The Psychology of Sexual Guilt
Religion and sex are linked by guilt. In an attempt to rigidly control sex the Judeo-Christian tradition has employed guilt as a psychic weapon of great proportion. It is a weapon that has the power to reach deep into a person’s consciousness and to turn that consciousness in and on upon itself in a way that totally dis-empowers the individual. It is fearsome because people do not know how to handle feelings of guilt. They become confused, frustrated, and the mind just eventually gives up, succumbing to it. This weapon is truly formidable, and certain kinds of people and organizations depend on it and use it as a tool of power and domination over others. The need and motive for the employment of guilt is imperative to certain kinds of people who use it in their everyday personal lives and these people cause a lot of pain and confusion especially for children who are most vulnerable. The greatest psychological and spiritual tragedy in history was the incorporation of guilt in religion as a tool for the repression of the sexual power that comes from sexual ecstasy. A great part of the secret motive for this can be traced back to male insecurity in realizing that the female has a far greater sexual capacity, a greater capacity to satisfy sexual partners, and a greater capacity for climax. Historically, a sexually uninhibited wife was quite threatening to a society where females were seen as being the personal property of males, and where males were revered as being dominant and stronger. Because of fears about women enjoying sex "too much," more than one society still removes the clitoris from young females so that climax and the enjoyment of sex are no longer possible. In his book on sex and religion even Rabbi Abraham Feinberg admits that organized religion's restrictions on sex have been grounded in part on an effort to gain power over people, especially the women.
What early mankind did not see is that repression of the sexual impulse actually
succeeded in fostering deep obsessions with it and, in the extreme, the repressed energy
brings about destructive antisocial behavior. Those African tribes that resort to outright
physical castration mirror in the extreme the same basic psychology happening about power
and sexuality, happening unconsciously, but almost universally, in more civilized western
societies. The goals are the same it is just the means that changes. In the early days of
our modern day culture religious leaders would employ frightening threats of an eternal
fire-and-brimstone punishment for unrepentant yielding to carnal lust to repress the
powers that threatened them, and in fact they still do. Early Judeo-Christian doctrine
stated the act of sex was to be limited to bringing children into the world and satisfying
the physical needs of the husband. Women were told that "indulging in climax" or
even enjoying sex was morally wrong and associated with the ways of prostitutes and
promiscuous women who were seen as the greatest of sinners. The effect of sexual guilt is the creation of complex of dysfunction's stemming from deep, negative subconscious feelings. In women we see it manifested in an inability to be aware of sexual feelings, to admit sexual arousal, or to enjoy sexual satisfaction. In an effort to protect them from "the evil of sex," women become less able to deal with increased levels of sexual stimulation or opportunity. In effect they are successfully controlled and their power as beings curtailed. In the final analysis sexual guilt creates a mind-body schism that debilitates their power as beings. The price is high when a woman loses contact with the physical red level energies of her first chakra, of her bodily sexual reactions, which are, in great part, the source of much of her power as a woman. The long-term visible effects can be depression and psychosomatic illnesses. This first chakra is the root and when that is made rotten what comes above becomes debilitated. Yet sexual guilt is not just limited to females. With men the results range from impotency to sexual crime. According to some criminologists and psychologists it is more than just a coincidence that sexual criminals often have backgrounds that include ultra-rigid sexual influences. Guilt is a negative paralyzing emotion based on non-acceptance of oneself or the situation, and it does not lead to change or improvement. Guilt is a negative focus turned upon oneself: "I am an evil person. I can't bear myself. I am unworthy." When these feelings arise over the most beautiful and powerful aspect of self, a person’s sexuality, these feelings can lead to self-hatred and self-destruction. The Christians mastered the use of guilt by placing it into the Tabular Rosa of the western mind with their concept of being born onto the earth with an "original sin" for which we are not even responsible. This puts a feeling of guilt in the basement of their minds with thoughts like. “I am bad, even without doing anything wrong.” Imagine the psychic confusion of a mind thus programmed. It’s like writing a computer program with a defective first line of code. Such programs are guaranteed to crash. This entire insanity at its worst is seen in several Christian traditions that actually teach that one should feel guilty and ashamed for simply having fun, and thus they are not even allowed to sing or dance. It should be noted that one of the greatest funs in life is lovemaking so these anti fun attitudes seem motivated along similar lines. Sex, the basic life force is that threatening. It has been so repressed and dirtied that one can hardly even imagine what a beautiful, pure and holy woman, in her full power and sexuality, would even look like. And even harder to imagine the kind of man who could deal with her likes without getting insecure. The common modern woman who does not associate herself with any of this negative Christian morality still lives under the influence of more than she knows. First she lives in a culture, and if she is part of it then she cannot escape its influences entirely. What we are talking about in this book is something new to society, a level of beauty the likes we have not seen before. We are not talking about the type of beauty you see on almost every magazine cover. We are talking about a beauty and power that is holy and stunning in its vulnerability and purity, a kind of power that mixes the full power of womanhood with the full power of the spirit of grace. We can question whether guilt is a learned, socially imposed emotion because there are certain cultures like the Tibetans who do not even have a word for guilt. If it is not even a basic human emotion, but a culturally imposed type of mental frustration that is programmed in we can begin to suspect that something truly evil is at work. It is not funny that many modern day evangelists go around saying that guilt is a key player in Satan's master plan of deception when their own bible and basic teachings are responsible for most of its creation. They like to say, “As the devil weaves his web of guilt into our lives, we are often overcome by feelings of punishment, rejection, and isolation. It is then that we are tempted to doubt the sincerity of God's forgiveness and grace.” These kinds of mind games that are double binds destroy the minds ability to see straight about anything. And what should we say about people out of whose mouths these words come words like