Liberating Eros

By Barnaby B. Barratt PhD DHS

This book is about lovemaking as the supreme path of spiritual practice. Through its carefully crafted chapters, Barratt presents a profound and ancient insight. The essential flow of life is sexual, sensual, and spiritual. Consequently, our sexuality is not an obstacle to spiritual life. Rather, it is the singular vehicle of Holy Spirit. The libidinality of our embodiment is the only process by which we may come to be truly in the spirit of Love, life and liberty. This book may disturb some of its readers, but it will not be forgotten. For it reminds us to return to the dance of life and to the nakedness of genuine spiritual experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465330109

Barnaby B. Barratt PhD DHS

Barnaby B. Barratt, PhD, DHS, works and plays as a tantric facilitator, as well as a certified psychoanalyst, sexuality educator, and sex therapist. Past President of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, he has earned doctoral degrees both from Harvard University and from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. His previous books include The Way of the BodyPrayerPath, and Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom. Dr. Barratt has studied tantric practices since his late adolescence, and now offers workshops and private consultations nationally and internationally. He is co founder of the Center for Tantric Spirituality.

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Copyright © 2009 by Barnaby B. Barratt.

Cover graphics by Jennifer Everland

Front cover photograph by Nick and Sayaka Karras

Author photograph by Leslie Kaye

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Selective Bibliography

Appreciations

About the author

May all beings be happy and free;

may these writings contribute

to the happiness and freedom of all beings.

1.

Love, freedom and joy

Why are we not living our lives in Love? What fuels human malice? And what can we do about our tragic situation? These are the three questions that motivate this book. For well over two thousand years, philosophers and theologians have pondered the meaning of life. They have asked questions very similar to these, such as: Why are we here? What coordinates should guide our life as it progresses from infancy to senescence? How can we live together in peace?

These questions have always engaged our distinctively human capacity for reflection. In the twentieth century they acquired a status of unprecedented urgency. This is because, in the course of this past century, the successes that came from the industrial and technological revolutions greatly empowered and exacerbated our human capacity to abuse and exploit, to ravage the environment, to kill off entire populations, and to catapult ourselves toward irreversible destruction. Today, as we move further into the twenty-first century, there is a growing awareness that humanity must change its conduct or accept its calamitous downfall.

In over two thousand years of thoughtful labor, intellectuals in the western tradition have provided a multitude of answers to life’s fundamental questions. Yet it cannot be said that these answers have been satisfactory and sufficient. If indeed philosophers have provided insights that could significantly improve our conduct, then it must be said that we have not listened adequately to their wisdom. Writing in the western context, at the end of the twentieth century, one of my favorite philosophers, Leszek Kolakowski expressed it like this:

For centuries philosophy asserted its legitimacy by asking and answering questions it had inherited from the Socratic and pre-Socratic legacy, that is, how to distinguish the real from the unreal, the true from the false, the good from the evil… At a certain moment, however, philosophers had to face, and to cope with, a simple, painfully undeniable fact: among questions that have sustained the life of European philosophy for two and a half millennia not a single one has ever been solved to our general satisfaction; all of them remain either controversial or invalidated by philosphers’ decree. (Metaphysical Horror, On Philosophy)

Organized religion has undoubtedly had far greater influence on human conduct than the ponderings of professional philosophy. In the western tradition, the influence of the three religions of the book—the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths—has had an enormous impact on every aspect of our social and personal life. And tragically the spiritual inspiration of these three has more than frequently been eclipsed by the social and cultural politics of their organizational formations. Their religious ideologies have promulgated answers galore to every question about our lives. They have supposedly provided us with solutions to our anguish. They have relentlessly instructed us how to be good. And usually they have also promised us that, for our good behavior and righteous subscription to their beliefs, we will receive our just rewards in some other time and place. All too often, they have transformed the experience of spiritual practice into matters of subscription to a faith, into vacuous gestures of affiliation, and into a moralizing politic of coercion and constraint. All too often the moralizing codes propounded by organized religion have actually suffocated our spirituality. And, whatever the exceptions, religious organizations have typically served the ruling classes, enabling the rich to stay rich, and the powerful to become more powerful. The ideologies they propound have served to reinforce our allegiance to social structures that perpetuate abuse, exploitation and destruction. Atrocities have been instigated by these organized religions, and yet more atrocities have been committed with their ideological collusion.

