In his new book, The Red Thread of Passion, David Guy explores the idea that sex and spirituality are not at odds, but are intimately related. The title comes from a Zen koan: “Why is it that the most clear-eyed monk cannot sever the red thread of passion between his legs?” To address the question, Guy profiles some of the pioneers of reconciling sex and spirituality — Walt Whitman, Alan Watts, D. H. Lawrence — and interviews contemporary thinkers and activists. The book begins with a personal account of how the author has wrestled with the issue in his own life. The following is an edited excerpt from that chapter.
— Ed.
I was raised in a middle-class Protestant household and took religion seriously; for a while, at the age of ten, I wanted to be a minister. But my true spiritual life went on inside me, and I told no one about it, as if I were ashamed of it.
I was obsessed in those days with the concepts of infinite space and eternal time. They seemed to be two sides of the same coin, because they terrified me in exactly the same way, and I associated them both with the night. In particular, I associated the vastness of infinite space with a dark sky. Nothingness was black. I pictured myself utterly alone, in a black space scattered with stars. That was infinite space. Trying to conceptualize eternity in heaven, I pictured a world floating around in the clouds where everybody was happy all the time. But I couldn’t imagine its going on forever. There was something deeply disturbing about such a concept: Wouldn’t you be afraid it was going to end, no matter what anybody said? Didn’t there have to be something toward which all this was heading? And what could that be, except an end?
I had similar problems at the beginning of eternity: If the universe was created at a particular moment, what came before that? (And before that? And before that?) How could anything, even God, always exist? There had to be a moment when God first became aware of himself.
Many schoolkids ask, “If God created everything, who created God?” but I took the question more seriously than most. It worried me to death. It led to the ultimate existential question: Why is there anything? I wanted to know if God asked that question. The religion I was raised in said that God knows the answers to all questions, but I didn’t buy it. How could he know the answer to that? How could there be an answer?
Unless it isn’t a question, but just a fact: we are here, and no one — not even an ultimate being — can ever know why. That thought raises an anxiety that I think of, in a play on words, as “the fear of God”: the ultimate being in the universe does not know why it is here, and is therefore afraid.
I was shielded from this fear throughout my childhood by sexual fantasy. From as early as I can remember — certainly from the age of five — I had dreams of embracing and kissing a beautiful woman. She was the movie starlet of the early fifties: tall and curvaceous, with large, warm lips. She would fold me in her arms and give me a long, long kiss, which was the closest thing movies showed in those days to a sexual act. One movie kiss especially thrilled me: the woman sat in the man’s lap and tossed her extremely long hair over his head as she kissed him, so that they were hidden from view. That was the kiss I wanted. Its blissful image carried me off to sleep every night.
It is said that very young boys masturbate, but I don’t remember doing that. I didn’t connect this image with my penis but with a feeling of warmth throughout my body. I would lie in bed reveling in that image until, at some point, I would go to sleep.
The pattern I established in those early years stayed with me into adulthood: I escaped anxiety by daydreaming about sex. It was the only distraction strong enough to pull my mind away not just from that deep existential anxiety, but from all the fears of my life — which all, in some way, went back to that deepest one. I believe that, at its heart, fear is a religious feeling. Thus sex for me was connected to spirituality: they were like two cats rolling around in a fight, their claws sunk so deeply into each other that they couldn’t let go.
I discovered masturbation soon enough, and it became linked with my fantasies, as if they existed for it, though the fantasies had come first. I am astonished, as I look back, by how much I masturbated, far more than anyone would do for mere pleasure. It is a measure of the anxiety I must have been feeling. I rubbed myself raw. I was an overweight, self-conscious adolescent, tongue-tied around girls, so masturbation was the only sex I would have until I was twenty. My disgust with my body drove me even further into my head, away from my experience.
The source of much of my early religious questioning was the church’s idiotic attitude toward sex. The answer it offered — wait until you are married, and then have sex only with that one woman, whom you will love all your life — seemed ludicrous. It was as if the church advocated keeping a raging bull around the house as a pet. I had also recently discovered literature, and most of the writers I admired — Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters — took a dim view of the church. But no book I read in my youth had as devastating an impact on my religious convictions as Mark Twain’s posthumous collection Letters from the Earth.
