Excerpts from Sacred Sex, Thomas R White, Also Way Out Magazine July 1970

The part of the body in which the sexual organs are located was called “sacrum” by our ancestors because they knew what it was all about. “Sacrum” comes from Middle English sacren, meaning to consecrate. And that in turn comes from a word out of Greek and Latin antiquity: sacer, meaning dedicated to God. Our own word “sacred” comes from the same root and means the same thing: holy, set aside for God’s use, God’s service, God’s purpose. What the word “sacrum” says is simply that sex is sacred. If this one word were widely understood, much of our sickness would end. and the destiny of the whole race would be altered.

What is sacred sex? I am going to try to answer that. and I suppose you are wondering what kind of experience I am talking from —so I will tell you. I have had the usual run of sick sex in mv life, from the time I was about ten years old until my marriage at 24. In marriage I had 16 years of sane sex. with some sick excursions into adultery now and then. And the sane sex was just barely sane, because it was exercised with little restraint and no regard for the higher possibilities of love between a man and woman. I did. however. keep sexual activity within the marriage most of the time, and I loved mv wife and children and provided for them. The marriage ended in separation in 1951 and divorce some years later. The end came because mv wife had discovered mv cheating and had begun to do some cheating of her own. She became attracted to one of the men involved, and there went the marriage. Actually. I “loved” my wife and children in my pretty weak and selfish way. If I had been a better lover, I would not have contributed one more case to the great American divorce total.

The broken marriage was not the only trouble in my life. I was involved in some other very serious rack-ups —drinking, drugs. and ferocious power driving in business —which I won’t go into here. Enough to say that by the time the marriage collapsed, I was already in the midst of a profound change in life style, which eventually brought me back to something like real sanity— not soon enough to save my home, but soon enough for me to take a look at life from there on in a radically new light. By now I had returned to the religion of my fathers. I was beginning to take my direction from the Bible, and at this time my future began to be shaped by it. Regarding the various possibilities open to a divorced mam the scripture gave clear-cut advice against remarriage and absolute contra-indication for fornication or any of the other varieties of sexual expression. The road ahead looked very steep indeed; and I wondered— although I felt sure it was the right way—whether it was possible to travel it.

In these circumstances I discovered the Way
and with it the way of sacred sex. And although my practice has been imperfect, it has made my life ever since an experience of increasing beauty and strength, of growing capacity to serve others, of conscious contact with God, of joy beyond my hopes and beyond my power to describe. In talking about sacred sex. I am talking about a power which has grown stronger for each of the past 18 years and a joy which has grown greater —exactly in the time of life (I am now 58) when strength and joy are apt to depart from a man. In bearing witness to the reality of sacred sex, I am describing a treasure which— I would not say I possess—but in which I am immersed over my head, and for which, if I live forever, I will never be able sufficiently to thank God. Man’s possibilities (as Gurdjieff said) are very great. But in order to realize them, you must first get some idea of where sex fits into the picture, and what sacred sex means. And in order to do that, you must understand a certain fundamental Greek word. Sex, sickness, and ecstasy all come from the same source. Generation, degeneration, and regeneration are produced by the same power. The name of the power is zoe. That’s Greek, pronounced dzoh•ay , and translated “life.” We now use “life” for everything from the man who sings loudest at a party to a kind of insurance policy, so in order to get back to first principles, we will just call zoe zoe. What is this zoe? It is life in the most literal sense and in the broadest sense. It reaches very low in the scale of things. Worms, slugs, viruses, and plankton operate on zoe. It also reaches very high. Speaking of the Logos (the divine creative, harmonic, and administrative Power and Person), the scripture says: “In him was zoe, and the zoe was the light of men.” And Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the zoe.” Further, it is said of God the Father that he “has zoe in himself. ” Here we are dealing with the most basic force in the universe. It is zoe which gives you the power to eat and to breathe and to read this page. We know it ordinarily as intelligent, creative, substantial energy. In higher states, it is experienced as living fire and living light. Zoe pervades the human body in two radically different degrees of intensity. The first. which we will call zoe-l. is ordinary life force, sustaining the normal mental and physical life processes of the person, or causing diseases when abused (every disease is a life process). The second degree. zoe-ll, is a radically higher intensity, properly called higher life force. Zoe-Il has dual possibilities: (a) it may give rise to sexual experience, which is grounded and terminated in sexual orgasm, or (b) it may by-pass the sex area, rising then to higher psycho-spiritual centers of the body in the heart, the throat. and the head, thus producing mystical experience —ecstasy, higher consciousness. illumination, and regeneration. (Our secular science knows nothing of this reality, for the simple reason that it has ignored the subject or treated it with the characteristic weapon of ignorance: ridicule.) Spiritual illumination is not (as our secular speculators suppose) sublimated sex. It is the other way around: Sex is a short circuit of illuminative power. In sex, the higher life force, zoe-ll, goes into generation—a high end, but not the highest. At the level of ecstasy and God-vision, zoe-ll, the primal power at peak intensity, reaches its goal and begins its greatest work: regeneration. The higher we go the greater are the penalties for ignorance or perversity in the use of life force. When abused, zoe-l produces many of our ordinary corruptions and diseases. When zoe-ll is misdirected, we find even more serious distortions in the human body and soul: Irresponsible sex, as modern psychology has rediscovered for our age, is persistently associated with guilt, fear, depression, and the outright insanities —with the real villain finally appearing, not as repression but as cheap, degrading, and obsessive expression.

