A Pearl of Wisdom

A sentence I've heard came back to me as I was reading the recent handout from Kathy's seminar (The Soul: Infinity and Beyond), and thinking about kindness.

Someone who is spiritual doesn't let life get them down. They use experience as a tool of growth.

The illustration is of the art of stringing pearls, and the knots between them.

Sex and Ethical Values, Oh My!

Lately I have been wondering about the “sex is love” belief and its sister, the "sex is a sin" belief. They seem to be pervasive beliefs all over the globe and all over time, and they have probably done more to advance our negative perception our ourselves as humans than just about anything. So I was wondering how these beliefs have affected me and my life and how they relate to ethical values. These are the thoughts that ensued.

When we think about sex we are really thinking about our own spirit energy. Sexuality is a part of our spirituality. It seems that most people do not think of it this way, but our spirit is in the human body, and the human body must advance itself and recreate itself. So with sexuality the human race is able to perpetuate itself. Perpetuation is the very act of creativity. And creativity is the behavior of the spirit, although when creativity is truly spiritual it is imbued with all the ethical values of the Creative Spirit.

But as we have lived in fear throughout history, that creativity has not always been a spiritual act. It has not always been ethical. So the challenge is for man has always been to create with the ethical values.

Sexuality defines a manner of being creative. To take a creative seed, which is the human seed of the egg, and bring it together with the sperm and together to form new life in the physical body (not in a test tube) this is a creative act. It is the ultimate in creativity. It is a fractal pattern of what our Creator did to create the human species. The Creator took his own creative seed, which was his thought of Spirit, and created new spirit consciousness from it. And all of the Universe is a result of this vast thinking and of the commitment that the Creator had and always will have to the act of Creation. It is divine action, action of the Spirit, action of the ethical values of love, truth, perfection, equality.

But in our beginnings of fear, we created an institution of fear - religion - our way of pulling together the mental forces of those in fear and bringing it to a mass consciousness level. And one of the major tenets of religion is that sex is a sin. We might wonder how religion could take an act of ultimate creativity and spirituality and say that it is a sin. And yet this is what was done because religion reflects our fear thinking. And so we perceived that we were in sin to have sex because indeed we were in our fear thinking and so sex was not a loving thing and was not an act of creativity as much as it was an act of physical gratification, selfishness, harm, punishment, of abuse, domination, gender control, violence, and fear overall.

This is the story of us and sex if we look only at our past and at the acts of abomination that have pervaded our history. But just because this picture is in our past, it does not mean that this picture is the truest story of us, because when we begin to live our ethical values, we surely begin to understand sexuality and the act of having sex with another person as the creative, ethical act that it is. We can respect, value, appreciate and honor our sexuality because we can understand that it, like every other aspect of ourselves, is a part of our Creative Spirit seed of spirit consciousness.

So how do we get to this point of accepting our spirit energy and integrating ethical values into our behaviors, including sexual behaviors? Maybe the first step is to acknowledge that we live eternally and that we are still on our path of learning, and that we are greater, truly greater, than we have in our past perceived ourselves to be. This seems a simple enough thing to do -- it only means changing our thinking. It does not mean we must acquire a million dollars or climb Mount Everest or swing from the Empire State Building or win the lottery. All we have to do is change the way we think. Is there anything more fundamentally at our disposal than our thinking?

But our fears are in control of our thinking, and our fears do not want us to change. Our fears like being in control. They are the Napoleons, the fierce little dictators of our being. But truly they are impotent even as they have convinced us that we should surrender our power, our innate Creative Power of Thinking to the dictators of fear. The sex-is-love belief, the sex-is-a-sin belief, which are both intertwined, are such dictatorial fears. They have exercised power over us for millennia.

