Great sex is enlightenment. So long as the mind is active, we are run by the collective insanity, the all-pervasive human condition of greed, fear, despair, and violence, the cruelty and suffering we inflict on each other each moment, what most mystics call the ‘illusion of self’. Death is the dissolution of the physical form and the limited sense of self. Orgasm is a temporary dissolution of the clenched physical form and the limited sense of self. Le petit mort, or little death, the orgasm is a portal of liberation, of death—a death of the false self, a unification with life.

Great sex is not dependent on great love between two partners. In fact great love can be an impediment to great sex. Liberating sex sweeps the slate clean every time. At the end of it you don’t remember who your partner is specifically, though you may know her or his soul. What makes you/us whole in sex is not the pointy penis snuggling inside the gaping vagina and forming a full human out of two unfulfilled ones; Sex is Emptiness, even as your body is filled to the brim, to the choking point, with sensation and thrilling pleasure, because the deafening pleasure is what helps you to shed the distractions of daily life and its ephemera.

Most people pursue physical or psychological pleasures and gratifications because they hope or believe they will make them happy or free. Happiness is usually a heightened state of aliveness attained through physical pleasure, or a more secure sense of self attained through psychological fulfillment. But most happiness is temporary and is allocated to the future. Of course, the future does not exist. And all the teachers and seers and gurus in the world have no easy prescription to happiness in the continuous present. Meditate, pray, chant, focus on your third eye, they say. Enlightenment takes time and commitment and repetition. And you can reach it through sexual pleasure. If you have sex in a conscious way every day, opening yourself up to your body and to the present moment, you will have the same results as you will if you repeat your mantra 108 times twice a day. You’ll also have more fun. Sexual ecstasy is a shortcut to God. Sex is salvation. Begin by ‘being in the body.’ It sounds new age and it is. Just do it. Inhabit your body, feel it from within, follow the breath and heartbeat and life inside your body part by part, day after day, until you become

If you are a Jew or a Christian or an Arab, you cannot fuck without feeling guilty. When your religious convictions violate and vilify your sexual desires, immerse yourself in pleasure. To do everything you do as if that is exactly what you want to be doing at that exact moment is the secret to being happy. To turn your will over to the moment is bliss. The fountainhead of all religion is our sense of amazement at being in this marvel-filled world, our wonder in the mysteries of the universe. Prayer, and worship rituals of any kind, is the method we’ve devised to cross the gap between manmade (or God-given) doctrine and (our sense of) the divine. Prayer, chanting, and genuflection, for example, are ways of opening ourselves up to the blessings of everyday life. The task of all spiritual paths is to keep the practitioner open, to enable the lifting up of the heart and mind to the harmony and the passion for life that is God. Perennial prayer in Christianity is the inner gesture that is the essence of all religious practice in every culture. God’s central message is that we all face one primary task: to enjoy life, together.

Since sex is one of the most natural activities human beings enjoy together, sex has since prehistoric times been part, actually or symbolically, of any religious worship. What is natural can’t be forbidden. What is joyful can’t be wrong. Only if we debase or waste the sexual ecstasy should we feel badly about having sex. Sex is bliss and what is bliss leads directly to God.
My grandfather was a devout Orthodox priest. He was a charismatic leader, mellifluous psalm singer, eloquent speaker, tireless builder of museums and chapels and charities, a clear vessel, a glowing specimen of human purity. I was devoted to him. He never sang a secular song, danced at the church fairs, cut his hair or his beard, took off his long black flowing robes, set foot in the sea, sat in a taverna, drove a car, uttered a negative word or oath or a smidgen of doubt about his faith and calling. He had a dream when he was.. The secret to his awesome serenity was surrender.

The first time I masturbated, I was mortified. As a child, I was fearless and oblivious—I had courage and recklessness--so this was the first time I remember feeling abject terror. And I couldn’t stop doing it. I had nobody to talk to, needless to say, and wouldn’t have dared to mention its name if I had known it. I did the only thing I knew, at the age of 12, to do when wading in strange waters: I started reading. I went to the public library in my Greek island town, which was the capital of the biggest island in Greece during the military junta, and found nothing but ancient Platonic treatises on the virtues of sublimating all eroticism, and Christian books that confirmed I had crossed over to the darker side. In the Orthodox Church, there isn’t much in the way of “repent and you’ll be saved,” wed-Christ-and-be-reborn, or even confess-and-be-absolved nuance. I might as well have fornicated with the Devil, like the whore of Babylon, from what I could read in that library. I found no anatomy, physiology, soft-core, or highbrow erotica that dealt with the topic anywhere. I continued sitting in the bathtub during my Sunday bath, letting the water get tepid, a dog-eared, stained copy of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra propped open against my waterlogged knees, and read, over and over, passages, while my wrist tried to rub against my Mons Venus without actually touching labia, as if by accident. And that’s how I learned to pleasure myself and what/the technique I perfected to the point of achieving climax within seconds of sitting on my left wrist and delicately, almost imperceptibly, grinding on it over my panties, often with my legs crossed to further hide/mask my activity from my high-minded self--while the right hand performed more useful/ tasks like typing, and while my ears and eyes were acutely focused on the slightest unexpected sound approaching. After the first/initial search for some answers and enlightenment, I silently resolved to ignore the whole orgasmic revolution/revelation I was undergoing and, while I performed daily routine masturbations in order to alleviate the need much like I alleviate the need for peeing by emptying my bladder, I never again revisited the topic in my writing in my diary or anywhere else. My primary concerns were participating in the political upheaval of the times, as older students helped overthrow the dictatorships, and posing big unanswerable questions of the “What am I? Why am I? Why can’t I fit in anywhere?” kind. I lived my life as if the upper half and the lower half of myself could not communicate. For many years my fingers never touched my clitoris. My fingers never entered my vagina. That I was highly sexed I attributed to freak genetic accident--I took after my Dad and other male members of my family, whose stories of sex trouble were legion and family lore--but I refused to get down and dirty. Like fixing car engines and leaky faucets, I left the distasteful manual work to men. I did not want to know what was happening/going on down there. The less I knew about my seat/hole of heat and shame, the more pure I could remain. Hydraulics appalled me. Even after years of sexual experience of all kinds, to which I was dispassionately open, like a student of erotic anthropology, I had no idea how sex worked. Considering my mother hadn’t known that men had different sex organs until she encountered my Dad’s on her wedding night, it is not surprising I didn’t know that a woman’s vagina had two holes--one for peeing, the other for the sperm--until long after I had published a successful book of fiction whose protagonist was a vagina.
Welcome to the human race.