The message of mystical love—for instance, the example of spiritual practice offered us by Yeshua of Nazareth—is almost entirely obscured behind the institutional promotion of moralizing ideology, judgmental regulations and pernicious self-righteousness that characterizes so many of the institutions of Christianity. The Aramaic Jesus lived, breathed, danced, and made love on this earth. And he was crucified precisely because he brought light into a world governed by the ideological prerogatives of wealth and power. His message simply exemplified the spiritual practice of love. So it is, to say the least, undeniably tragic that the number of people who have been emotionally maimed, physically tortured, or killed in the name of Jesus is probably so great as to be uncountable.

I do not intend to single out Christianity for its ubiquitous lapses. Similar examples of the tragedy of organized religion and its divergence from genuine spiritual practice can certainly be found within the Jewish and Islamic faiths, as well as in all the non-western traditions. The ideologies of these three in particular have captured the western imagination and, although they may have provided comfort to some, it cannot be said that they have led us collectively toward serenity and deeper meaningfulness.

Religious ideology and its organizational machinery must be distinguished from authentic spiritual practice. Although too stringent a distinction would be simplistic, institutional religion (with all its moralizing ideologies) is entirely different from genuine spiritual practice. Spiritual life—as the contemporary Vietnamese spiritual leader, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many others have said—is not a matter of faith, it is a matter of practice. Western culture has tragically failed to realize the truth and the profound significance of this distinction. Again: Authentic spiritual practice is quite different from the institutionalized ideologies of organized religion. Our discovery of this difference is crucial for the survival of the human species, and for the welfare of this planet. Whereas the consequences of adherence to the moralizing politics of religious organizations may have been nothing less than disastrous, it is still profoundly true that spiritual practice can facilitate our access to the presence and abundance of Love.

Returning to the urgent questions about life’s meaning, about who or what we are, and about our potential for enlightened living, it is evident that we cannot find the way out of our anguish through professional philosophizing or through attaching our selves to religious institutions and theistic ideologies. We can, however, turn to the intrinsic and integral wisdom of our spiritual nature. If we examine the spiritual essence of western religions—as contrasted with their ideologies—and if we survey spiritual teachings from all over the world, we find that genuine spiritual practitioners always point to a common wisdom. As Tenzin Gyatso, our present Dalai Lama, so often says, the words of different cultural traditions may vary, but the wisdom is always about the Supreme Spirit of Compassion—that is, Love. Spiritual wisdom thus offers us, quite universally, the meaningfulness of life in love, in freedom, and in joy.

Despite remarkable variations in the language of its presentation, insight into the ultimate truthfulness of these three—the triunity of love, freedom and joy—recurs across cultures and across historical eras in all authentic spiritual teachings. Perhaps it is indeed the inherent wisdom of our humanity, and of the earth itself. But if this is so, it cannot be said that love, freedom and joy characterize the present state of the human condition. Rather the reverse. Yet I believe all of us know—at least somewhere, deep in our hearts—that our experiences of love, freedom and joy are the essentials that make life worthwhile. And as the fourteenth century Persian mystical poet, Hāfez-e Sirāzi wrote, we need to always trust what our heart knows. Adequate shelter from the elements and healthy nutrition are important and necessary to us, but it is our potential to experience and to be aware of the presence of love, freedom and joy that comprises the fundamental and enduring reason for us to go on living. As one of the twentieth century’s most inspired spiritual and political leaders, Mohandas K. Gandhi, is reported to have said, where there is Love, there is life.

How is it then that, for so many of us, for so much of our existence, we live alienated and estranged from the experience and awareness of this triunity? Misery and suffering are not only all around us, they inhabit us. Our emotional or relational life is frequently characterized by anguish and turmoil; our daily existence is typically imbalanced, and infected with our hostilities. What obstructs our experience of life’s potential for love, freedom and joy? If this triunity is indeed the fundamental spiritual dimension of our humanity—the birthright of our potential to live life in happiness from the cradle to the grave—the question we really need to ask is: How are we to liberate the human potential to experience Love, Freedom and Joy? There is, I believe, no more urgent question, and yet the ideologies of organized religion, with all their moralizing codes, will only mislead us away from this crucial challenge.

