Everything that we consider in the world involves a consideration of
the relationship between the thing that has evolved into a consciousness
embedded within a body (the subject-self) and all the other things that
are the case in the world (the object-others). Although,
- the sexual relations between the subject-self and object-others is
one of the most intense of experiences that can be recalled (since death
cannot be recalled) and,
- the idea of a subject-self relating to another subject-self an illusion, and
- a relationship between one object-other and another object-other or
an object-other 'thinking' in relation to the subject-self are both
impossible (since the object-other has no consciousness except as a
subject-self regarding another subject-self as object-other),
... any possible relationship between the subject-self and the object-other is of equal potential importance as the sexual act.
Sex
is not privileged in this respect. It is the intensity of the relation
that is the issue here and not either the subject-self in itself nor the
object-other in itself or a valuation of relations without taking into
account this intensity. (The interpenetration of subject self and
object-other is extensible far
beyond sexuality into any possible relation between consciousness and
the world)
It is simply that the sexual drive is most
likely to be one of great intensity for biological reasons and so most
available, at hand, for use, restricted only by social considerations.
Only the active relation between the two (from subject-self to
object-others) can have meaning or power, power and meaning being
intimately related in their relation to the relation between
subject-self and object-other.
However, the quality of
the relation (implying a valuation by the subject-self) now bears
consideration because it can be simple contact (even a fleeting
awareness or lack of awareness that nevertheless enters into the occult
subconscious or into an unconscious from which it may later be
recovered) or it can be increasingly 'intimate' to point of a sense of
'merging' with an object-other.
The ultimate stage of
sexual subject-self/object-other relations is defined by its intimacy.
This is not some fluffy snuggle but a radical engagement in the relation
between the two. It is radical intimacy that creates the 'frisson' that
is misinterpreted as the eternal or the absolute when it is (in fact)
an intense engagement with the contingent and the momentary.
The
only absolute involved is the discovery that there is no absolute and
that the illusion of the absolute is the proof of the contingent and the
momentary. An awakening, an enlightenment, an aufklarung, that declines
to embrace this instantiation of Heraclitean flux is an evasion and so
no enlightenment at all. The power of the experience lies not in the
illusion of the absolute but in the ability to extend moments and join
separate moments to each other in order to create a
consciousness-changing experience that can be experienced also and
simultaneously as detachment.
The continual flow
between subject-self and object-other of moments experienced by the
subject-self in a direct contest with the brute fact of the
object-other, a dialectic of relationships, is the experience that is
then merged into a whole - this is the point at which there is the clear
danger of a wrong interpretation of this as the universal or the
absolute.
Without the dynamic flux of pulsing relations
being sub-consciously perceived as instants unified by the occult will,
there is nothing there but an illusion, a shallow simulacrum of the
real which lies not in the object-other but in the transformative effect
of the dialectic of the relationship between subject-self and
object-other.
We can go further - the subject-self is
an object-other to itself unless and until it enters into this process
of intimate engagement with the relation between itself as subject-self
and itself as object-other. The transformation requires that the dynamic
between subject-self and the external object-other is an analogue and
trigger for a transformative relation between subject-self and the
subject-self as object-other of the period before the act of intimacy.
It
is the realisation of one's own objectification by oneself, the only
objectification that actually matters, that is at stake. As object-other
and subject-self dissolve in the relationship between them so the
subject-self and the subject-self as object-other to itself both
dissolve into each other. The intimacy uses the active set of relations
in the world (subject-self/object-other externally) to trigger an
internal set of relations that is transformative - unless, of course,
the entire externally directed experience is dissipated in an absurd
belief in the absolute and the universal.
The collapse
of subject/object dualism is an occult act within one's own
consciousness, a consciousness which, nevertheless, remains (because it
can be no other way) alienated from the world. The question perhaps then
arises of the 'meaning' of the ambrosia that emanates from the
'friction' between subject and object in the sexual act.
This
is always the emanation from the female - the object in the cultic
practice - that is, the fluids created by erotic pleasure and expressed
as some form of ejaculate. We can take this analogically or literally.
Literally,
the female ejaculate is a proof of pleasure and engagement of vastly
greater import than the male ejaculate which, of course, in the
traditional form of cultic practice, is actually not expended. The
Taoist version has the male ejaculate drawn back into the body and the
tantric has the female ejaculate 'imbibed'.
Analogically,
it might be seen as the emanation from the object-other - that which
exists outside the subject-self - entering into and transforming the
subject-self. It is a physicalisation of what might be called spiritual
but is (to be in conformity with our own theme) the analogical
expression of the felt acquisition of the other as transformative tool
in relation to the subject-self.
Interestingly, at his
point, Abhinavagupta [Yogasamcara] refers to the union of fire and moon
in a context where fire is specifically the subject and moon is
translated as the 'known' with the idea of the sun as 'knowledge' or
'what is known about the known'. You would think that what is known and
the state of knowing what is known ['knowledge'] are logically the same
thing but the differentiation is there and must mean that the mental
state of knowing about the known is different from the thing known -
wholly counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. This thing the 'known'
is in a state of relationship or exchange with the subject and the
'known' is 'known' through the sexual dynamic.
