SEX AND THE SACRED

Two categories hold my attention because they are forbidden to discuss, because they are at the heart of being human, and because they, like supersensitive cloud chambers, trace things that must remain unseen.  That means in our crazed half-conceived transition to a new world because of changes in our old world, these categories are deeply affected.  Thinking about them is the surest way to escape the syndrome of being too dumb to know you are dumb.  Instead, once you know the boundary is gone or never was, what remains is more than any one person can conceive of, but gives birth to endless ideas.

One category is sex and the other is the sacred.  Both are ways to escape the body, to go beyond the envelope of the known.  Both are consequences of desire, physiologically founded -- emotionally confirmed and repelled at once.  Both are constant subjects. never resolved, and that's their point.  Keep moving,

Originating in the individual, both rocket out along the continuums of possibilities until they are captured by institutions, which are structures both good and bad.  Love, as sexual bonding, becomes renewing family and even possibly tribe of relations.  The sacred becomes institutional religion, a source of power in society through group identity.

Research into these two, sex and the sacred, is deep among the tiny tractions of particles which are not the same as the social metaphorical boundaries and essences.  Once making these bits permissable to be seen, named and talked about, some people were bound to do it.  Taboos about the holy are as strong as those forbidding sexual bonding outside the culture rules.  Both are about controlling competition for social dogma, sustaining the illusion that things like marriage or ordination are real entitlements that give power over other people, that really do something.

Within the limits it's impossible to talk about religion without being limited to the anthropomorphism of God or Gods or antiGods or pluralGods.  It's impossible to talk about sexual bonding without arguing about marriage.  As soon as one can see past these, getting smart enough to know you are dumb, terrifying vastness opens up and identity quails.  How can a thought system based on metaphor operate if the thought object has never been experienced, nor nothing like it?  How does one find the experience?

You can't expect it.  Many will turn away from it.  It's like learning to read, partly the brain acquiring a new skill and partly a felt step into a new world.  They say a few women have mutated in a way that allows them to see a different section of light microwaves, which the eye codes as "color".  They can see a new color.  What does it look like?  The rest of us will never know.  (Some suggest it might be "like" green.)  What else is there that we COULD learn to perceive if we knew it existed?  Maybe it's like twilight when the rods that perceive no color but become more perceptive when used sideways, glancing out of the side of the eye.  A dark animal leaping.

How does one conceive, consider and respond to the pre-verbal inchoate felt concepts of existence?  Granted that verbal skill and grammar technique are vital to thinking, they can do no more than metaphorize the limbic underconscious felt being.

Take desire, both sexual and holy.  Yearning.  Wanting to take in/wanting to be taken in.  An obliteration of the self while at the same time everything, everything, more than was ever imagined.  A repeat of the gradual wakening of the forming human before birth.  We can only hope death is like that, but it probably isn't.

When I began the search for how ceremonies, shaping of the material culture, might call into one an awareness of the Sacred expressed by the body with or without words, I still thought I was I.  When I stepped into sexual bonding, I discovered that I was still I.  Yet the essence of both is leaving the I.  Leaving language?  Can math express these things?

The most basic guide I know is Mircea Eliade's "The Sacred and the Profane" in which he suggests the two things are felt, not thought out.  This is against the two millennia tradition of civilization, against the institutions of religion, the named organizations that become bureaucratic and hierarchical, and thus in control of what everyone else thinks and does.  What fewer people know is that Eliade was also a free-form explorer of sexual bonding, but I, too, know nothing about that.

In seminary I was laughed at for attending a Masters and Johnson conference.  But then the laughers looked worried.  What if they were missing something?  They were.  But so were Masters and Johnson, who were looking for physical phenomena -- not going deeper than which cells exudes which molecules under what circumstances.  Their approach -- a mechanical penis with a camera inside it -- was laughable, but to the women who snuck in to feel it for themselves, highly pleasant.  I doubt anyone thought of using it anally.  The larger context was still conventional.  Their work is preserved in the Kinsey Institute, an institution.
https://kinseyinstitute.org/collections/archival/masters-and-johnson.php  

Sex as embodied can only explore a suite of possibilities in stimulating a human body (forget cis or not) so long as it is limited to the body.  When the act is expanded by the imagination and sharing with someone else, it becomes something far more.  The whores I know, who are a small group of males I've never met, are atypical enough to understand that a fantasy must be created as a container for the felt response.  If I move the metaphor to sex, then it's a chalice -- in the Xian tradition -- or maybe (much earlier) a cave or even the dark, that mantle, that shriver.

We know that -- enlarged this way -- the experience is actually a symphony of molecules in the blood, which are felt by the whole body.  Some are willing to curtail everything by excluding other humans and jumping straight to the molecules.  It is never as rich, never as expanding -- more like excluding.  (I'm told.)  It's a boundary for me.  So is money.  I might be wrong.

I don't think about boundaries -- I think about the nuclei that are our centers.  But they're a slippery bunch, swelling and shrinking, to put them in a metaphor of lubricated sex.  Society is all too willing to provide us with boundaries.