Sexuality and Spirituality: Interdependent and Complementary
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious changed the world forever. For the first time we came to understand that phenomena outside of conscious awareness influences our beliefs, our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors, and therefore how we see the world and how we perceive reality.
Jung’s discovery of the collective unconscious with its archetypes altered our world even further. Not only did the unconscious influence reality, it organized it according to certain universal patterns, acting like a magnet attracting various and relevant experiences that influenced us to live out their emotional and behavioral stories.
Einstein’s famous discovery that E=MC2 or energy equals mass plus light squared, set in motion a series of scientific experiments that concluded, in the language of quantum physics, that at the most basic level everything is energy. Both the physical plane of matter and the more abstract plane of the mind are energy. Therefore, our thoughts, our emotions, our fantasies, and our behaviors are expressions of energy, each vibrating with information that attracts to it those experiences that match its energy.
Sexuality and spirituality can thus be understood as expressions of energy. Sexuality does not exclude spirituality, nor does spirituality exclude sexuality. Rather, they represent two aspects of a person’s total energy flow. Sexuality and spirituality are one energy. The flow in one direction is complementary to, and dependent upon, the flow from the opposite direction. This means that the spiritual life of each person is an inner, private exploration in which each individual is trying to understand the meaning and purpose of his or her life in his or her own terms. Inevitably, as sexuality and spirituality become increasingly recognized as interdependent and complementary forces, the fulfilling of this purpose includes an exploration of one’s sexual life.
If everything is energy, and if sexuality and spirituality are two aspects of one energy flow—each complementary and dependent on the other—then all sexuality including homosexuality and same-sex attraction can also be understood to have a spiritual purpose. By spiritual purpose I mean the intent of homosexuality as an interplay of energy within the individual to provide a healing to the soul—a reconciliation of a split between the “outer-man” or “ego-self” and some “inner-man” or “unconscious self” that longs to live and of which a man may be completely unaware.
From an energetic point of view, sexual attractions, fantasies, and behaviors are fundamental and meaningful patterns of energy that play at creation and development. They are archetypal in the sense that they express the call of a basic power in the depths of the soul that is essentially of a spiritual or sacred nature. These images and sexual acts carry a certain mystery, a certain sense of awe, a certain power that grabs the soul. The experience, whether in fantasy or acted out, can be so powerful that it is capable of lifting one outside of oneself into some transcendent place.
To further explore sexuality and spirituality as interdependent and complementary forces, I invite you to take a look inside my book, The Other Man in Me—Erotic Longing, Lust and Love: The Soul Calling, at https://www.amazon.com/Other-Man-Me-Longing-Calling-ebook/dp/B08N5LQ7NM/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=The+Other+Man+in+Me&qid=1605609653&sr=8-3