Irresponsible mysticism produces the worst horrors of all, as the history of pseudo-religion and degenerate real religion, East and West, appallingly demonstrates. Drug addiction and drug abuse are included among the irresponsible mysticisms. Certain drugs release the soul from its prison in the nervous system and cerebral cortex, and/or they conduct the life force to higher centers. But a heavy penalty is required by nature for this evasion of purity, devotion, and discipline, which are the only passports to true illuminative experience and higher consciousness. Drugs have been used for millennia to induce mystical states, but no great teacher ever has taught or approved these practices. Drug-mysticism is an experience, not a way. Frequent repetitions of the experience bring radically diminished returns and are expensive out of all proportion to any gain involved. Drug use has always been a marginal factor on the religious scene; it has remained until our age for a whole culture to go crazy on it. Such wide -spread irresponsible mysticism could only occur in a time of almost total religious eclipse, when the ways and means of true illumination are scattered, un-honored, and hard to recognize — so that desperate men in large numbers will clutch at even the most harmful and degrading substitutes. Sacred use of the higher life force —involving sacred discipline of sex —is the way, and the only way: to sustained and inalienable higher consciousness, higher objectivity, conscious immortality, and knowledge of God— the fully regenerate and fully human estate. If there were other ways, they would have been discovered and made part of this science centuries ago. There are no other ways. All possible routes around this point have been tried. None has ever succeeded. Sacred sex begins when zoe-ll, the higher life force, is dedicated to God and exercised under God’s direction. Sacred sex is the use of sex for generation only. And, believe me, this discipline is such a shock to our ordinary views and our ordinary obsession with pleasure that ordinary men and women* flee from it in dismay and revulsion. Superior men and women* see the truth, and are thereby sustained in the discipline. [*The terms “superior man” and “ordinary man” are not used here in any careless or offhand way. They are used strictly in their traditional and technical sense in the Way and specifically as used by Confucius. The superior man (chuntse) is one who understands the Way and follows the Way in Confucian terms, he is a “prince of the Way.” The ordinary or vulgar man (hszaoyen) is considered inferior by no means on the basis of education or any other worldly consideration but because his capacity to understand and follow the Way is limited or lacking The democratic ideal is not breached here: it is a matter of recognizing, and taking into practical account. differing spiritual capacities. And of course the whole point of the Way is that ordinary men can become superior men — from which base they can become liberated, illuminated, regenerated. transformed, and God-realized men.] The truth is obvious enough to anyone who looks at human life with both the generative and the re-generative possibilities in view: There is enough zoe, both zoe-l and zoe-ll, naturally allocated to every normal human being for the fulfillment of all three of his possibilities: (l) ordinary life, (2) generation, and (3) regeneration. But if zoe is wasted for the sake of mere pleasure at the level of generation, then there is not enough for man’s third and highest and only satisfying possibility: re -generation.

