Soul Sex: Hidden Driver behind Romantic Love?

From a 2009 Qi Flows Naturally newsletter>

The question that few ask: is full sexual completion achievable, through either a
romantic sexual love relationship OR an internal spiritual practice?

Another way to ask: is it possible to embody an integrated
male-female state (divine androgyny) while still living
in a male or female sexed physical body?

Is the very desire of our soul to integrate its male and female
halves the hidden driver behind all sexual and romantic
love?

If Romantic Love cannot satisfy this soul quest, is it doomed to tragic failure?

                                             ————-

I have been exploring variants of these questions for
decades. My current premise: humans have a binary or
split soul. This soul tension flows into our sexed
body-mind. Many spiritual practices seems to target the
mind, rather than the soul. Is there a way to
energetically resolve this sexual tension at the soul
level?

Recently I had a breakthrough, a new alchemical
meditation practice I received as a transmission from
some more profound level of my Self. You could call it
way to induce “soul sex”, the internal copulation of
the split halves of our soul.

What I discovered was a method of circulating soul
essence (a particular quality of “jing”) in a
“pre-natal orbit” pathway. This orbit flows in a
different pattern than the spiral around the spine and
chest of the standard Taoist Microcosmic Orbit – it
also cycles through the core channel. It also seems my
“soul question” led me to have numerous intense
experiences of astral or beyond-the-body sex – i.e.
exchange of soul essence as a kind of macro-cosmic
orbit shared with others souls. More on astral sex in
my essay.

This new “Advanced Lesser Kan & Li: Second Refining of
the Golden Elixir” practice is given on the
Glastonbury/Stonehenge UK September 2007 retreat. The
audio CD set is 17 hours, and includes other powerful
new practices: the Wudang MACRO-cosmic Orbit, and a
great new Fusion 3 practice to concentrate the 8 cosmic
forces + Self: The 9 Cosmic Spirals of the Energy Body.
The CDs also have the full confession and juicy details
of my astral plane sex life…:). The new practice is
very intense if you have done the prerequisite
training.

————————–

Dear Seekers of the Sexual Mysteries of the Soul,

I have already written extensively about how, from the
viewpoint of Taoist cosmology, we humans got into these
strangely wonderful if sometimes awkward contraptions
we call a physical body. Briefly, our body-minds are a
crystallization of natural cosmic yin-yang and
five-phase forces. This a basic Taoist principle – that
humans are a microcosm of nature.

The original human being in the astral plane was
androgynous (both male & female), and hence immortal-
it could self-reproduce. This allowed us to
continuously explore the process of creation, a.k.a
Life. I received the information that during the
process of polarization into physicality, a problem
arose when we split into separate male and female
bodies in the physical plane. We unknowingly scattered
and lost much of our Original Breath (yuan chi) – the
neutral force that bound the original yin/female and
yang/male forces together.

This new level of sexual polarity caused a feeling of
separation from source/heaven and eventually led to the
battle of the sexes on earth. (see
www.healingdao.com/healinglove.html#slt for talk on
“Sexual Qigong: Secret Tao Path to Completing our Human
Identity”).

Immortality Formulas: Designed to Rebirth our
Androgynous Self

The Taoist hermit One Cloud’s “Seven Formulas for
Achieving Immorality” is basically an outline for the
process of re-constructing our original androgynous
Energy Body. This isn’t easy, however. Because when
you’re in a man or a woman’s body, your perceptions are
largely driven by the polarized sexual current running
your consciousness.

Many meditation traditions that I have studied attempt
to offset this sexual bias by focusing on “stillness”
or a passive “inner witness” or “divine self” that is
described as sex-less and desire-less. These traditions
often blame some aspect of the lowly physical self –
either the “ego”, the “mind” or our bodily sexual
desire – for leading us astray from our true nature or
higher self. I find these to be unnecessary judgments
against the body and its sexual nature. My view is the
polarization is now intentional, and begins BEFORE we
incarnate, at the soul level. Humans are blameless in
the predicament they find themselves, only able to
manifest as a male or female, but not both. It’s the
root cause of our mortality.

Few meditators seeking transcendence seem able to
release their deep sexual tension, especially the
supposedly highly enlightened male gurus/masters who,
while posing as celibate transcendents, end up screwing
hordes of their female disciples. A case of “boys will
be boys”? The female gurus seem to have a less
scandalous record – but are they truly desire-less, or
perhaps just more discrete? (for the juicy details,
see my article “The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm: Daoist
and Tantric Sexual Cultivation in the West
www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&article
id=35). The parallel in the West is found in the Roman
Catholic church, with its history of widespread sexual
abuse by priests recently exposed.

Romance: the Cultural Solution to Sexual Tension

The solution to finding sexual peace on the popular
level of culture is more simple. Countless seminars
(Sterling comes to mind) and new age writers like David
Deida counsel something like, “if you are male, be
totally male. If you are female, be totally female”.
This is the traditional Asian approach. This seems to
make sense on one level – surrender to your bodily
destiny.

