The Big Spiritual O
by Scott Edelstein

Excerpted from his book Sex and the Spiritual Teacher (Wisdom Publications, 2011)

Many of us come to spiritual teachers feeling like virgins who long to lose our spiritual virginity. Often we believe that the right spiritual teacher can give us, or lead us to, a powerful “spiritual” experience. In essence, we look for a teacher who will bring us to spiritual climax.

Some of us also come to spiritual teachers in the expectation, hope, or belief that they will make us complete—or teach us how to complete ourselves. We admire in our teachers those personal qualities we want to develop ourselves, and may feel that we currently lack. We may also project onto our teachers the ability to fulfill us—as if they will somehow do our internal work for us.

This may have a familiar ring because it’s how we often approach new and potential romantic partners. Yet, just as in romance, these attitudes set us up for disillusionment and disappointment.

Many of us who place ourselves in spiritual teachers’ hands are primarily looking for “powerful” or “profound” or “peak” experiences—i.e., the spiritual equivalent of orgasm. We imagine that experiencing truth or the Absolute must involve a physical or emotional jolt, like a wave of energy washing through us, or a blast of energy up the spine, or a feeling that our third eye or crown chakra is opening. The bigger the effect something has on our body, the more profound we think it must be. And if an experience doesn’t have a physical or emotional kick to it, it must not be truth—or, at least, not a truth worth experiencing. In short, we expect our truth to be hot and juicy.

Some spiritual teachers offer their students these kinds of experiences. Other teachers, however, dismiss them as unimportant—the stuff of spiritual beginners. Some even view such experiences as distractions, dangers, or potential addictions. What is the fundamental difference, these teachers ask, between getting a buzz from a joint, or a double espresso, or a set of “spiritual” exercises? They warn students that they can easily get stuck in blissful or “powerful” experiences, yearning to repeat them again and again, like a cocaine addict who needs to keep doing lines.

People on spiritual paths tend to fall into three general groups: truth seekers, thrill seekers, and comfort seekers. To some degree, all of us have all three orientations—but in most of us, one of the three clearly predominates. Our focus may, of course, change over time; many folks who start out looking for thrills or comfort eventually turn to seeking truth.

For now, let’s look at truth seekers and thrill seekers. Truth seekers want to get to the bottom of things. They are willing to experience difficulty, pain, despair, disappointment, exhaustion, and boredom, if that’s where the scent of truth leads them. But they’re not masochists, ascetics, or prudes: if the smell of truth wafts through sex or gourmet cooking or running a business, they’ll follow it into those realms just as willingly.

In contrast, thrill seekers go after peak experiences. These may be physical, emotional, sexual, or all three. Thrill seekers sign up for workshops on tantric sex, astral travel, power yoga, kundalini awakening, and whole-body orgasm.

Sexually, spiritual thrill-seekers tend to lean toward two extremes:
1. those who consider sex a path to the Absolute
2. those who consider celibacy, and the supplanting of sexual energy and bliss with spiritual energy and bliss, to be a path to the Absolute

Both of these paths have long and venerable histories in multiple spiritual traditions. Both, however, are quests for ecstatic experience—and both mirror the quest to find a partner who can give us a huge, dramatic orgasm.

Ultimately, any quest for spiritual thrills boils down to acquisitiveness and a desire for self-gratification. Some spiritual teachers call these thrills “spiritual toys” or “spiritual candy.” Some also call the pursuit of these thrills “spiritual materialism,” which is fundamentally not very different from hedonism.

In the twenty-first century, when we can gratify far more of our physical and psychological desires than ever before, the promise of “spiritual fulfillment” (however it might be defined) is deeply alluring. Having become jaded with all the goods, services, culture, and sex we can acquire, we want still more. “Spirituality” is the perfect upping of this ante—partly because it promises thrills of a higher order, partly because we can claim to be “spiritually advanced” even as we chase after those thrills.

Scott Edelstein has studied with several spiritual teachers, including Toni Packer, Dainin Katagiri, Tim McCarthy, and Steve Hagen. He is a longtime practitioner of both Buddhism and Judaism, and a committed proponent of serious spirituality in all forms and traditions. Scott’s short works have appeared in Shambhala Sun, American Jewish World, The Writer, and elsewhere. He is also the author of 15 other books on a wide range of subjects.