Is sex okay?

10. Is sex okay? C’mon—what is the real story behind this human experience? Is sex purely for procreation, as some religions say? Is true holiness and enlightenment achieved through denial—or transmutation—of the sexual energy? Is it okay to have sex without love? Is just the physical sensation of it okay enough as a reason?

 

Of course sex is “okay.” Again, if I didn’t want you to play certain games, I wouldn’t have given you the toys. Do you give your children things you don’t want them to play with?

Play with sex. Play with it! It’s wonderful fun. Why, it’s just about the most fun you can have with your body, if you’re talking of strictly physical experiences alone.

 

But for goodness sake, don’t destroy sexual inno-cence and pleasure and the purity of the fun, the joy, by misusing sex. Don’t use it for power, or hidden purpose; for ego gratification or domination; for any purpose other than the purest joy and the highest ecstasy, given and shared—which is love, and love recreated—which is new life! Have I not chosen a delicious way to make more of you?

With regard to denial, I have dealt with that before. Nothing holy has ever been achieved through denial. Yet desires change as even larger realities are glimpsed. It is not unusual, therefore, for people to simply desire less, or even no, sexual activity—or, for that matter, any of a number of activities of the body. For some, the activities of the soul become foremost—and by far the more pleasurable.

Each to his own, without judgment—that is the motto.

The end of your question is answered this way: You don’t need to have a reason for anything. Just be cause.

Be the cause of your experience.

Remember, experience produces concept of Self, conception produces creation, creation produces ex-perience.

You want to experience yourself as a person who has sex without love? Go ahead! You’ll do that until you don’t want to anymore. And the only thing that will—that could ever-cause you to stop this, or any, behavior, is your newly emerging thought about Who You Are.

It’s as simple—and as complex—as that.

 

11. Why did You make sex so good, so spectacular, so powerful a human experience if all we are to do is stay away from it as much as we can? What gives? For that matter, why are all fun things either “immoral, illegal, or fattening”?

 

I’ve answered the end of this question too, with what I’ve just said. All fun things are not immoral, illegal, or fattening. Your life is, however, an interesting exer-cise in defining what fun is.

To some, “fun” means sensations of the body. To others, “fun” may be something entirely different. It all depends on who you think you are, and what you are doing here.

There is much more to be said about sex than is being said here-but nothing more essential than this:

sex is joy, and many of you have made sex everything else but.

 

Sex is sacred, too—yes. But joy and sacredness do mix (they are, in fact, the same thing), and many of you think they do not.

Your attitudes about sex form a microcosm of your attitudes about life. Life should be a joy, a celebration, and it has become an experience of fear, anxiety, “not enough-ness,” envy, rage, and tragedy. The same can be said about sex.

You have repressed sex, even as you have repressed life, rather than fully Self expressing, with abandon and joy.

You have shamed sex, even as you have shamed life, calling it evil and wicked, rather than the highest gift and the greatest pleasure.

Before you protest that you have not shamed life, look at your collective attitudes about it. Four-fifths of the world’s people consider life a trial, a tribulation, a time of testing, a karmic debt that must be paid, a school with harsh lessons that must be learned, and, in general, an experience to be endured while awaiting the real joy, which is after death.

It is a shame that so many of you think this way. Small wonder you have applied shame to the very act which creates life.

 

The energy which underscores sex is the energy which underscores life; which is life! The feeling of attraction and the intense and often urgent desire to move toward each other, to become one, is the essen-tial dynamic of all that lives. I have built it into every-thing. It is inbred, inherent, inside All That Is.

The moral codes, religious constrictions, social ta-boos, and emotional conventions you have placed around sex (and, by the way, around love—and all of life) have made it virtually impossible for you to cele-brate your being.

 

From the beginning of time all man has ever wanted is to love and beloved. And from the beginning of time man has done everything in his power to make it impossible to do that. Sex is an extraordinary expression of love—love of another, love of Self, love of life. You ought to therefore love it! (And you do—you just can’t tell anyone you do; you don’t dare show how much you love it, or you’ll be called a pervert. Yet this is the idea that is perverted.)

In our next book, we shall look at sex much more closely; explore its dynamics in greater detail, for this is an experience and an issue of sweeping implications on a global scale.

For now—and for you, personally—simply know this: I have given you nothing shameful, least of all your very body, and its functions. There is no need to hide your body or its functions—nor your love of them, and of each other.

Your television programs think nothing of showing naked violence, but shrink from showing naked love. Your whole society reflects that priority.

From Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsch