phil shining
chapters
Sex Life Cultivation: Ars Erotica as an Alternative to Sex Education and Sex Therapy
In Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World: Beyond the Biopolitics of the New Normal (Brill, 2023)
Pages: 393–452
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004549388_014
Introduction to the “New Normal:” Biopolitics, Sexuality, and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World
In Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World: Beyond the Biopolitics of the New Normal (Brill, 2023)
Pages: 1–80
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004549388_002
Embodying “The Little Death” of Orgasm: An Interdisciplinary Research on Sexual Trance
In Exploring Sexuality and Spirituality: An Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Field (Brill, 2021)
Pages: 318–386
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004437869_012
Introduction to the Sexuality and Spirituality Field of Research: A History of the Intersections Between Sexuality and Spirituality
In Exploring Sexuality and Spirituality: An Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Field (Brill, 2021)
Pages: 1- 54
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004437869_002
The Sexuality and Spirituality field of research is focused on the physical and emotional well-being potential of embodied experiences like bliss, ecstasy, and eroticism as, also, the ethical potential of the ars erotica, the arts of living, and the millenary spiritual traditions that have generated the knowledge required to responsibly cultivate these liberating experiences. The Sexuality and Spirituality field of studies delineates the territories to explore by scholars interested in the historical intersecting problematizations: eroticism, ecstasy, mysticism, and inner cultivation.
As it would be expected, the Sexuality and Spirituality field of studies shares some of the same problematizations of the Religion, Sexuality and Gender field—like inquiring on love, intimate relationships, gender empowerment, or subjectivity construction—, it constitutes an independent field on its own; while the latter is centered on gender and identity, the former is focused on ecstasy and selflessness. This fact corroborates the critical thinking potential of the Sexuality and Spirituality field of studies and research, not only supported on its use of critical theory conceptual and methodological tools but, above all, due to its emancipatory nature, in which self-centeredness or self-realization do not constitute the goals to achieve—as it happens in present-day uncritical approaches to the study of spirituality—but, actually, social habits that need to be problematized through the critical analysis of the political and ethical consequences of its cultural normalization in contemporary capitalist societies.
The history of the interrelations between sexuality and spirituality reveals how fundamental this interaction has been in the evolution of human societies. Although each culture reveals its own particularities, the big-picture history of sexuality presented in this Introduction to the Sexuality and Spirituality Field of Research indicates the formation of five different eras of its interaction based in the evidence of processes shared between cultures and civilizations during hundreds or thousands of years.
The first era of interactions between sexuality and spirituality, lived by the Upper Paleolithic societies (50,000 – 10,000 BCE), is characterized by the emergent problematization of the mysteries of the origins of life that give way to the earliest spiritual inquiries in humankind history, as part of a generalized sex/life/death biocultural continuum. It is clear that at this point of human history there were not yet fully formed experiences of what we call now “sexuality” or “spirituality;” however, there is evidence of instinctive notions of sex and spirit integrated into the non-dual experience of prehistoric everyday life, going from sex rituals to the use of Venus figurines, among others.
The second era, lived by archaic societies (8,000 – 3,000 BCE), is characterized by the rule of governments and religions establishing the first separations between everyday life and spirituality with the introduction of divisions like immanence/transcendence, gods/people and sacred/profane, giving way also to the first historical interruption of the sexual/spiritual continuum: sexuality now becomes regulated by authorities, conditioning the use of sex as a medium to access the divine.
The third era, lived by Axial Age societies (800 BCE – 300 BCE), is characterized by the first reintegration of sexuality and spirituality driven by the pioneer countercultures defying the monopoly of the divine exerted by political and religious authorities, developing the earliest arts of existence and the original stylizations of sexual conducts. The fourth era, lived by medieval societies (300 BCE – 1,700 CE), is characterized by restrictive religious moral codes, reinforcing marriage and family, prohibiting certain sexual practices, and promoting love separated from sex, giving way to an unprecedented historical division between sexual pleasure and the divine.
The fifth era, lived by modern societies (1,700 BCE – present day), is characterized by the development of capitalism and biopolitical forms of governmentality leading to processes of secularization of the social systems and, also, to the formation of a sexuality dispositif that facilitates the individualization of human beings. This revolutionary process continues today, with the globalized macroprocess of generalized sexualization of our hyper-modern societies, accentuating the division between sex and spirituality due to the hegemony of self-centered cultures. However, current 21st century events indicate a new countercultural reintegration of sex and spirituality emerging among alternative societies around the world, recovering sex as a medium to access the divine and as a vehicle to cultivate selflessness and spirituality, reconfiguring the feminine/masculine polarity, the ethics of hedonism and ecstasy, eroticism, inner cultivation, intimate relationships, and the empowerment of women and LGBTQIA+ communities.
In conclusion, at the same time that the sexuality dispositif massively integrates people to a mainstream self-centered culture through the promises of gender construction, full agency, and self-realization, alternative communities find the selflessness potential of sexual activity and the spirituality intrinsic to sexual pleasure, revealing the limits of the self and the ego while taking back the power of ecstasy, plus highlighting its health, well-being, ethical, and even emancipatory political possibilities for the times we are living in.
Keywords:
ars erotica – arts of living – Axial Age – bliss – divinity – ecstasy – eroticism – ethics – feminine/masculine polarity – gender empowerment – Hatha Yoga – history of sexuality – inner cultivation – mysticism – selflessness – Tantra – Tao – Vajrayāna – Yoga – well-being.