The Problem of Sexuality for Spiritual Idealists

The problem of how to handle sexuality is always a difficult one for spiritual idealists. I look at two factors that are at work.

First factor:
the practices of meditation, contemplation, and any activities requiring strong will power all have something in common. The emotional base of them is hate. Hatred clears the mind of extraneous clutter and calms the mind to a slight extent.

Second factor:
in addition, spiritual evolution entails the development of sensitivity. The good side of sensitivity is that it facilitates creativity. Unfortunately, the bad side of it ensures that a person becomes wary of emotional attachments. The person feels very keenly any suggestions of ridicule, rejection, reprimand and hostility directed at him.

The strongest form of emotional attachment is bonding. When the person focuses on will power, it is very difficult for him to modify bonding. If he is in a relationship that is sometimes difficult, he usually reacts in two ways. If his will power is currently strong, then he ignores the difficulties, criticisms, ridicule. ‘Why bother to respond to difficulties: they are not bothering me’ – this is his attitude. But when his will power deflates for a time, then such difficulties plunge him into depression. Because he is depressed, the attempt to address such difficulties becomes completely beyond him. Therefore, in neither mood (high or low) does he try to negotiate with other people about the difficulties.

Hence over many lifetimes, the spiritual idealist learns to become wary of all forms of bonding (except to religious figures). So unfortunately, the usual course of development for sensitive intellectuals and idealists is to develop hatred of sexuality. The male idealist and thinker learns to hate women. As the man retreats into solitude, so that very solitude makes it even more difficult to learn social skills in relationships.

Women have not understood this feature of (male) spiritual development, because in all traditional cultures they are the underdog to male supremacy. Underdogs always club together rather easily, whilst topdogs assert their individualism. Hence the ease with which women attune to each other rather than to men is the direct result of their social disadvantage and repression. Women assert that female–female friendships are more easily established and maintained than female–male friendships, and like to say that in this way females are superior to males.

However, I suspect that when sexual equality is fully established, so that women are no longer repressed in any social or political way, women will find it just as hard to establish harmonious female–female relationships as it is to establish harmonious male–female ones.

For example, during periods when early Christianity was repressed by the Roman emperors, the spirit of the Christian groups was intense. The repressed Christians bonded together because they had a common enemy. But when some emperors allowed religious freedom, then the Christian groups tended to fall apart and go their different ways. In hard times the intensity of religious or group enthusiasm increases, but that intensity drops when soft times return.  So suffering some form of repression will confer advantages to any repressed group, and these advantages are likely to be lost when repression ceases.

Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
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