Learning to Love. Sex

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Lesson 17: Sex

Hands come together, in prayer. Bodies come together in Love. We need two hands to pray; two wings to fly; two bodies to make one soul.
The etymology of the word “sex”, from the latin: seco/secare-cut in half or division, may refer to the split which cut man in half according to Aristophanes in Plato´s dialogue “The Symposium”.  Plato describes man, as originally having had four arms and four legs, with a single head and two faces. He goes on to say that man´s pride was such, that he was daring the gods. Such insubordination obliged Zeus to split him in two, breaking his power in half and duplicating the number of people that would give him tribute. Since then, man yearns for his/her other half, longing to make his soul whole, again. Theosofists like Edgar Cayce, believe that when karma is paid, man will again be rejoined with woman and be whole again.

It wasn´t till the early 1900’s that the word ‘sex’, was openly related with ‘sexual intercourse’, as used in D.H. Lawrence’s controversial book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.  In it he also talks of the division between man and woman but in this case, separated by social class. The book explores different types of love: a cold relationship between husband and wife; an abusive relationship and the passion between a high class aristocrat and a low-class gamekeeper. It seems to question the split between body and mind, so rigorously severed for religious and puritanical beliefs, releasing the passion of sex.

In Book 4 of the Republic, Plato says that the soul is divided into three parts: the appetitive (responding to physical cravings); the rational (or logos, from the mind or intellect) and the spirited (desiring honor and love). In fact, sex can be experienced physically, as a natural response of heightened erogenous arousal; sentimentally, as a subjective interpretation of sensorial romance; rationally, as a relationship taken by decision and free choice; and spiritually, as the bond of love. The challenge is to integrate this diverse experience into one integral response. Love comes from this ‘integrity’.

 “Marriages are made in heaven” is a Yiddish proverb that relates love, to fate and destiny. Jewish tradition holds it, that love is predestined to a divinely fore-ordained spouse or ‘soul-mate’. This idea of completion, reached only when we are with our true ‘loved one’, is also subscribed in predestined karma. It seems to be the soul that recognizes our “complementing other half”, and not our body. Such sexual attraction gives unconscious, instinctive, intuitive, inspirational, libidinal enlightened bliss. This is what the Kamasutra is about. It is not a manual of ‘sexual postures’ but a holy guide written in Sanskrit between 400 and 200BC, describing the virtuous and gracious art of loving.