'Can sensuality be spiritual?'
is a question that has aroused its fair share of controversy
over the centuries, says Eric Harrison.
 Sensuality
is the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, but no
one has a good word to say about it. Moralists regard
it as degrading, selfish and wasteful, if not actually
evil. Hedonists, on the other hand, find it frustrating
and disappointing. It offers so much and rarely delivers.
So is sensuality always bad or unsatisfying? Can it
be redeemed? And is it possible for sensuality to be
part of a spiritual life.
We're inclined to forget that some cultures have enthusiastically
embraced sensuality as a natural part of the good life.
Ancient Rome was a tolerant and promiscuous society
in which every conceivable luxury was enjoyed. Married
women were as open about their affairs as their husbands.
Similarly, Japanese culture has an enormous capacity
for sensory pleasures, from sex and pornography to moon
viewing and flower arrangement. The tea ceremony is
a masterpiece of delicate sensuality. A traditional
Japanese meal is a work of art, and all this indulgence
is remarkably free of shame or guilt. Even today, well
bred schoolgirls happily sell their bodies for extra
pocket money. It pays better than working in a fast
food chain. Sex and sensuality, in that culture, are
as natural as breathing.
The philosopher Jeremy Bentham described life as fundamentally
about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
It is hard to argue about this unless you are a masochist.
John Stuart Mill reintroduced the moral dimension by
saying that there is a hierarchy of pleasures (in other
words, some are "good" and some are "bad").
For example, the appreciation of great music or literature
is likely to satisfy you more than getting drunk. Of
course, it all comes down to a matter of taste.
Even though some pleasures seem more spiritual than
sensual, Aristotle still gave sensation its primacy.
"There is nothing in the mind," he said, "that
did not first arise in the senses." Even the most
abstract or spiritual thoughts have their original,
if long forgotten, bases in sensation. And if you can't
trust your senses to say what is right or wrong for
you, what can you trust? A holy book? A pop psychologist?
The newspapers?
Research suggests that happy people commonly have a
rich sensual engagement with the world. Conversely,
people who are depressed are often "anhedonic":
that is, nothing gives them pleasure. Happy people are
usually "here", with their senses and their
heart open. Unhappy people, on the other hand, tend
to fearfully disconnect from the sensory world and ruminate
endlessly about the past and future.
This is all common sense, and yet hedonism is still
under the curse of our Christian heritage. We can still
feel somewhat embarrassed about enjoying life. To openly
indulge the senses, as the hippies did in the '60s,
still feels somewhat rebellious or naughty. We feel
the long shadows of St Paul and St Augustine even today.
Throughout history, we find that spirituality is usually
vehemently antagonistic towards sensuality. After all,
why would anyone who enjoyed the world think about God?
Spirituality is usually more attractive to the disappointed
and depressed. In fact, many spiritual leaders have
deliberately poured bile on ordinary human pleasure
as a way of cultivating followers.
For most of the last two millennia, Christianity has
described lust, gluttony, and avarice as deadly sins,
and monks would attempt to extinguish all pleasure in
their search for purity. St Origen in the third century
cut off his penis in his battle against the flesh. Even
the most innocent kinds of sensuality - playing games
on Sunday, for example - were seen as the trademark
of "the world, the flesh and the devil".
Similarly, Yoga idealises those trance states in which
the mind turns resolutely away from the world. This
is called "pratyhara", or "sense-withdrawal".
You try to focus inwards so intently that you literally
don't hear or see or feel anything at all. This kind
of insensibility is a precondition for "samadhi",
which is the union of the mind with God. Conversely,
the outer world is seen as illusory, deceptive, and
the source of all misery.
Likewise, the Buddha said that all pleasures are ultimately
painful because they won't last forever. Even the pleasure
of marrying a beautiful, 16 year old virgin from a good
family will not satisfy you, he said. (She gets old
and nags. You get fat and impotent.) The noble person
should therefore abandon every kind of sensory engagement
with the world, and seek only what is impervious to
change and decay.