Men should explore their various roles as father,
brother, son, grandfather, and whatever list of male
archetypes you want to choose (warrior, priest,
magician, hunter, etc.). Women should explore their
roles as mother, sister, daughter, grandmother, and
various female archetypes (virgin, priestess, whore,
nurturer, etc). This raises political fights over which
archetypes belong to which sex, but essentially is
saying that biology ultimately controls destiny.

From a Taoist point of view, this cultural solution to
our deepest biological impulse would be considered one
Way of completing your worldly destiny, or “ming”. Your
“mingmen” or Door of Life, is the soul essence flowing
between your two kidneys to form your body. It carries
in it a demand that we complete some mission in the
world. We each have a unique post-birth destiny, and
filling it gives us a feeling of completion. The Taoist
view i’ve met in China is that there are differences
between the sexes, but they tend to disappear if your
cultivate to deep levels of soul integration.

This drive to complete “who you were meant to be” is
the same impulse that supports the modern industry of
self-fulfillment and self-improvement books and videos.
But most of them are only working at the level of mind,
not soul, so are only partially successful. Our deep
soul-sex drive also feeds the huge “quest for romance”
theme in songs and films, the default cultural reason
for existing.

But the simplicity of the biological-cultural romance
model of sexual completion gets a bit fuzzy when you
scratch the surface of it. The romance is never wholly
satisfying. You cannot permanently unite with your
lover. Lovers ultimately get sick and die on you. There
are all the confused gender issues, people claiming
they were born in the wrong sexed body. The sense of
dissatisfaction with marriage and culture, the feeling
there must be some deeper fulfillment beyond working
your whole life to scratch the sexual itch and all its
attendant cultural roles.

Modern science steps in to close the gap: you are
working for the survival of your species. But
Darwinism feels inadequate, too one-dimensional, like
chewing cardboard. It fails to fully explain the
evolution of collective cooperation and the range of
consciousness embedded in nature itself. From the
Taoist viewpoint, a dissatisfaction with romantic love
might be our spiritual destiny or “xing” calling us
back to re-discover and love our original bisexed
androgynous nature.

Can Inner Alchemy Create A Male-Female Energy Body?

This brings us to the key question: is it possible to
simultaneously satisfy both our worldly destiny of
biological romance and our spiritual destiny of divine
androgyny, aka immortality?

The Taoist meditations of the Inner Smile and the
Microcosmic Orbit seem aimed at harmonizing this
tension in our sexual-spiritual nature. The Inner Smile
cultivates the sense of our neutral inner witness. It
invites our soul force to flow in and unconditionally
accept what is, thereby freeing the stuck aspects of
our outer self to move on and unfold their unique male
or female destiny.

The Orbit actively embraces both our conscious front
and our unconscious back, creating a circular flow of
the male fire and female water channels in the body.
This circular flow harmonizes the direct expression of
our male/yang/governor and female/yin/conception energy
pathways. In effect, it begins the process of
consciously mixing our male and female energies.

But if we analyze the sequence of the formulas, the
Inner Smile and Orbit apparently aren’t enough to heal
the soul’s split. That is why there are seven alchemy
formulas to do the job – the sexually split soul runs
very deep, and must be healed or integrated on many
levels, not just for our personal selves walking the
earth looking for romance.

It is an unresolved issue for our ancestors trapped in
sun-moon time cycles, and for the collective/archetypal
level of human consciousness embodied in the planets
and our astrology. It’s beginnings are found at the
celestial level – in the zodiacal stellar consciousness
that we could call the field of our oversouls.

In One Cloud’s 1st Formula, the chi flowing in the
orbit is superficial in the sense it harmonizes our
outer or post-birth chi only. It’s One Cloud’s 2nd
Formula of Inner sexual alchemy – Lesser Kan & Li –
that includes a method of “self-intercourse”. This
internal sex marries our inner male and inner female.
The fire and water halves of our soul are guided to
copulate in the central channel. This moves us
consciously into the energetic domain of the pre-birth,
the formless self, where our soul first polarized
itself into the male or female sexed body.

The Missing Element in Lesser Kan & Li

But I had noticed in both myself and in my students
that something was missing in the Lesser Kan and Li
practice, some element of our sexuality was not
completely being resolved. It was this dissatisfaction
that led to my asking for and receiving the practice I
call the” Advanced Lesser Kan and Li: The Second
Refining of the Golden Elixir”. This practice involves
coupling the male and female aspects of the soul (our
pre-natal essence) along the entire axis of our body’s
core channel and in all three dantian.

What I perceived was that even though the male and
female halves were coupling and resolving their past
“sexual split” in the original Lesser Kan and Li, the
higher levels of the soul collective downloading
energy from the future was still being polarized by our
male or female physically sexed vessel. This new
practice, with its pre-natal Microcosmic Orbit, brings
the horizontal sexual tension of the male/female halves
of our soul continuously into the vertical
crown/perineum or heaven/earth axis of our being. So
its more integrated, and refines the Elixir to a higher
level. The method is an evolution of the Wudang Orbit
taught in my Qigong Fundamentals 2, which is necessary
to get this new method.