But we can make the conscious choice to regain our freedom of thought and shed the sex-is-a-sin belief and begin to perceive our sexuality through the perspective of ethics. We can challenge ourselves to ask how we are being kind to ourselves when we are having sexual behavior. How am I being kind and respectful of the other person? Am I using this act simply to gratify myself, or am I embarking on a journey of kindness or love and caring and appreciation of this other person? If we truly examine our intentions and our motivations, scrutinize them, we will see where we may be living vestiges of the beliefs and where we are living our loving behavior. We don't have to believe the voice of the ego, since truth is not the behavior of the ego. We can work with the creative energy of our spirit consciousness, which is inherent in each of us, to banish the fears that have held our intellect captive. And by doing so we can become more loving, more respectful of ourselves and our partners or partner.

Sex is not a sin. Surely our Creator does not judge his children as sinners. Sex and sexuality are the behavior of creativity and adventure. So we should love ourselves and love the expressions of love that we share. Sex is a physical act; love is an emotion. As we imbue our physical acts with the emotion of Divine Love, we become a master creator. We are learning. We can be proud of our lessons, and excited about our lessons, and committed to our lessons. We can share the joy of learning our lessons.

If we see success in these avenues, we will be the activation of the Creative Seed of spirit consciousness that brings good things to fruition. Sex is about bringing good things to fruition when it is coupled with the ethical values of the spirit. These values are within us at all times. If we seek them, feel them, know that they are ours, and share them, all good will result.

the download

Here is a thought...we have been talking about the ethical values and its relationship to us in our life in that it is meant to be lived. After all when you read all 33 ethical values, what is there not to like? So how about rather than the perspective of striving to live up to it or look up to it, how about letting the ethical values download into our mind and out through our behavior as we would a software application download into our computer.

I have spent some time giving some of the mainstream values a try. I have tried the Zen approach and the Catholic guidance to empty the mind and let it be. If you haven't noticed, they are one and the same by the way. I have tried the Christian guidance suggesting that we should just accept things as they are and that we are not good enough to ascend without intervention from an external savior...and then there is the new age approach that we can ascend into heavenly bliss if we let love in.

I think I have given a lot of techniques and modalities to life a good try...yet nothing about these modalities would have us believe that we can create true happiness for ourself through our mind alone. We can't be mind-full if we are encouraged to be mind-less. I look around and I see and hear a lot of angry and sad people. We know pretension does not work, and yet we go on with pretension.

Our humanity deserves better, we deserve to treat ourself better than to think that we are just a physical body whose only focus in life is survival before death.

I have been thinking about what it means to have an intellect and our responsibility to learn, understand, and live our love for ourself and others in our life, so that we may live the life we want to live. It seems easier to me to acknowledge that we do have a very physical focus with a physical intellectual mind as our reality. So that we don't have to live to false hopes of trying hard to live up to something we are not. Instead, how about thinking about how we could do the things we want to do in our life with our intellectually focused mind and use the ethical values as a checklist to help us guide our thinking process and our decision process?

Rather than try to ask ourself how we could be all of these things...how about defining what we want to do from the activities and focuses in our life and simply use the ethical values to see how many of them we can relate to our activities and what our goals in life are?

Now I have tried this and it has shifted my point of view, my perception and interpretation of my goals for the new year and what I want to do in my life into a different way of thinking, a different way of perceiving and interpreting what is possible that I can do right here, right now. Our mind then changes the way it sees these ethical values, not as something outside of itself to strive for or look up high above in the sky from which we are beneath to, but as a true ally in all things that we want to do, right now.

It becomes our unconditional friend to us rather than an outside finish line that we have to cross.

The ethical values is the portal to our mind that operates in our physical world to provide us all the abundance we want to create in our life. It gives our mind the maximum energy to power our thought from its birth of creation to fruition as a reality in our life. It energizes our thought to make it real. It is the portal to give our physical mind the sense of love. We can let it work through the portal of our physical mind in how we choose to see its value and relationship in our own personal responsibilities and goals in our daily living, and how we want to live our life, what do we want our accomplishments to be, how we want our life to be, and who we want to be in our life.

Maybe this is what it means to en-lighten the mind.

Pesay