The
'ambrosia' (or 'cum' and related juices) is what can be 'known' about
the 'known' (the ambiguity about this is that the tantric is claiming
full knowledge in this whereas we disagree and suggest that the 'known'
is only a taking of part of this thing which remains essentially
unknown). In any case, what is felt to be known or experienced to be
known is analogically represented by the physicality of female juices of
which, of course, there are, not so mysteriously, more than one.
The
symbolism has what is known being known by the subject through action
that transmutes the bodily organs into secretions that represent the
orgasmic experience of the transcendent ... though we might better say
the transcendent experience arising from the orgasmic. This is sexual
heat, a lighting up and a shaking off of time itself.
To
bring this (literally) down to earth, the flow of felt energy derives
from the fact of matter, the fact of the matter, through the medium of
the perceiving self, flowing back into the world of matter through the
perceiving subject as a re-perception of the world as something
transformed.
The underlying nature of matter has not changed (and so this is not magick in the Western sense) but, in the changed
perception of matter, the function of matter to the subject changes, its
meaning.
Thus, matter is, in fact, transformed to the degree that what is
perceived about matter is to be regarded as matter to all intents and
purposes (since the perceiving self is not a detached scientist or
analyst but someone who lives in the world in time as really existing
experience).
As far as the subject-self is concerned,
the world has changed. This is a process that, in being wholly a-social,
transforms the relationship between the perceiving subject and the
other, the social context of the other and the perceived materiality
underpinning the social that underpins both other and subject-self. It
is potentially total with only the base substrate of matter and being
itself unchanged.
It is a shift of position or stance
from looking away from the sun into the shadows of a cave and towards
the sun and away from the cave. The sexual transformation of the body is
thus a sexual transformation of the social and so of the material in
its use-value to self, other and society. Sexual intercourse transforms
the social and the social transforms the material (techne).
This
is what we have to hold on to - that the material body of the
subject-self in converging mindlessly with another material body in an
exchange of energetics and fluids transforms perception and, since the
world is a world defined by perception, so changes the world. Which
helps us understand why sexuality is so threatening to the meanings used
to maintain social order.
The central thing to
remember here is that we are engaged in a process rather than a thing.
Something is expressed outwards, in bodily fluids, but something is also
consequently and relatedly, but still mysteriously to the experiencing
subject, being absorbed back into the subject-self - not the material
fluids which are an epiphenomenon but something ineffable: '
the swan of dazzling whiteness drinks the world and says with immense joy: I am That."
The
satisfaction of the self arises from awareness of the thing that
emerges from the process, illusory to the world and real to the self,
which is the no-self. And the most powerful of such experiences may be
required only once to transform a relationship to the world. The insight
is an antinomian one. It is also not one for 'swingers' or repetitive
or addicted sexual animals. Once it is realised that the illusion of the
universal is a pragmatic reality in experience and in that quality is
no longer an illusion, we are engaged in a profound paradox that permits
the holding of a contradiction in logic as a truth regardless of logic.
The
insight is then applied to the world in general - the self in the world
has become beyond good and evil in its knowledge of the world and it
makes the necessary choices from then on rather than have those choices
thrust upon it. This is the knowledge that was forbidden Man by God in
the myth and which
auctoritas has, ever since, been trying to contain and evade.
There
is another aspect of this which goes against the essentially socialised
nature of formal religion - it is that the impulse is towards the
'self' as something really existing and with a core of creative being.
Post-modern philosophy often likes to deny the self - in a perfect
expression of the death instinct - but it is tenacious precisely because
it hangs on in the face of an inevitable unavoidable death.
The
universe is created not externally (at this moment of orgasm of which
we speak) but from within and then outwards. Each consciously developed
orgasm is a creation of the subject-self's universe, a sort of Big Bang,
although it dissolves quickly enough back into its origin. Briefly, a
new universe, unlike this one, was created and destroyed, leaving a
residue of itself to change the old.
Experiential
subjectivity is precisely what makes all this possible. Objective
analysis of an internal condition can never, in itself, create an
existential change in one's condition. Experiential subjectivity is
embedded in the body which cannot be the 'other' for objective analysis
under such conditions of experience.
This thing, the
body, in which one is embedded, may be 'correctly analysed' objectively
speaking but this correct analysis cannot change the body directly - the
body can only be changed by the subsequent application of technology.
The body in its relationship to the world can, however, be transformed
by experience within the subject-self and so the world, in which the
body is embedded, can be changed.
This suggess both a
transhumanist truth (the body changed by technology) and a
sexual-socialist truth (the world changed by experience). The final
albeit pseudo-harmonious state is when the subject-self and the world
are recalibrated. The world is 'renovated' by experience. The world
before and after the experience are objectively the same thing but
subjectively are 'worlds apart'.