This weekend, as I was buzzing through the work of the esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom, a sentence jumped out at me: "[Our] erotic livesare quite simply now our spiritual lives." It is startling to see something you felt you knew but couldn't express reflected back at you. Sex is an appreciable substitute for religion.
The ecstatic feelings once generated by an uplifting Baptist service or the prayers of Hasidic Jews are now completely sought through genital contact, but as religion was repressive of sexuality in the past, our mad drive for sex can equally repress our need to seek spiritual truths.
I do not mean to be a prude or to moralize, but merely to note something I have observed as clinically and objectively as possible.
If you are an Epicurean, you should be quite glad that Eros is our new god, but for others, this might be a cause for concern. Has our single-minded craving for "the little death" (what the French call an orgasm) made us neglect all thought of what dreams may come in our actual death?
The pursuit of sexual pleasure has features similar to a spiritual quest, but is only a carnal parody. In fact, Muslim poets frequently wrote of the earthly pleasures sought in the tavern (or frat house) as symbols of the spiritual experience of God sought within (they did not literally partake).
Consider the elusive quest for union and intimacy evoked when a Dartmouth male slinks through a frat basement, worsening his state of inebriation while searching for the woman who will fulfill him. Southern Baptists used to say that they sought "to be alone with Jesus," but today our goal is to be alone with one girl or guy of our choice (or two or three).
We want to be constantly physically stimulated to rid ourselves of the burden of our thoughts and the crushing world of dull concerns. We are seeking some higher consciousness that will grant us a fever pitch of feeling.
Sex is the most immediate method we have of reaching such a state of ecstasy, because it is accessible and enjoyable to all but a few heretics. So it only makes sense to wake up in the morning and hit the ground running on a mad embarkation for orgasm.
In the view of many acolytes of the sexual revolution, civilization must seem to have reached its culmination a society in which nothing restrains our desire for sexual recreation.
But perhaps, in our ardent pursuit of one particular pleasure, we have left something out. I do not mean to say that we must have spirituality in place of sex, but that we cannot have only sex in place of spirituality. Mankind cannot live by orgasm alone.
Additionally, most would agree that unconditional love should determine more of our actions than conditional lust. But does it ever? Ultimately, such slavish devotion to sexual passion results in repressing our curiosity about other higher, unknown pleasures. It is the opposite of the repression suffered during the Victorian Era, but, nonetheless, it is repression.
To constantly crave and push for pleasure is to isolate oneself from the environment. It is to create a cocoon of self-satisfaction, which no other feeling or idea may penetrate except the dark, saccharine nectar of lust.
Whenever I go to a frat party, there is always this push a wind at everyone's heels to try to sop as much pleasure from the situation as one can, like twisting a nearly dry washcloth to obtain the last few drops of water. Everyone is willfully trying to extract fun from the situation, so no joy ever bubbles up pleasantly simply from our being together without pretense.
Spirituality springs naturally from the fact that we exist and are curious, that we long to know ourselves and to be known. Joy at being alive arises unpremeditated without any grasping for it.
It is not sexuality that I object to, obviously, but the perverse and forced straining for it the self-torture that is undergone in the service of one's primal instinct.
Living in a world that so emphasizes our one instinct causes me to feel like I continually need to gather my wits to keep a firm sense of another primal instinct we all share seeking. It is in seeking the mysterious order behind Nature and humanity that I feel most certainly myself, most whole and full.
