Many, if not most, men give love -- or at least something resembling love -- to get sex, and many, if not most, women give sex to get love -- or at least something resembling love. But in either case, sex is just doing time, having been sentenced to slave labor in the sweatshops of our neuroses.

When sex is used as a means of distracting us from our suffering -- and not just now and then, but chronically -- it only reinforces our psychospiritual slumber, both sedating us and giving us a briefly convincing illusion of being connected or something of similar import (like being potent, desirable, or capable of intimacy).

Yet we need to feel, and openly feel, the connection between the bedroom and the rest of our life, beginning with recognizing that sex can be used to illuminate the roots and inner workings of our distress, but only if it is engaged in consciously.

But who really wants to do that? Why should we threaten what seems to be such a dependable outlet, such a quick and easy pleasure-source? We may not want to risk interrupting our sexual exercise. We may not want to see our sexual behavior stripped down to its less appealing aspects -- its mechanicalness, its lies, its tunnel vision, its desperation, its manipulativeness, its unsavory connections. We may not want to see what we are really up to during sex, aside from pleasurably stimulating ourselves. We may not want to see the context within which we are operating before, during, and after sex. And we may not want to see that we don’t want to seriously consider any of the above.

However, if we pay conscious attention to ourselves and our partner in the midst of sexual engagement (beginning with the first signs of erotic interest and foreplay) -- which does not mean dissociating from our partner or from our own experience -- we have a chance, at least some of the time, to view the underpinnings of our suffering with remarkable clarity, as well as our craving to escape from that suffering. We will then literally catch ourselves in the act, realizing that what we tend to do sexually is often but an exaggeration of what we tend to do when we aren’t being sexual.

However reluctantly, we will see through our craving for orgasm, realizing that when we make orgasm the goal we only screw ourselves. We will then no longer so easily exploit the heat of sex’s fire, but will, to a significant degree, make good use of its luminosity, understanding with our entire being that sexual sanity and joy is impossible without a corresponding sanity and joy in the rest of our life.

When we stop depending on sex -- or anything else -- to do it for us, we stop making a problem out of dependency itself, finding in ourselves a strength that is unthreatened by dependency, a strength that serves the ripening of both our individuality and our relationship with the Sacred.

We abuse our sexuality in many ways, not the least of which occurs when we attempt to spiritualize it, burdening it with metaphysical or “tantric” expectations, trying to manipulate it into something “higher” or holier. But sex does not need to be the “gate” to bliss or superconsciousness. Rather, it needs to be liberated from such “high” expectations (and their underlying spiritual ambition), so that it can naturally and spontaneously be expressed, untainted by notions of “higher” or “lower.”

Sex can be profoundly spiritual when we stop trying to engineer it into transpersonal domains -- all that is needed is open-eyed surrender and love. The Wonder and Beauty that we may then find ourselves immersed in is not a familiar something, but an always-fresh arising that cannot help but evoke in us a deep gratitude. We are then not knowers of Spirit, but lovers of It, pulsing together at the edge beyond which there is only God. This asks for lovers of awakened innocence, lovers for whom sex is devotional lust, sacred bodyplay.

Sex is neither salvation nor consolation.

Do not encumber it with hope. Do not become insensitive to its seasons, its tides, its silences, its molten Mystery and edgeless Invitation.

And do not cheapen it with unnecessary stimulation-strategies -- if we need to fantasize (or immerse our attention in titillating inner theater) in order to have “good” sex, then we are not displaying interest in sexual intimacy and depth, but rather only in mind-games whose primary purpose is to maximize both pleasurable sensation and distraction from the more unpleasant aspects of what we are feeling with our sexual partner.

If sexual passion does not simply arise out of mutual love, then why force it, why induce it, why fantasize or rub ourselves into it, why put our sexuality in a pelvic -- or Tantric -- headlock?

“Making love” is often not much more than a matter of making ends meet. The point is not to “make” love, but to make room for love, which in part means nakedly yet discriminatingly entering into Being, into the inconceivable, horizonless Heartland of who and what we fundamentally are, letting that positionless yet paradoxically individuated condition be the ground, the anchor, the unfabricated basis, the animating “center” of whatever we do.

Here, where familiarity loses its solidity to the point of vanishing, sex is already itself, already spontaneously outdancing its surrogates, already out of the grip of its every description and egoic squeezeplay.

Here, sex does not promise Joy, but instead begins with Joy, with love, with uncensored intimacy, with deep trust and faith in the unfathomable Reality of God. Here, sex is love, transparent to Being and yet simultaneously rooted in uncaged passion and caring, shining through both the personal and the transpersonal, no longer burdened by the obligation to make us feel better or more whole.