To some extent, Letters from the Earth is the work of the village atheist: it takes the myths that Christian fundamentalists have accepted as hard reality and blasts them apart with devastating wit and intelligence. (One particularly damning fact, I remember, was the number of insects that must have been present on Noah’s ark.) This assault didn’t leave much of my religious heritage standing. And Twain not only seemed more intelligent than anyone in the church; he also seemed to care more. He questioned religion with the passion of a true believer.
I became a libertine of the mind, too timid to be adventurous in life, but with ideas as wild as anyone’s. I passed through adolescence at the moment when censorship laws were being lifted in this country, and I had the enormous thrill of reading the great banned works when they were first published here, in the midsixties. I went from the mild fare of James Gould Cozzens and Grace Metalious to The Story of O and the Marquis de Sade in the space of about a year. Of all the writers I read during that impressionable and fertile time, none — not even Twain — is more important to me than Henry Miller.
I had been longing, in my stifled youth, for someone to tell me what sex was like, and Miller did. His wild, almost surrealistic descriptions gave me some idea of how much fun sex could be. He inspired in me the certainty that it was best to tell the truth about this subject, to be as bold and explicit as I could. Since reading Henry Miller, I have never thought it would be better if we just didn’t talk about it.
In college, I was rescued from my virginity by the woman who would become my first wife, but my sexual fantasy life still fed on anxiety and was insatiable. It didn’t matter how much sex my body had: my mind was always ready for more.
In my midtwenties, when I was chairman of the English department at a secondary school, I began to experience a pain beneath my breastbone. It felt like a tightening, a pressure, a slight burning. I had no idea what it was, but it seemed to get worse. Finally, I went to a doctor, who said it could be “gastritis” (which was probably Latin for “tightening, pressure, slight burning”). He modified my diet, put me on a mild stomach tranquilizer, and told me to buy some antacids.
It was the first time in my life I’d had chronic pain, and it seemed alien and mysterious. I would wake up every morning hoping I wouldn’t feel it, but soon — often before I got out of bed — I would, and as the day wore on I’d feel it more and more. My body would tighten around it, and by the end of the day I’d be stiff and awkward, with a flashing pain burning at my heart. The pills didn’t seem to do much good. Neither did the antacids, nor my new diet. I was a nervous wreck.
One spring morning, I awoke with the scent of honeysuckle drifting in on the breeze, and I lay there in despair, longing to be without pain. My wife woke up, and I turned to embrace her, hoping to relax in the one way that never failed me. I noticed when we touched that I wasn’t as excited as usual — the pain seemed to cut me off from my body — but I didn’t figure it mattered. I slipped my half-erect penis into her, expecting the prolonged, relaxed lovemaking we usually had. Instead, I ejaculated after two or three strokes with a feeble shudder that felt like an accident. “What was that?” my wife said.
“I don’t know,” I said, flushing all over, breaking out in a cold sweat. I tried to laugh. “I don’t know what happened.”
I couldn’t work. I couldn’t eat (at least, not what I wanted). I couldn’t sleep. Now I couldn’t make love.
If there was one part of me that didn’t fit in with Christianity, one part that I kept having to cram into a little box where it didn’t belong, it was my sexual self. My old erotic imagination had not disappeared when I’d started attending church. If anything, it had flowered.
I had enjoyed teaching and thought I was good at it, but I felt my real vocation was writing. After years of scribbling away at stories during vacations, I decided to write a novel. I had the enormous energy and ambition of youth; I would go to bed early every evening and get up at five o’clock to give myself a couple of hours at my desk. I loved those mornings as I sat there with a strong cup of coffee, watched the sun come up, and did the work that used my best energies.
I had been circulating stories ever since college but had never had any accepted. Still, I had always been sure my first novel would be published. When I got home from work one afternoon and saw that my manuscript had been returned, it was a blow to the heart.
Around the same time, I had started attending church again, primarily because I felt a spiritual need. I genuinely wanted a tradition and figured that the Presbyterian Church in which I’d been raised was as good as any. I threw myself into it the same way I did everything else.
When I look back on my life in the church, what I remember most is tremendous effort. There was something that I had to believe. That’s what being a Christian was to me: believing in some doctrine. I read huge tomes of theology — Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, the Catholic Hans Kung — trying to find a way that I, as an intelligent person experienced in the world, could accept what the Church taught. There were moments when I felt at one with it, but then my faith would lapse. I felt I had to be faithful all the time. I had to hold steady.