The Buddha has put his finger on the one problem with
sensuality: it is particularly vulnerable to the law
of diminishing returns. The first piece of chocolate
is Paradise. The fourth is okay but the fifteenth could
be almost tasteless or even repulsive. After the first
sensory contact, it's all downhill.
This is called "habituation", and it is hardwired
into our nervous system. Habituation means that the
more you repeat a certain sensation, the more rapidly
its intensity fades. For example, you may be acutely
aware of a foul smell when you walk into a room, and
yet a minute later you can't smell it at all. Familiarity
breeds contempt. The olfactory nerves literally switch
off, as a kind of neurological safety valve. Imagine
how much chocolate you'd eat if it all tasted like the
first bite!
The downside of habituation is that you become jaded.
"The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the
ear filled with hearing," says the Bible. An ex-monk
that I knew had been a boy prostitute between the wars
in London. He said that many of the European aristocracy
he met were so sexually jaded by their thirties that
they became celibate.
Unfortunately, you can't "own" pleasure. You
may be an oriental potentate with an abundance of food,
wine, music and dancing girls at your fingertips, but
there is no guarantee that you will enjoy any of it.
Kublai Khan conquered China and enjoyed all the pleasures
of that mighty culture, but he died obese and utterly
depressed.
Yet the path of sensuality doesn't have to finish in
gloom and despair. Years ago, a girlfriend gave me a
formula for managing a chocolate addiction. Buy small
quantities of expensive chocolates, she said, and consciously
enjoy each one. Buy truffles from Belgium, not the bargain
slabs at the supermarket. Become a gourmet, not a glutton.
There is no doubt that gluttony is just as destructive
to body and soul as Christianity says, and that we have
now become a gluttonous and avaricious society, to our
great cost. There is a certain kind of lowly pleasure
that comes from eating two or three pizzas in a row,
but it will also kill you. However, this kind of thoughtless
excess is not the only way to exploit the senses.
Some people are connoisseurs. They consciously love
music, or food, or clothing, or art, or nature, or a
craft or a sport. The gourmet, for example, eats with
deliberate appreciation. Each bite then becomes unique
and rich in memory and associations. Furthermore, this
kind of value-added sensuality gets even more sophisticated
and satisfying with age. And you don't finish up like
Kublai Khan.
It is not hard to train yourself in this skill. Any
sensation - a bite of food, a kiss, a song - becomes
more satisfying if you give it your full attention.
If you do this deliberately over time, you accumulate
a vast body of intuitive knowledge about your subject,
and about yourself.
So are you a gourmet or a glutton? Do you taste your
food or devour it? Do you just "hear" music
or do you listen to it? Do you really know how your
body feels when you walk, do exercise, make love? Do
you live in a world of detailed, ever-changing, subtle
sensuality or do you just get through another boring
day?
Even if a connoisseur loves what he or she does, to
know anything well is still a discipline and a sacrifice.
In ancient Greece, an athlete was regarded as an "ascetic",
because of his single-minded discipline and dedication
to training. To pour your attention into one thing means
you sacrifice everything else you could be doing or
thinking about at that time. Even nowadays, we regard
some athletes as semi-divine as much for their phenomenal
discipline as for their successes.
All that training aims for transcendent moments in which
you become almost preternaturally alive. In states of
deep sensuality, you go beyond words and thought. The
English language and the 21st century disappear. You
know and love and become one with your object, be it
music or a human being or the dirt in your garden. The
circle is complete. Through the senses, you can occasionally
touch the face of God. At the very least, you know you
are in a blessed and glorious world.
This is where sensuality can become spiritual. A connoisseur
is literally "one who knows", and it can be
argued that to know any one thing perfectly is to momentarily
know everything. Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach and
Beethoven were masters of sensuality, but you wouldn't
call them unspiritual because of it. They saw the eternal
through their conscious love and appreciation of the
senses, and we can do the same. |
