the soul and bottomless chasms of mystical experience, a certain amount of trepidation is probably warranted about just what one might find down there in the sexual night. But to avoid going there is to remain on the side of repression.
Kali Ma, Goddess of creation and destruction