Though I was trying to be a Christian, I hadn’t given up the convictions of my youth. I still thought Twain and Miller were right. And if there was one part of me that didn’t fit in with Christianity, one part that I kept having to cram into a little box where it didn’t belong, it was my sexual self. My old erotic imagination had not disappeared when I’d started attending church. If anything, it had flowered. I had a fulfilling sex life, but my imagination was as infinite as the anxiety that fueled it, and always wanted more. I had a fascination with pornography and also began to visit massage parlors. Both of these activities expressed a lifelong fantasy of a place — which I imagined simply as a small room — where a woman would do anything I wanted (in this case, if I paid enough) and where my acts would have no consequences (as long as nobody saw me sneaking out of the place). I dreamed of this small room where I wasn’t under the pressure of the outside world, where my stomach didn’t hurt, and where I never felt like a failure.
I finally stumbled into a counselor’s office. He was a pastoral-care counselor, a minister, and I discussed my theological questions with him. He had the good sense to recognize that I was working as a teacher when I wanted to be a writer. He got this point across by having me go home and make a list of the five most important things in my life. Teaching — which occupied nine or ten hours of my day — wasn’t one of them. I saw that it was better to admit to the world what I wanted, even if I fell flat on my face pursuing it. I was squeezing writing into a small corner of my life, when the place it held in my heart was much larger.
The next year, my wife and I moved to another city in North Carolina, and I rode to work every day on a rickety secondhand bicycle. My job at a university library didn’t start until noon, but I would go to a carrel in the stacks and write for a few hours before I began. I was composing the book that would become my first published novel. It was lonely at first, not having seventh-graders hanging all over me, and our income had taken a severe drop. My wife was also working part time. But she was happier, I was happier, and the tightness in my chest began to diminish. I was learning the long process of living, and writing, from the heart. I had stopped, for the time being, going to church at all.
Writing was my first spiritual discipline. I actually made it into a spiritual discipline before I even knew what one was, because that was the way to get the work done. My writing hours were as regular as a monk’s, and I built my day around my vocation: writing in the morning, exercise in the afternoon, reading in the evening. It became my religion, and I believed it would lead to my salvation.
Writing was a spiritual discipline also because it put me in touch with the energy of creation, made me stare into the void out of which that energy came. The initial encounter with the blank page was terrifying. To get past it, I would do extremely rapid and often sketchy rough drafts, then spend days and weeks rewriting them. In my early years, those drafts were so rapid and sketchy that it was as if I were trying not to be aware, just to close my eyes and do it. Staring into the void that all writers — all creators — must face was causing me tremendous anxiety. And I escaped it in the same old way.
My forays into illicit sex bore a relationship to my writing. I felt those urges most strongly on the first day of a project, when I was facing the anxiety of the void, and on the last, when I faced the emptiness of being finished (and when I often gave in to the temptation, as if rewarding myself). The last day of work was often a short one, of typing or revising, and when it was done I had a lot of leftover energy. I was all dressed up with no place to go. So I went someplace — and undressed.
I believed that, to explore the vast and fascinating realm of sex, I would have to have a wide variety of experiences. I did just about everything I’d imagined, one way or another. My experiences of paying for sex were split along the same lines as all my other sexual encounters: some were deeply satisfying and a lot of fun; others were terrible.
I gave up going to massage parlors not because of anything about the experiences themselves, but because the compulsion became too powerful. Whenever I had some free time and spare money, the temptation was irresistible. I couldn’t understand why I was at the mercy of this desire, which often expressed itself in that familiar ache under my breastbone. The only way to soothe it, I had decided, was to hold it against a woman’s body.
I think of the therapist I began seeing at that point as my first spiritual teacher. He was a tall, well-built, handsome man whose very posture in his chair — utterly open to what I was saying — embodied presence. He was accepting of everything I told him, and I found his attention profoundly healing. Much of what he taught was awareness practice. “Just try to stay with it,” he would say in response to whatever feeling I brought up. He led me to other spiritual teachers, including Krishnamurti, and also encouraged me to use writing as part of my therapy.
After my change from teacher to writer, I had looked for a new church, but the part of me no church would accept was growing more prominent, not less, because I was writing about it, and I had become extremely impatient with Protestant religious ritual — all that singing and reading and talking to God.
