Tantra
Follow that spirit that arises in you with puberty. It is an angelic force. Another dimension has entered the picture. Height and depth, valleys and peaks are now a part of the planar landscape you spent your childhood in. And you spend so much of your youth on dishonouring and demeaning your parents for not preparing you for this much more challenging and surprising journey to manhood. Yet those children who have experienced such adult landscape often spend much of their adulthood dealing with the trauma of “seeing G-d’s face” when not yet ready.
It is a new realm of consciousness, and it is what drives us to aspire and create and build and love. In other words, become fully human. Most of us are bent under the burden of all that we have refused, not willing to take the risk of faith, failing in the trials that await us, and prefer to remain safe in the hollow bubble of whatever delusion has fed our desire for safety and security in the name of some other.
For all your young life, you looked at the world as a place of learning and growing. Then, this curve ball enters, and nothing is the same again. Nothing feels the same again, and the rest of your life will be determined by how you tend and nurture your relationship with the erotic in your life. For now, let’s speak of the erotic at that which attracts or awakens your senses. It is a particular sensation, the depth of which one could measure.
N I propose that this “depth” measurement has certain “orbitals”—similar to the electron orbitals (determined by the amount of interacting mass in the orbital) and also that the previous orbital has to be filled (except for certain exceptions) before the higher orbital. Similar to the spiritual path of learning. One has to fill the lower orbital of Assiyah sufficiently before one can begin to grasp the dynamics of the higher orbital of Yetzirah, etc.
Embarking on the adolescent (young man’s) quest for learning—which he now appreciates the importance of in order to become a productive member of his community—there are certain things he learns to do that he “loves” and certain things that he “hates”, and then there is the rest that he does because it is easier than not, and some of them he likes, and even grows to love. How does he know that he loves something? He feels a response an awakening of the same spirit that came to him with his sexual awakening. There is a “sexual” element to it.
Oh, don’t be silly, you might say. A boy is not going to fall in love with his toy soldiers, or his dinky-cars. Really? I beg to differ. He will go on to love mathematics, or building things, or surfing, or swimming… but his true adult initiation begins when he falls in love with the other, his b’shirt, his soul-mate. Do we, can we, only have one? And can that one not, perhaps, feel the same way about you? And how do you tell if its true soul (Neshamah) love, or just ego (Nefesh) love, the love of possession, of claiming beauty, or even just love that is blowing through like the wind (Ruach), a hurricane that will turn your life upside down, but not leave anything to rebuild with, except some exceptionally lovely memories and feelings.
I thought capturing this thought/idea was going to be easy. But its emergence is far trickier than I anticipated. So let me start here instead:
Note: It started when he was still a boy. Not yet experienced in the realm of sex and sexual feelings, he spent most of his adolescence reading, and studying the things that excited him. Later in life, as a young man, he realised later that certain of these topics even excited him physically as well. Like mathematics—I swear to you that that is true—that would stimulate him sexually. Reading Torah too! What a strange twist. Even the Zohar… and highly intellectual dialogues on the Hekhalot, etc. He searched for the answer to this conundrum of his. To whom could he turn? He tried Kabbalists, Tantra, Intimacy workshops… but perhaps it was because he never revealed this part of himself, that he failed.
Thus I remain with the question(s). How to unite these two. In my 50’s I came across much literature that spoke of the deepest mysteries of Kabbalah in very sexual terms. Perhaps there was mention of this in previous readings, but something in me denied its existence—just as I was unable to grasp and express it properly in my own life.
Men do not try to analyse why something exists. They try to find out what it is, and what to do with it – how to use it to best further their needs/goals. You will not be able to eradicate pornography in our society—nor should you. There will always be a percentage of people who like it, and will not change. The rest are seeking some other form of sexual expression, cannot find it, so settle for this release. But it is an existential impulse rising from the biological (Nefesh) need to procreate that is built/programmed into the vivifying soul (Ruach) of the human being.
It is the role of the woman to know what that is—do not expect this of the man. He does not have the capacity to analyse this to find that solution. He will go for the easy fix – pornography, prostitutes, lap-dances, indelicate flirting, etc.