Over the last years, one central and ongoing area of inquiry, for me, is sexuality, relationship, intimacy, or what some traditions call Eros. I attended a few workshops last summer with the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA.life), which I find to be very powerful, challenging, and transformative work. As many of you know, I made my own mistakes when I was younger, after I suddenly became famous in middle age, following a common pattern for many men. Since then, I have been watching, studying, and researching in this area.
The topics that fascinate me most are the ones where my own individual, embodied experiences meet the experience of the collective. This was the case with psychedelics, where I couldn’t understand why my society rejected and ridiculed the profound explorations of the many layers and dimensions of consciousness I started to discover (or recover) when I tripped. I believe that sexuality remains an edge for our culture, an area that we have still not managed to fully address or integrate, where there is still a lot of unconsciousness and shadow. To paraphrase Carl Jung: We don’t get enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Because sexual energy is life force energy (sometimes called chi or prana), how it is expressed and channeled, how society honors it, makes use of it, or represses it, is very essential to how that society functions. I live in the East Village of Manhattan, and every weekend night, my entire neighborhood becomes a chaotic, dismal, drunken, largely dissatisfying mating ritual for hordes of identically attired young people. It seems a tragic waste of time and energy for all of these young people, who could be cultivating themselves in more intentional and meaningful ways.
Sigmund Freud famously argued that civilization required the suppression or “sublimation” of Eros toward the goal of building cathedrals and skyscrapers, fighting wars, building missiles, and so on. In the 1950s, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote his masterpiece, Eros and Civilization, where he proposed that authentic liberation of sexuality would lead to an emancipated society. A few decades later, confronting the failure of the sexual revolution of the 1960s to transform the world as he had hoped, he coined the term, “repressive desublimation:” Essentially, he saw that, while permissive sexuality was now culturally accepted, this had been orchestrated in such a way that the “desublimation” supported the exploitative, repressive force of Capitalist modernity.
I find it extraordinary how, in recent years, so many spiritual and esoteric communities have been decimated by charges of sexual misconduct against the leaders or gurus, sometimes years or decades after the fact. For example, I just read “Secrets of Shambhala: In Pema Chodron’s Shadow”, by Be Scofield (who specializes on exposés on fallen gurus and cults). I love the writing of Chogyam Trungpa, the alcoholic “crazy wisdom” master of Shambhala, who was close friends with Allen Ginsberg and a major inspiration for many. It is difficult for me to accept the many claims against him, but they seem well-documented and irrefutable. We have seen the same pattern with Yogi Bhaijan, Bikram Choudhury, Sogyal Rinpoche, Geshe Michael Roche, Swami Vivekananda Saraswati, John of God, many ayahuasca shamans… the list is endless.
My current “pet theory” on this topic (also based on personal experience) is the following: Basically, while we like to think we are intelligent, rational, and in some communities “spiritual,” we are also, essentially, apes: Primates, whether wearing suits or sarongs. Subliminally, when a man is in a position of power — the one up on the podium, stage, or screen — women tend to identify that man as the “Alpha Male.” In primate communities, the Alpha Male has, more or less, sexual access to all of the females — until that time when they become sick or weak, at which point the Beta Males organize to overthrow their leader, and then fight among themselves for who will take on the Alpha role. Whether in a “spiritual” community or in the DJ booth, or in media, finance, or some other industry, as long as the Alpha is perceived as dominant, their coworkers and minions tend to support and enable their bad behavior, as if in a kind of collective trance or hypnotized state. This explains why someone like Pema Chodron — so intelligent and perceptive in many ways — will continue to defend Trungpa, her teacher, even when the brutal facts are out on the table.
If we can step back to look at our situation through perspectives drawn from evolutionary and social psychology, we might start to get beyond the current, knee-jerk reaction to blame the men or the male species as a whole. We can understand the archetypal or primordial pattern which we can then seek to address, by developing more consciousness, more awareness and intention, as we seek to transform the underlying, often invisible, dynamics. I feel this requires men and women working and discovering together, developing a new level of complicity.
I will go deeper into this theme in future essays, but for today, I want to introduce my interview with Chloe Macintosh, founder of Kama, a sexual wellness App. I met Chloe at Medicine Festival, and was impressed by her insights and intelligence. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. You can also watch and share it on YouTube (please subscribe to my channel):
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