by David Deida: For the Masculine, death and sex are inextricably interwoven; that is, good sex is mind-blowing, self-obliterating,so ecstatic and loving that no shred of self-containment remains intact.

Instead, the boundaries of self are melted in the heat and light of desire expanded into love beyond limits. It is this ecstatic loss of self I am referring to when I say that sex involves the desire for death: the death of self into ecstasy and love. This form of whole-bodied self-yielding into the force of radiant love is far more blissful than the spasmodic release of physiological tension that an orgasm affords.

In the practice of Intimate Communion, the Masculine learns that sex can be a way to yield His self into love. His sexual passion becomes converted by His heart into penetrating and pervasive love, shining through His sense of self and other – that is, melting the difference between lover and the beloved, obliterating them in unity, dissolving them in the bliss of overwhelming love.

…We must admit, finally, that orgasm does not satisfy this desire [for ego-death and release] for very long. True, we experience a blissful peace after orgasm – and such temporary bliss is also reported by soldiers, athletes and philosophers. There are many ways to approximate the ultimate realization of ego-death, but none of them are the real thing.

And this is what we must come to admit: However satisfying our deviation is, we are not perfectly released into the happiness of our very being. Rather, our craving soon begins again, and we are locked into a life-long cycle of repeating our deviation, our approximation of death-like release, through sex, through inebriation, through losing ourselves in TV or at the movies, and even through the release we experience from artistic creation or from understanding an elegant philosophical theory. None of these things bring an end to our search for release….

The way the Masculine grows in His practice of Intimate Communion is by learning to relax into who He really is, yielding His tension of self into the very heart of this conscious moment. The more He relaxes into the nature of His Being, the more He sacrifices His tension, His searching. Finally, He yields so thoroughly into His true nature that He feels transparent to its native qualities. In His fullest realization, the Masculine is Consciousness, the nature of which is freedom. The freedom felt after winning a football game or an argument pales in comparison with the infinite freedom of unbounded Consciousness. “Dying” into the peace after orgasm or intellectual achievement is nothing like dying into the realization of eternal Being.