Sex and God: What Adi Da Taught About the Only Sin

There are two old answers to the question of sex and God, and they have been at war for as long as anyone has kept records.

The first answer says the body is the obstacle. Sex is the heaviest weight a soul carries, the strongest rope tying consciousness to the dust. To reach God you must put it down. This is the answer of the desert fathers and the celibate orders, of the brahmacharya that gets translated as abstinence, of every tradition that built its highest rung out of renunciation. Climb away from the genitals toward the crown. The flesh is what you ascend from.

The second answer says the body is the doorway. Sex is the most direct sacrament available to an embodied creature, the one act in which the boundary of the separate self actually thins. To reach God you must go through it, fully, with technique and attention and reverence. This is the answer of the tantric schools as they are received in the modern West, of sacred-sexuality workshops, of the long lineage that treats the bed as an altar and orgasm as a passage. The flesh is the way in.

Adi Da Samraj, who considered the emotional-sexual life in more granular detail than almost any teacher in the modern record, did something with this argument that neither side expects. He refused both answers. And he located the actual error somewhere neither camp was looking.

The two strategies are the same strategy

In The Aletheon, Adi Da names the two postures and strips them of their costumes. He calls them Alpha and Omega.

The Alpha strategy identifies with the Transcendental and suppresses the conditional. It controls the body, minimizes sex, limits emotion, treats the appetites as static to be reduced so the signal of the Divine can come through clean. The monk runs Alpha. So does the puritan, and the seeker who treats desire as a leak to be sealed.

The Omega strategy identifies with the conditional and walls off the Transcendental. It indulges the body, pursues sex and sensation and acquisition, and holds the Divine at a polite distance through doubt or disinterest or taboo. The libertine runs Omega. So does the materialist, and the spiritual-but-not-religious hedonist who has made sensation itself the highest available church.

These look like opposites. The whole history of the argument depends on them looking like opposites. Adi Da’s recognition is that they are the same move performed in two directions. Both are strategies of avoidance. The Alpha avoids the body to escape the discomfort of conditional existence. The Omega avoids the Divine to escape the demand of self-transcendence. One flees up, one flees down, and both are fleeing. Neither is willing to stand in the place where the whole thing is already happening.

So the obstacle answer and the doorway answer turn out to be the two halves of a single confusion. Renounce sex and you have made it the enemy, which is still to be ruled by it. Sacralize sex into a technique for reaching God and you have made it the vehicle, which is still to be using it. In both cases you are doing something to sex in order to get somewhere else. The energy is being spent on the trip.

What the sin actually is

Here is the sentence around which Adi Da’s entire sexual teaching turns. It appears in My Bright Sight:

“I have considered the matter of emotional-sexual life in great detail — because sex is one of the primary means whereby people withdraw from Real Happiness. This is why, in the traditions, people have often chosen celibacy. Do not go to war with the emotional-sexual function, but oblige it to become a form of devotional Communion with Me. Then whatever you do sexually that is a form of devotional Communion with Me is good sex and no ‘sin’.”

Read that slowly, because it relocates the entire problem. The danger of sex, in his account, is not pleasure and not the body and not desire. The danger is withdrawal — that sex is one of the most reliable ways a human being contracts away from the happiness that is already the case, retreats into a sensation, and uses the retreat to avoid the radiance that was there before the retreat began. The celibate noticed this withdrawal and concluded the act must go. Adi Da noticed the same withdrawal and concluded that the act must be turned.

This is why he says, plainly, do not go to war with it. War is the Alpha error. It keeps the thing you are fighting permanently in front of you. The instruction is not to suppress the emotional-sexual function but to oblige it — to require it — to become Communion. And then the verdict that should have ended the argument a thousand years ago: whatever you do sexually that is a form of devotional Communion is good sex and no sin.

The sin is not getting off. The sin is checking out. The same act, the identical motion of two bodies, is bondage or worship depending entirely on whether you are withdrawing from the prior happiness or melting open into it. Nothing about the externals tells you which one happened. The question is the direction of the heart.

Why neither pleasure nor restraint is the measure

Adi Da is unsentimental about how good sex feels, and he does not pretend the feeling is the goal. In Easy Death he sets the proportion exactly: spiritual life is about realizing a Love-Bliss-Happiness that is greater Bliss than is realized through sex or any other conditional experience. He is not against the pleasure. He is against mistaking the smaller bliss for the larger one, against organizing a whole life around the conditional spark while the unconditioned radiance it dimly imitates goes unclaimed.

In the same vein, from The Aletheon: the fundamental human urge is not food, not sex, not power, not even survival. It is ecstasy — literally the capacity to stand outside the bound point of view of the separate self. Sex is so charged precisely because it is one of the few ordinary experiences in which that standing-outside almost happens. For a moment the wall of the separate self goes thin. The tragedy is how fast it is conscripted back into self — into performance, into getting, into the private sensation of the ego being pleasured. The doorway closes from the inside, and the person calls the closing satisfaction.

This is why technique alone cannot save the act and abstinence alone cannot purify it. You can run a flawless tantric protocol and spend the entire time withdrawn into your own nervous system. You can be celibate for forty years and spend every one of them at war with a body you never stopped obsessing over. The measure is never the behavior. The measure is whether the gesture is Communion or contraction.

Melt, do not climb

What Adi Da offers in place of both renunciation and technique is closer to a dissolving than a doing. The somatic instruction in The Aletheon is not to drive the energy upward through the spine like a manager moving inventory. It is to melt — “melting the navel, melting all the belly-knot, melting the sex organs” — to let the contraction at the root of the body soften into the heart-sphere rather than be either spent or hoarded. Not climbing away from the genitals. Not engineering them into a launch pad. Letting the knot they hold come undone in the field of a love that was already prior to the whole arrangement.

And he is explicit that this happens in the body or it does not happen. The gross life — money, food, sex — must be disciplined, not bypassed. There is no version of this teaching in which the spiritual person rises cleanly above the appetites and leaves the flesh behind as solved. The flesh is where the work is. The body is the precise location where the withdrawal happens, which makes it the only location where the withdrawal can be reversed.

So the question that has organized two thousand years of argument — is sex the obstacle or the doorway — turns out to be the wrong question, asked from inside the contraction it is trying to escape. Sex is neither. Sex is one more place, maybe the most honest place, where a human being either turns toward the Real or away from it. The flesh was never the sin. The leaving was. And the leaving can be unlearned in exactly the place it was learned.