The way in which the average person uses sex is a form of suicide. For in most lives (not the lives of degenerates and sex-crazies but of ordinary good people) there is not only a waste but veritable hemorrhage of zoe at the sexual level. Sex is the only living experience of zoe-ll which most people know, and they can never get enough of it. God knows, this is understandable; the pleasure and the joy of sex are so tremendous that in requiring restraint at this point God seems to have laid upon us a burden beyond bearing. And yet — there it is, and the sanity and fulfillment of the individual and of the race are at stake. Furthermore, experience (in which I have had a share) shows that the burden can be born— and then turns into a crown of strength and joy. In human nature the instinctual restraints which keep animal sex sane, are absent. And therefore, it is fatally easy for an ordinary person to make a pig of himself with sex (something which a real pig, incidentally, never does). The average citizen doesn’t know that there is an alternative (since religion is submerged almost out of sight), and so he does the sex-hog number. And this is not merely a mistake but a tragedy, because in this way he cuts himself off from reaching full humanity—which is attainable only by the regenerative process, of which each of the great religions is an instruction and a way. If you take your values from sacred life and from sacred teaching of any of the great schools, the requirement is clear and inescapable: keep the sex valve closed except for generation —or in pleasure oriented repeated sexual experiences you short circuit and ground a large excess of your own higher life force, and your partner’s with it, thus cancelling the tremendous possibility for which both of you were born on this earth. The intuitive knowledge that we are made for God and destined for God is in everyone, however deeply buried. That is why men and women who abuse sex, in and out of marriage, grow to hate each other. Something inarticulate in each of them realizes and deplores what is going on under the ironic label of love —a mutual defrauding of the true humanity of each.

I fully realize how unacceptable —indeed, how appalling, weird, and actually crazy— all this must seem to modern men, particularly to intelligent, educated, liberal, and humanity-loving men. Not one person in a hundred today realizes that a pleasure, a joy, and a development enormously greater than sex is available to men, on the condition of the restraint of sex. Therefore, the idea of sexual restraint of any kind beyond the most elementary has become utterly foreign to the mental climate of this age and repugnant to people at all levels of our society. Nevertheless (can you sit still for it?) this is what all of the great spiritual teachers have taught: sacred sex, sexual continence except for generation, must be practiced so that the higher life force can accomplish its task of bringing man to his true estate—immortality in a sustained consciousness of unalloyed and ecstatic joy. (When a visitor wanted to commiserate with Sri Ramakrishna about the absence of sexual experience in his life, the great Bengali master replied: “Sir, every pore in my body is a sex organ. Personally, I have found the idea of sacred sex just as difficult as anybody possibly could, but I have also found it inescapable in the lives and doctrine of the greatest men who have ever lived — Moses, Christ, Sri Krishna, Buddha, and their illuminated followers. I don’t expect you to change your outlook in this regard without a debate, but if you are willing to read about the examples and teachings of these giants of our race, these beautiful and dazzling human beings, these true men, here are a few items which are typical of many others:

MOSES: The great leader of the Hebrews was an Egyptian initiate and a man of extensive, direct God-experience, deeply instructed and adept in the regenerative science. The Law which he gave to the children of Israel is aimed at the maintenance of sane sex, that is sex confined to marriage and without perversions or hankering after other men’s wives. Moses’ own example, however, is one of sacred sex. When it came time for him to die, God suspended the office of the angel of death in this case and prepared to take the soul himself. But the soul, developed beyond any fear of death or of after-death experience, nevertheless protested that she did not want to leave the body of the law-giver. The following account is from Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews: Then God spake to Moses’ soul: “My daughter, one hundred and twenty years had I decreed that thou shouldst dwell in this righteous man’s body, but hesitate not now to leave it, for thy time is run…” But the soul replied: “Lord of the world! I desire to remain with this righteous man; for whereas the two angels Azza and Azazel when they descended from heaven to earth, corrupted their way of life and loved the daughters of the earth, so that in punishment Thou didst suspend them between heaven and earth, the son of Amram (Moses), a creature of flesh and blood, from the day upon which Thou didst reveal Thyself from the bush of thorns, has lived apart from his wife. Let me therefore remain where I am. ” The example of Moses and the example of the Buddha are identical. Both were sanely and soundly married men. Both lived apart from their wives after having the vision of the supreme Reality. If it be argued that these were extraordinary men granted. But everything these great men did was done not only for themselves but for the instruction and the emulation of ordinary men.

