From the very beginning, the awakening of my sexuality was disturbing. This energy rising within me is something taking form inside me as a foreign entity. However, it is not directed toward the sexual act or an orgasm. The orgasm is not a climax to be achieved, but rather something to be avoided. The little death triggers fear; it is the end of a movement of energy and pours itself into ecstasy. It dissipates like water in the sand. It is a waste, not a feeling of happiness, but of loss.
As a teenager, I was maybe fifteen, I had an almost constant erection for a long time and didn't know what to do with it. I played with this energy for months, experimenting with warmth, pressure, friction, and my own body. I never reached an orgasm in the process. When I finally ejaculated after months, I was scared to death. I thought I had broken something.
The erection is something that fills me with happiness, pride, and satisfaction. The orgasm plunges me into shame, sadness, anxiety. I felt that my sexuality did not correspond to what is portrayed in the media in society, and so I fled into this flood of images. I masturbated to pictures of supermodels and followed the development of pornography on the internet. My sexuality seemed to be able to be numbed there. The visual stimulation allowed a choreography, a buildup of a dramaturgy that corresponded to an inner search. It was always a search for intimate moments, encounters and connections of mouths, hands, breasts and penis, stimulation of the clitoris, full-body massages, friction, fluids, contortions and entanglements. In slow motion, the connections of body parts, the meeting of eyes, the devouring of mouths, penetration, surrender and taking, demanding, dominating and sacrificing lust in ecstasy were energies that interested me. They made my erection grow to the point of a trance. My body quivered and trembled. I rode on a wave, always just seconds away from orgasm, at the edge of an abyss. The surrender to the orgasm is plunging into the abyss, the pleasurable, shameful, guilt-ridden surrender to an ecstasy that felt wrong. I never understood why it felt wrong.
That state of self-transcendence could be achieved through visual stimulation, yet without merging with the other, and so masturbation became self-transcendence. However, this path led into a simulation where pleasure turned into something that could be kept under control there. It became a stress regulator, or it was simply serviced just to be put aside, or abused as an energy kick. I felt that sexuality thus became something I controlled, failing to realize that my sexuality was still a long way from finding what it was looking for.
I had fulfilling relationships for most of my life. I had sex with my partners. This sex was different. It was beautiful; I lost myself in the sensuality, let my hands roam over the landscapes of the other's body, penetrated the other, connected with the other's energy. Sometimes this built into a symphony of the senses: rhythm, pauses, ecstasy, fading out, quiet, resurrection, merging, devotion, surrender, letting go, and then demanding again, taking. This included massaging and pressing the other, penetrating them, exchanging glances, the merging of mind, heart, and body. It wasn't often that I managed to reach this level with the other; it was often preceded by long foreplay and sex that felt like hours. The orgasm here was different; it was an explosion, a union, self-transcendence.
Those tantric moments with some of my partners had provided a small glimpse, but we were not capable of exploring it further. We regarded the extraordinary gift uncomprehendingly, frighteningly. Its power was too great to master, too overwhelming to understand, too vast for any ego to withstand.
Romance
I heard a story, full of romance: Two people around 60 fall in love. It is the great love late in life. It describes how happy they are, how much they long for each other, how great the sex is, how difficult it is to truly commit again, and how wonderful it is to then do so. It becomes a fairy tale, my German romantic nature feels addressed. I want that too, I miss a lot of it, the happiness of being a couple. However, there is this idea that we are only complete through the other person.
However, this beautiful idea, which has accompanied humanity since antiquity, leaves out something essential: union with the divine. Can this be separated? Can we experience unity with another and unity with God and understand these as two different kinds of unity? Isn't it rather the case that many choose one or the other? The path of intertwining both—love, the divine, and the physical—is the tantric path. Here, too, there are ways that follow an either-or, that may be so, but on the tantric path it is possible to unite everything. However, this demands a departure from conventions, especially those like in this story or those that lead into monasteries.