While working at the university, I had my first encounter with Buddhist thought, though I didn’t recognize it as such. The student newspaper printed many letters to the editor from a professor named Roger Corless, who taught Eastern religions and would later write a book called The Vision of Buddhism. His letters captivated me, made a kind of sense I had never heard before; addressing some campus controversy, he wouldn’t dive into the same old dispute but would reframe it in a new way. About sex, he said that anything you do with your deepest energy is a sexual act, and I simultaneously had no idea what he was talking about and felt absolutely sure he was right.
By then, I was bristly on the whole subject of religion; I yearned for some kind of spiritual life but couldn’t find anything that seemed right. I was surprised when a friend mentioned my “anger” on this subject; I would have said I was disappointed. I brought the matter up with my therapist.
“You are angry,” he said.
“I don’t know why I’d be angry.”
He got an odd look on his face, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to say something. Then he said, “I know why.”
He had five clients at that moment, he told me, who felt the same anger, and all of them had been adolescents when their fathers died.
He had just hit upon the most tender fact of my life.
“What’s my father’s death got to do with it?” I asked.
“Adolescence is a time of great religious questioning,” he said. “Then this thing happens that turns your whole world upside down and seems so unfair. Instead of acknowledging those feelings and letting you have them, people offer feeble explanations: ‘It was all for the best.’ ‘God has a plan.’ ”
I’d heard many such statements after my father died, when I was sixteen.
“Those people mean well,” my therapist said, “but they’re missing the point. They need to let you roar.”
Roaring was something I hadn’t done.
Mark Twain was eleven when his father died. He expressed his rage in biting comedy, often hilarious, but full of the bitterness of a man who deeply wanted to believe. I have sensed the same passion in other famous atheists, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, who also lost their fathers when they were young.
People assumed that because I didn’t believe what they did, I didn’t believe anything, but that wasn’t true. One week, during my long writing mornings, I wrote what I did believe, the tenets of the tiny sect (one member) to which I belonged — not to show anyone, just to have done it. Not long after that, I read a book that it seemed everyone had read and been influenced by in the sixties — everyone except me. The book came closer than anything else to tracing the outlines of my little sect. Suddenly, I felt I wasn’t entirely alone in the universe. There was a centuries-old spiritual tradition much in accord with what I believed. The book was Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen.
In the meantime, I had to roar. That knot beneath my breastbone now seemed to be unfelt rage, and in order to begin feeling my anger I did some typically macho things: I bought a heavy punching bag and pounded on it, sometimes until my knuckles were bloody. I beat the hell out of my therapist’s office with a foam-rubber encounter bat, screaming and stomping like a lunatic. It was frightening to discover the depth of my rage. Those sessions managed to untie the knot in my chest, but they were exhausting and would leave me sore for days afterward. I thought that there must be another way. A man shouldn’t have to exhaust himself to feel his emotions.
Another kind of therapy that put me in touch with my emotions and healed the pain in my chest was massage — the legitimate, legal kind. The real reason to get a massage is just that it feels good, but for me, it was also a learning experience. A woman touching my naked body had always been sexual, but this type of massage was not, or at least it wasn’t genital. The one part of my body toward which all such touching had previously been directed was the only part not being touched. This brought the rest of me into focus. A man cut off from his feelings is cut off from his body, where they reside. As my masseuse slowly touched me, part by part, I discovered that beneath the anger I’d held in my chest was a great sadness. There seemed to be more emotion beneath that.
I knew there was further to go, but therapy had taken me as far as it could.
The sexual problems of many middle-aged men are the symptoms of a spiritual crisis that has nothing to do with sex. Men are rummaging around in their small rooms looking for the solution — younger women, better gadgets, subtler techniques — when the real answer is outside the room altogether.
The subject of religion came up again when, three years after my first wife and I split up, I fell in love with a woman for whom religion was extremely important. She had been raised a Catholic, had done social-justice work with priests and nuns in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and was now planning to go to divinity school in Cambridge. We argued about religion, but Buddhist practice, which interested her also, was a kind of meeting place. She said that when we moved to Cambridge we should take a course together at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. I went along with her suggestion, though I would never have gone by myself. I had been burned too many times in the past.