CHRIST: The life of Messias begins with a mystery of sacred sex in the conception of his mother and in his own birth of a virgin. And it continues through 33 years of total sacred discipline of the generative force. There can be no mistaking— and no escaping— the example given us by the King of kings and Lord of lords. And again, it is not an example for his sacred person only but for many of the ordinary men and women through the ages who have the astounding opportunity to walk as he walked, die as he died, and rise as he rose. His words on the subject of sacred sex are brief and crystal clear, but hard to “hear” —that is, hard to accept. And indeed he anticipated that only the qualified (superior men) would accept them: All men cannot receive this saying [that divorced people who re-marry commit adultery], except they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, who were so born from their mother’s womb; and there are some eunuchs, who were made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

PAUL: Christ’s apostle to the gentiles, Paul, teaches strictly sane sex for every Christian and sacred sex for those (superior men) who have the gift: Avoid sexual looseness like the plague! Every other sin that a man commits is done outside his own body, but this is an offense against his own body. Have you forgotten that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you, and that you are not the owner of your own body? You have been bought, and at what a price! Therefore, bring glory to God both in your body and in your spirit, for they both belong to him. Now let me deal with the questions raised in your letter. It is a good principle for a man to have no physical contact with women. Nevertheless, because casual liaisons are so prevalent, let every man have his own wife and every woman her own husband. The husband should give his wife what is due to her as his wife, and the wife should be as fair to her husband. The wife has no longer full rights over her own person, but shares them with her husband. In the same wav the husband shares his personal rights with his wife. Do not cheat each other of normal sexual intercourse, unless of course you both decide to abstain temporarily to make special opportunity for fasting and prayer. But afterward you should resume relations as before, or you will expose yourselves to the obvious temptation of the devil. I give the advice above more as a concession than as a command. I wish that all men were like myself [continent], but I realize that everyone has his own particular gift from God, some one thing and some another. ED: [Paul to the Thessalonians, Chapter 4: 3,4: For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor]

SRI KRISHNA: When the great warrior, Arjuna. falters and loses his direction in life on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Sri Krishna (God incarnate) teaches him the Wav, the yoga of selfless service in the world. Arjuna (as reported in the Bhagavad Gita) inquiries about the greatest obstacles in the Way, and Krishna answers. Arjuna: “Krishna, what is it that makes a man do evil, even against his own will; under compulsion, as it were?” Sri Krishna: “The raja-guna [the power-driving quality] has two faces, rage and lust; the ravenous, the deadly. Recognize these: they are your enemies. Smoke hides fire, dust hides a mirror, the womb hides the embryo: by lust the Atman [the divine self] is hidden. “Lust hides the Atman in its hungry flames, the wise man’s faithful foe. Intellect, senses, and mind are fuel to its fire. Thus it deludes the dweller in the body, bewildering his judgment. ‘Therefore, Arjuna, you must first control your senses, then kill this evil thing which obstructs discriminative knowledge and realization of the Atman.’

BUDDHA: As do all of the great teachers of the Way, the Buddha makes it clear beyond question that the highest path is open only to those who practice sacred sexual discipline. In the following passage from the Surangama Sutra, the Buddha’s nephew and favorite disciple, Ananda, has asked how to set up conditions to which sentient beings of the last kalpa (our age) may come for deliverance and protection, and the Buddha answers: All sentient beings in all the six realms of existence are susceptible to temptations and allurements. As they yield to these temptations and allurements, they fall into and become fast bound to the recurring cycles of deaths and rebirths. Being prone to yield to these temptations and allurements, one must, in order to free himself from their bondage and their intoxication, concentrate his whole mind in a resolution to resist them to the uttermost. The most important of these allurements are the temptations to yield to sexual thoughts, desires and indulgence, with all their following waste and bondage and suffering. Unless one can free himself from this bondage and these contaminations and exterminate these sexual lusts, there will be no escape from the following suffering, nor hope of advancement to enlightenment and peacefulness. No matter how keen you may be mentally, no matter how much you may be able to practice dhyana [meditation], no matter how high a degree of apparent samadhi [higher consciousness] you may attain, unless you have wholly annihilated all sexual lusts, you will ultimately fall into the lower realms of existence.

Well, this is only a beginning. There is much more to be said. The point to be made here is that these great teachers —saying essentially the same thing— are obviously not mere bluenoses bent on spoiling anyone’s fun. They are pointing out the great fact of human nature: that there is a level of pleasure, joy, and fulfillment enormously superior to generative enjoyment, that too much of the latter blocks the higher attainment, and that man can never be satisfied short of his true heritage.

The words of Christ: Matthew (Kang James). The words of Paul: I Corinthians 6:18-7:9 (Phillzps). The words of Sri Krishna: Bhagavad Gita 3:36-39 (Prabhatananda).