How well does the alchemical process resolve the deep
sexual tension of the soul? Can the inner alchemy
process truly shift the practitioner from the sexually
polarized state into an androgynous state? I’ve trained
many hundreds of people in the practice. The reported
level of progress varies widely, depending on the
adepts’ natural aptitude and self-discipline. The
practices can bring up huge resistance that exists
collectively to re-integrating this male-female split.
It requires deep courage and strong focused practice to
keep penetrating to deeper levels of integration.

The answer for myself is both clear and ambiguous. I
have vastly expanded the functional presence of my
“inner witness”, the aspect of self that is holding the
neutral force that binds my original androgynous self
together. AND I simultaneously have as much or more
male sexual energy than I had as a younger man. My
sexual drive is quite different from when i was
younger.

My hormones-with-winged-feet are no longer flowing
wildly and indiscriminately out of my groins as an
unconscious biological urge. Rather the sexual impulse
emerges, still unpredictably, from an inner space,
where my heart-feeling and kidney-will seem to have
integrated into a deeper drive that I feel is best
described as a soul impulse. In short, I only feel
sexual attraction when there is a soul attraction.

Subtle Body Sex is Beyond the Personality

More interesting is that this soul impulse, flowing out
of my core channel, seems to have led me to have
numerous sexual affairs. Not in the physical plane, but
in the astral plane. These affairs were not generated
by the physical desire of my body and did not originate
from the sensory or culturally shaped mind. Instead, my
soul partners spontaneously arrive from the ethers and
impose themselves upon my personality involuntarily.

Some astral sex affairs happened with the energy bodies
of people I knew physically, but who were mostly not
conscious of the process (I asked). Other astral
affairs are with the souls of complete strangers who
seem to feel the need to exchange some powerful
information with me. This macro-exchange of soul
information involves what I would call a second phase
level of kundalini experience that is not experienced
in the spine, but in the core channel, which is far
more intense.

Most of my subtle body sex was with my wife Joyce – it
has been a hallmark of our relationship since we met at
a Taoist retreat 24 years ago. But even that could not
be fully willed by our personalities or any biological
urge; it usually happened spontaneously, most
powerfully BEFORE we had physical sex. Eventually we
surrendered to allowing it to be our primary form of
sexual coupling – just lie down next to each other,
relax and allow our energy bodies to copulate. Our
skill with Taoist alchemical practices obviously
facilitated this subtle body sex, but did not exactly
control it. The soul controls it, not the mind.

Soul Sex is Kundalini in the Core Channel

These subtle body sexual experiences are usually far
more intense than physical sex because the energy body
has many more channels of exchange than the physical
body. But it was observing my many experiences over a
long period of time that led me to suspect that my soul
was not in fact a totally”neutral witness”, but a
polarized pattern of force or entity within a more
neutral field of consciousness.

This led me to the hypothesis that all human souls are
sexed predominantly male or female, but that each human
soul has a “shadow” gender which functions exactly like
the shadow side of our slower vibrating male/female
sexed body-mind. In short, the formless pre-natal plane
of our soul is similar to the physical plane, only it
is difficult to grasp because it is vibrating as such a
fast level.

The hidden or unmanifest side of our soul is holding a
lot of power and has a different agenda than what we
think or feel we are. The sexual split at the body-mind
level has us polarized “horizontally” as male-female.
If we have a male body, our shadow is female, and vice
versa. This dynamic is played out biologically and
culturally in our sexual relations.

Humanity: 3rd Force between Heaven & Earth

At the soul level, the sexual split plays itself out
“vertically”, in our identification with the
heaven-earth polarity. This plays itself out in our
spiritual seeking after earth/form or heaven/formless,
and played itself out historically within sky god/earth
goddess religions and all the social implications they
promote. Groups offering a path into the ultimate Void
or Absolute Emptiness are simply repackaging the
male/formless/sky ideal.

If we can make the shadow side of our soul conscious,
we can harness its spiritual power and greatly speed
completion of our spiritual destiny as humans mediating
between heaven and earth. Otherwise, humans are simply
unconscious soldiers fighting for one or the other side
of their psyche. An awakened humanity will realize it
can consciously hold a third force between heaven and
earth. I believe our highest potential destiny is to
return to our divine androgynous male-female-state with
ia restored ability to easily breathe Original Breath
(yuan chi), the raw stuff of creation.

This accounts for the Taoist focus on becoming
immortal, which I define as unique beings who bring
continuity to creative life in other dimensions, other
heaven and earths beyond this particular physical one.
Human evolution is the process of internalizing our
relationship with and transforming the primordial field
of Original Breath, not devolving and disappearing back
into it without a trace. This is how I interpret
“returning to the source” in the Tao Te Ching
(daodejing) of Lao tzu.

May our Souls Play Harmoniously in the Tao,

Michael Winn

Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Tao as his door, and who becomes change  is a
Sage.

– Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters

“The Tao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”

— Taoist Sage, 200 B.C