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[Mantak_Chia,_Michael_Winn]_Taoist_Secrets_of_Love(BookFi.org)

[Mantak_Chia,_Michael_Winn]_Taoist_Secrets_of_Love(BookFi.org)

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Unfortunately, our lives are powerfully affected by this loss <strong>of</strong><br />

personal sexual self-knowledge. As a society we have chosen to<br />

ignore what the great spiritual traditions once understood about<br />

sexual energy and its role in personal transformation and spiritual<br />

evolution. What knowledge we once had has been fragmented or<br />

distorted by the institutionalized Judeo-Christian religions and remade<br />

to serve the lesser gods <strong>of</strong> social, political and personal control.<br />

Our Western institutional religious tradition has essentially<br />

repressed and distorted the sexual instinct and thereby created a<br />

variety <strong>of</strong> personal and social pathologies. In so doing, it has also<br />

effectively removed sexuality from its spiritual foundations.<br />

In this respect, Western psychoanalysis correctly perceived<br />

the role <strong>of</strong> repressed sexuality in individual neurosis. Whatever<br />

limitations the psychoanalytic view may have as a full representation<br />

<strong>of</strong> human potential, this much can be granted to Freud's insights.<br />

Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung understood quite well the<br />

enormous power <strong>of</strong> liberated sex energy and its connection to a<br />

larger universe <strong>of</strong> spiritual meaning. Jung rightly protested Freud's<br />

emphasis on disease as a model for health as well as the narrowness<br />

<strong>of</strong> his understanding <strong>of</strong> the range and purpose <strong>of</strong> the unconscious.<br />

He correctly emphasized instead the creative and transcendental<br />

function <strong>of</strong> sexual energy within a spiritually attuned<br />

and evolving individual.<br />

But all <strong>of</strong> these psychologists and their legacies have missed<br />

the point in one way or another. It is true that the sexual instinct<br />

can both liberate and enslave, but in order to be truly liberating, the<br />

sexual instinct must be channeled in the direction <strong>of</strong> another purpose.<br />

Only in conjunction with the drive for spiritual transformation<br />

can sex become truly liberating.<br />

Because <strong>of</strong> his lack <strong>of</strong> knowledge <strong>of</strong> the great spiritual traditions,<br />

Freud was completely unable to see this point. Wilhelm<br />

Reich, whose work has influenced so much <strong>of</strong> the Human Potential<br />

Movement's body centered therapies, was bold enough to bring<br />

Freud's insights to their logical conclusion. Reich clearly recognized<br />

that the ultimate result <strong>of</strong> repression was individual dis-ease<br />

and political fascism.<br />

But in his zeal to emphasize the destructive effects <strong>of</strong> sexual<br />

repression, he also ignored the spiritually transforming functions <strong>of</strong><br />

sex energy. Carl Jung had just the opposite problem. He clearly<br />

emphasized a spiritual and transcendental perspective on the sexual<br />

instinct, but he left out the central role <strong>of</strong> the physical body in<br />

this development. This omission made it next to impossible to<br />

XI

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