By Julie Peters | Spirituality Health
In many religious traditions, desire, especially sexual desire, is best to be avoided or carefully repressed. From Christianity to Buddhism, celibacy is understood as an important aspect of the spiritual path. The Dalai Lama, in a 2008 interview in Nigeria points out that celibacy is a good prescription for a calmer life, with “fewer ups and downs,” and that “those who marry always have trouble, and in some cases, it leads to murder or suicide.” Murder or suicide! Of course, that’s true, in some rare cases, but I think the strong statement points to an intuition many of us have about sexual desire—it’s powerful and can be dangerous.
Related Article: 3 Surprising Sexual Insecurities That Most Men Have, But Don’t Express
Behavioral economists Dan Ariely and George Lowenstein were interested in this intuition, so they did a study on how sexual arousal affects rationality and decision-making. Ariely concludes, “Across the board, [the participants] revealed in their unaroused state that they themselves did not know what they were like once aroused. Prevention, protection, conservatism, and morality disappeared completely from the radar screen. They were simply unable to predict the degree to which passion would change them.” When we are in an impassioned state, we are more likely to behave outside of social norms or religiously mandated behavior. Ariely and Lowenstein showed what many of us know intuitively: that sexual desire is intoxicating.
This power, though, can also be used for good. Sex also connects us deeply to another and to the present moment. There’s something about it that’s pure in and of itself. Matt Killingsworth is a researcher on happiness that developed an app called trackyourhappiness.org. He discovered that people were least happy when they were “mind wandering,” thinking about something other than what they were currently doing. This is one of the reasons a long commute can add a lot of stress to your life—it’s the most common place for mind wandering. In activities that are totally absorbing, the mind is not wandering, and people feel happier. The most common place to be totally absorbed was, of course, while having sex.
Related Article: 25 Interesting Things You Should Know About Sex
From some devotional perspectives, sexual energy can be channeled towards connection with the divine. The poet and Islamic scholar Rumi, for example, writes in his steamy poem “Like This”, “If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead, / don’t try to explain the miracle. / Kiss me on the lips. / Like this. Like this.” Sufi mystic and Muslim saint Rabia of Basra writes, “God must get hungry for us; why is He not also / a lover who wants his lovers near?”
How do thy explain asexual people? I saw nothing of that in a very lopsided blog post skewed to encouraging sex :/
Not sure how this is supposed to expand my consciousness. I only have enough blood to expand one organ and I don’t think this is the right one.