Buddhist practice — at least, as it was presented to us — skirted my problems with religion. It didn’t posit a set of beliefs to which you subscribed, but simply instructed you to sit down and see what you saw. It didn’t involve talking to God, or singing to God, or petitioning God, all of which I found ridiculous (since God knows what we really need better than we do). It didn’t mention God at all. It seemed to assume that whatever reality there was would present itself if you just sat and were open to it — which was what I had always believed. In addition, Buddhist practice gave specific suggestions about how to be open.
I found the actual experience of meditation difficult. Our class met in a dim, cold basement, and the ethic of silence around the place seemed unfriendly. I wasn’t good at meditating: I developed physical pains, I couldn’t stick with the breathing, and my mind was full of cascading thoughts.
Yet something about the practice, even in those early weeks, captured my devotion. I couldn’t do it, but it seemed worth doing. I loved the immediacy of it, the down-to-earth quality; people weren’t asking what I believed or telling me what they believed. Week after week, all the teacher told us was the instructions, and all we talked about was what happened as we sat. This was a new way of looking into the self and encountering the body. In fact, it was as if I’d never encountered it before.
My stay in Cambridge, though rich and rewarding, was one of the more difficult transitional periods of my life. I had recently turned forty. My son had gone off to college. And I had moved away from North Carolina, where I’d lived for more than twenty years, leaving behind many friends, a men’s group, my therapist, my masseuse, and what little reputation I had as a writer.
I’d just published my fourth novel, but a novel that I’d written since then had been turned down, and I couldn’t even get a book-review assignment in Cambridge. My girlfriend (soon to be my second wife) had moved there for a purpose and had immediately plunged into intense activity and a new group of friends, but I had moved just to be with her. I found myself losing confidence and feeling unsure of my identity. I was also — and this does not seem unrelated — having trouble with sex. For years I’d had one way of operating, in that small room I knew so well. To compound matters, my brother had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was facing the possibility of never having sex again (to say nothing of the fact that he might die). I had a sympathetic reaction to his news: I could hardly function at all.
There is no lack of material on middle-aged men’s problems with sex. Magazine articles abound, as do books with titles like Sex over Forty and Sex over Fifty. (As the baby boomers age, I’m sure we’ll see Sixty, Seventy, and Eighty.) The traditional answer has been to find younger and better-looking women: mistresses (if you’re a wealthy businessman) or students (if you’re a professor or a wayward Zen master) or prostitutes (if you can scrape up the money for a young whore). This neatly puts the blame for the man’s dysfunction on the woman by assuming that middle-aged women aren’t attractive.
Articles and books — which can’t openly recommend the traditional solution — suggest more realistic expectations, more advanced sexual techniques, direct stimulation of the penis, a finer grade of porn flick. I am convinced, however, that the sexual problems of many middle-aged men are the symptoms of a spiritual crisis that has nothing to do with sex. Men are rummaging around in their small rooms looking for the solution — younger women, better gadgets, subtler techniques — when the real answer is outside the room altogether. It is a matter of discovering what sexual energy really is, something like what Roger Corless meant when he said that anything you do with your deepest energy is a sexual act. It is a matter not of looking for sex in new places but of seeing that sex is everywhere.
This is the sex of the Chink in Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, who seems able to have sex at will; of the Zen master described by Alan Watts who “on one occasion . . . made it with his lady friend sixteen times in twenty-four hours.” It is what Walt Whitman meant when he celebrated “the body electric,” what D. H. Lawrence meant when he said that sex “consists in infinite different flows between the two beings, different, even apparently contrary. Chastity is part of the flow . . . as is physical passion. And beyond these, an infinite range of subtle communication which we know nothing about.” It is what Marco Vassi understood when he said,“The bodhi is the body”; what former porn star Annie Sprinkle refers to when she says, “When you truly let your sexual energy flow freely throughout your entire being, you feel as if you’re making love every moment of every day, with everything and with everyone.” There is no real prescription for finding it (though some people do offer techniques) and no easy way to describe it. For me, the energy has arisen in many different situations:
- I was meditating early one morning while my second wife slept. When I finished, I noticed she was awake, and I got into bed with her. I have been known to be too insistent about sex in the morning, but this time I wasn’t thinking about sex at all. As I embraced her, I had a feeling I’d never had before; it was as if I could feel her energy through her skin, all over her body. It was racing and seemed to flow into me. I got a powerful erection. (The erections that I’m describing in these anecdotes are not the kind that someone gives you; they are the kind you just get, like a force of nature. They are much harder and more solid than the usual erection. They are the kind of erection cultures build monuments to.) “You want to have sex,” my wife said. “How can you tell?” I said. Actually, I didn’t care about having sex. It couldn’t have been any more blissful than feeling her energy.