Alchemy
In the Asian world, there is the teaching of alchemy. It is an esoteric doctrine concerned with elements, energies, and recipes. Metals, fire, and ingredients are often spoken of, and many misunderstand this as recipes for making gold or tinctures to prolong life. At their core, however, these teachings are encrypted wisdom on how to guide, purify, and direct the body's inner energies toward higher goals. When we harmonize life energy, sexuality, consciousness, intellect, the body, intuition, and our actions, we live more fulfilling lives, and we become complete. It is an alchemy of life.
It has been very difficult for my Western mindset to open up to this alchemy, because the first step is to acknowledge the existence of the individual elements, to perceive them, and to play with them a little. I need guidance for this, which means I have found people who accompany me on this path, occasionally guide me, criticize me, point out dangers, and above all, are patient. Over the past few years, I have met a dozen people who are helping me with this. And so now I am sitting in Ladakh by the Indus River in Alchi, following the paths of the Dharmas, reading about Chinese alchemy, pondering the Upanishads, exploring my heart, and continually trying to understand how this path is fueled by life energy, consciousness, and sexuality.
Sexuality
When I came to India, I shook off many of my bad habits. I eat better, don't drink alcohol or coffee, and abstain from visual sexual stimulation. I had to rediscover my body, relearn the mechanics of erection and masturbation. I learned that my sexuality is underpinned by ideas, fears, and insecurities that blocked me. I had become alienated from my sexuality; routines and avoidance strategies, as well as the constant search for novelty, had buried this powerful energy.
It took years of inner work to untie this knot and reintegrate this energy into the network of life. However, this cleansed and purified energy is so strong that I still cannot control it. It is too ambitious, too impatient to simply engage with the present moment, and so it slowly builds up again through sensuality and eroticism, closeness and resonance. It is a sensuality that integrates, that connects being and consciousness, spirituality and physicality, heart and mind, intuition and action.
It seems to me that this eroticism, which blossoms in the presence of the other, can also be present in meditation, in nature, in temples, and in sleep. And just as the unity of consciousness opens up in deep meditation, eroticism unites the experience of the world. It is the bond that weaves everything together, it expresses itself in arousal, vibration, and resonance, it connects the chakras, it is Kundalini that shows the path to full unfolding.
Visualizations
I have a ambivalent relationship with visualizations. They are certainly helpful in communication and teaching. If we imagine the various energies in the body as gears, give them numerical meaning, and make them shine in colors, then that helps the search, meditation, and work with them. But they are just visualizations. These images are not reality; as copies or diagrams, they are merely forms of representation.
I have always resisted this a bit and take the much longer and more complicated path of direct experience. Every reflection, every thought, even every feeling has an anchor in my inner being. Death, suffering, joy, community, unity, thinking, perceiving, acting – they and much more are anchored in being. The Action Here is a compass: elements, inner and outer senses, organs of action, levels of consciousness. This is the building kit of human life. Everything is composed of it. And just as a child builds a castle with building blocks, we can use these Tattwas to describe the complexity of life by creating images of energy flows, levels of consciousness, and energy fields.
My thinking and acting, my feeling and perceiving extend into reality. We can hardly describe this empirically, rationally, or scientifically, but if we sharpen our perception, it is self-evident. And if we now take these, shall we say, phenomena seriously, understand their universality, and generalize them, we arrive at personifications that present themselves in the form of gods. Here, too, it is evident that emotions exist; we speak of love and fear, sensuality and knowledge, of actions and the creation of meaning. When we stop reducing these to matter and laws and instead perceive them in their existence, they reveal themselves as the countenance of gods.
These images are like a language, a language of religion. Whoever masters it, rules. Whoever knows it can navigate the world faster, but just as the rational mind easily gets lost in language, religion can become a trap. Whoever confuses description with reality becomes alienated. Only when these levels remain connected can we truly evolve. In India, this is the connection of Mantra, Tantra, and Yantra.
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