The answer to the question ultimately comes not from the ideologies of religious faith, but experientially from within us. More precisely, it comes not through philosophical reasoning, nor through theological argument, nor through proclamations of belief, and not from any attempt at adherence to lofty ideals and inspiring narratives. Rather, our human potential to experience Love, Freedom and Joy, comes from the sensual flesh of our embodiment.

Yes! The source of our capacity for the experience of love, freedom and joy, is to be found within the lived experience of our body—and nowhere else. It is my intention that these writings will exhibit and elaborate this insight.

The insight contrasts quite sharply with almost all of the conventional belief systems and ways of thinking inscribed by western cultures. In our western traditions, we are typically socialized into an alienated relationship with the sensuality of our embodiment. We are trained, for the most part, to live in our heads. And accordingly, we are prone to conceptualize love, freedom and joy, as if they were, or could be, abstract qualities to be concretely enacted—the distinguishing characteristics of good conduct. This is the fundamental mistake, for it is a mistake that reinforces the very obstacles within us that keep us from the experience of this triunity.

It is true that, once in a while, we are encouraged to listen to our hearts and relinquish our adherence to cognitive calculation. It is sometimes acknowledged that we cannot, or should not, live in our heads all the time. But in western cultures, this admission of the significance of our passion and our desire rarely, if ever, advises us to attend to the lived experience of our embodiment. This cautious encouragement of emotions is always somewhat abstract, even abstractly calculating, and it is typically buttressed by rationalization. This viewpoint never acknowledges the spiritual primacy of our sensual bodily being—the way in which our heart is empowered by our erogeneity, because western culture has fundamentally tabooed the realization that divine energies are sourced through the sensuality of our genitals.

Although I have lived and traveled in India, Tibet, China, Japan, Thailand, and Laos, I am not qualified to speak about eastern cultures, and will not do so. I write as a European, who has lived most of his life in the United States. To me it seems evident that, in the contemporary context of western societies, alienation from the immediate sensuality of our bodies is not only normative, but it is often rationalized and touted as necessary in order to achieve the very qualities—love, freedom and joy—from which it actually severs us. This is not only tragic, but it coerces or compels us into an ideologically imprisoned or delusional way of living.

Love is mistaken—that is, we mistake what love is—as soon as we conceptualize it, thinking love is this but not that, or that we can feel it here but not there. Love is not an idea, a decision, or even an affectionately beneficial state of affiliation and attachment. These are mistakes prevalent in our western tradition. And they are mistakes that could only be made by a culture that has become alienated from the sensual energies of our embodiment—the energies that permit us genuine spiritual practice. They are mistakes that could only be made to the extent that we are in our heads about love, and are thus living alienated from the experiential immediacy of our sensual embodiment.

Throughout the ages, spiritual adepts have pointed out this mistake. It is not love if you think you love what is good for you and not what is bad. It is not love if you feel it pertains to one person and not to another. Indeed, it is not love if it is consequent upon, and subordinate to, our judgmental faculties—however righteous our judgmentalism may seem to us. Rather, love is the supremely transcendent and transgressive dimension inherent in every aspect of everyday life. It is the universal and unitive vibration to which we may become aware and attuned throughout any and every moment of our daily lives.

To avoid confusion in the remainder of this book, let us use love with a lowercase l in the ordinary sense of a positive attachment that is the discriminatory opposite of hate, and let us use Love with an uppercase L to point to the mysteries of the universe, the sacred energy that pervades all that is, and all that is not. They are not ontologically equivalent, and the one does not imply the other. For whenever someone says they love someone else, or that they performed an act of love, rarely do they mean that they are immersed in the mystical experience of divine Love. It is a central intention of these writings to awaken us to the ways in which thinking about love is a major distraction from spiritual practice, and to show how the essence of all genuine spiritual practice is precisely the process of falling into Love’s vibration.

The lyrics of the Upanishads tell us that God is farther than the farthest, closer than the closest. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Catholic theologian, also makes the same point