- A number of times, while sitting on my meditation cushion, I’ve experienced that same feeling of rushing energy. One morning, I felt it for almost three hours, both sitting and walking, and I remember thinking, quite distinctly, This is better than sex. This is better than any sex I’ve ever had.
- My wife and I returned to North Carolina after she finished her degree, and — following a nine-day meditation retreat — I visited my old masseuse. During the massage, she dug her fingers under the base of my skull, and I felt a falling sensation, as if I’d just stepped into an elevator shaft, but I never landed. The space I’d fallen into was vast and full of energy. It felt as if the energy existed both outside and inside me. I also had an overwhelming feeling of love. As usual, I got a monumental erection. I later asked my masseuse if she’d felt that energy. (I didn’t mention the love part, which was slightly embarrassing.) “No,” she said, “I didn’t feel any energy. But I felt an enormous feeling of love — not for you, particularly. It was just love.”
I have learned more about sex on a meditation cushion than I ever did in a whorehouse. . . . Often, as I’ve sat on the cushion, I’ve noticed that sexual thoughts aren’t accompanied by any feeling in the body at all. My body doesn’t want sex. It’s all in my head.
My meditation teacher, Larry Rosenberg, describes this place of peace and energy and love — which people sometimes reach in deep meditation states — as the abode of silence. “We’ve all entered it many times,” he says, “because every night, the experts tell us, we have four or five hours of dreamless sleep. It’s the same thing: the ego isn’t present.”
During that dreamless sleep, men have an erection. It’s as if the body, in its deepest and most natural and energetic state, with the ego not present, is sexual.
I have learned more about sex on a meditation cushion than I ever did in a whorehouse. I have learned, for instance, that a great deal of what I thought of as sexual excitement was the result of thought, of images that come and go, stimulated by certain conditions — often, in my case, a feeling of anxiety. Given enough thought, for instance, I can work myself into the conviction that if I don’t go to a massage parlor, I’ll go crazy. But it is all just thought, what D. H. Lawrence calls, with almost audible contempt, “sex in the head.” Even if I actually went to the massage parlor, it would still be sex in the head. (A lot of what passes for physical sex in this world is only in the head.) It wouldn’t belong to that deeper experience of the body that I felt in massage and that morning with my wife. Often, as I’ve sat on the cushion, I’ve noticed that sexual thoughts aren’t accompanied by any feeling in the body at all. My body doesn’t want sex. It’s all in my head.
What stimulates sexual thought most readily for me is fear. Beneath the anger I discovered in therapy and the sadness I discovered on the massage table — and interwoven with them both — is fear, the emotion that I most often encounter on meditation retreats. All of these emotions express themselves in that now familiar knot beneath my breastbone. Last year, on the ninth day of a nine-day retreat, I was finally able to do what my teacher had been telling me all along: just to be with that feeling, not to try to get rid of it or change it in any way, just to be intimate with that knot in my chest. I was with it for almost the whole day. And I was afraid all day. But in that intimacy I discovered tremendous energy. We did the usual eight or nine sittings, and I got up from each one as if it had been about thirty seconds. Walking meditation was equally effortless. And after lunch I took my usual three-mile walk — wearing heavy boots, with ten inches of snow on the ground — and it was a breeze. It was like walking across the street.
The fear I am speaking of is what I referred to earlier as “the fear of God.” It is the fear felt by an aware being in an infinite and mysterious universe — the same fear that kept me up nights, made me stroke my penis raw, stimulated illicit affairs, chased me into porn parlors and into the arms of whores. But it is energy, and by running from it — as I did for most of my life — I was running from energy. We can call it creative energy, spiritual energy, sexual energy, but there is only one energy, and you don’t tap into it by running from it. You tap into it by turning toward it, what the great teacher, writer, and mystic Eihei Dogen called taking “the backward step that turns the light inward to illumine the self.” When you do that — or so they tell me; I have only stuck my toe in that ocean — you discover that everything is the self. The self is everything. The vast, empty universe that I am afraid of is me.
“The Beautiful Woman and the Fear of God” is excerpted from The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex (Shambhala). © 1999 by David Guy. It appears here by permission of the author.