evil, the devil, Satan? Perhaps they in truth are what they are projecting or suggesting with their own words meaning devils, evil and Satan personified in their own personage. Lust is really what it is all about, what the puritans cast down as sexual evil and it is correct to understand that lust is basically destructive to relationships because it is "me" rather than "we" centered. Not surprisingly, cultures that have more lenient attitudes about sexuality have not had significant problems with lust. Clearly, lust is related to things that are forbidden, not to things that are readily available. So again we can see how religions actually create what they seek to destroy. By denying and repressing the beauty of sexuality they make it into a rare quality that we cannot help lust after. The effectively turned what is most beautiful and bright inside into something ugly. Instead of celebrating the light beings that we are, able to dance in loving songs of beautiful lovemaking, we are haunted and tormented with living realities below the potentials of our natural beings. Guilt is a weapon that is deadly to our emotions. Many people report the source of their emotional struggles with something that says, "I just have an overwhelming feeling of guilt." There may be no definable reason for their guilt that they can put their finger on just a pressing sense of guilt that is slowly destroying them on the inside. Physically, sexually, and mentally abused people are prime candidates for guilt about things that are not their fault at all. They carry huge burdens of guilt that they should never have to bear. But many would have them bare that instead of looking honesty at what creates this whole mess to begin with. The emotion of guilt is associated with the realization or perception of wrongdoing, of having violated an important social, moral, or ethical rule or code. A person may feel guilty without being consciously aware of it. Conscious and unconscious guilt act as an underlying factor and force in behavior, emotions and in our most personal relationships. So the world of guilt and its use hinges on concepts of right and wrong with sexuality being the basic wrong. Is this right? Another structural way that bible creates guilt and represses sexual beauty is in the creation of someone to compare ourselves to who is sexless. It is not an uncommon psychology to compare us with some ideal person, or with some person who perhaps is more talented in a given area. There is no harm in feeling less gifted or inadequate in such a comparison when that is simply an accurate assessment of facts; the harm comes in feeling guilty about it, in feeling we should be better than we can be, in feeling we should be as good or as competent as the ideal or the other person. In the sexual arena this is a deadly game especially if it is a complete lie that Jesus was sexless. In this book it becomes an obvious absurdity and actual obscenity to suggest that his mother Mary was sexless, after all she gave birth several times. So here guilt for being something we cannot and were never meant to be is programmed in and creates a moral obligation to be better than we can be. It creates an impossibility upon which many have hanged themselves, creating an insanity of mind, body, emotion and spirit. Obviously we only have the moral obligation to be as good as we can be. One can only do the best one can or by trying to improve one's best as one grows. We then do not worry or fret over what we simply cannot do. This all gets destroyed when we believe our moral obligation is to repress sexuality through trying to be as good as Jesus or his mother. For we simply cannot do what no one has done or would want to do if they were in their right mind. Building universes of guilt around purposeful lies is the greatest rape of the collective heart, mind and soul of humanity there has ever been. This all comes down to how it affects our children. Adult pre-occupation and fear with pre-adolescent sex, for example, is one good place to examine the roots of sexual guilt. The real problems with sex play before adolescence is not what most people think, the biggest problem is being caught by an adult. A child who is caught while having a sexual experience by a parent, who makes him or her feel desperately guilty and afraid, who creates the feeling in them that sex is a dirty thing, which must be conducted secretly in a dark corner, if at all, is headed for trouble in later life. Why is sexual play between little kids wrong, evil, or dirty unless sex is? In the chapter on The Psychology of Touch we also talked about this. The pairing together of sex with guilt creates deadly emotional mental complexes that there is absolutely no reason to create. Some people believe that a child’s sex life begins even before they are born and point to the fact that some little boys are born with erections. Why would we think that unusual if the lungs and heart both function at birth? When we look at sex as something that is also non-physical, as an internal energy or passion light it should not surprise us that even very young children can have orgasms which is just another way of saying that they can feel pleasure. Having sexual feelings, experiencing orgasm and masturbation are a natural part of growing up, just as learning what pain is like or what other little boys and girls are like, or what can be done and what can’t be done in the society one is born in. In short people grow up in a world full of all kinds of things, and sex experiences are common to everyone. There is no need to single out a child’s sexuality unless we want to abuse the child’s innocence and replace it with something else. Human beings are curious by nature. As babies they start crawling about the floor, exploring the world, and they continue to explore it when they can stand up and walk. It is natural and most easy to explore their own bodies when very young for their own body is always with them and within reach. It is natural, after they have satisfied their curiosities about their own bodies to become curious about what others are like. Boys want to find out if other boys are like them and they want to see if girls are different and visa versa. So at some point kids start exploring each other and this is innocent sex play. Hundreds of millions of children have played doctor making a game out of sexual exploration. This kind of make-believe enables children to look at and examine each other as much as they please. Though parents do need to watch for older kids or what might be termed ‘sexual bullies’ or kids who already are sexually disturbed, parents should know that ‘normal’ sexual play is a natural part of growing up and is in reality practiced by most children. It can be and is clean, healthy, enjoyable and valuable if it helps children to learn to accept sex naturally, free of the guilt and fear that complicates the sex lives of so many adults. But there is no getting around the fact that parents tend to disapprove of such activity and even the most relaxed and open minded of them can and will get tense over the subject when it comes up. It is though, the very relaxation and casual acceptance of this play ‘as play’ that helps kids remain with the innocence of it, and like all other play, normal kids simply move on to other interests. Just like parents need and want private sectors in their lives, the children also need a bit of privacy with this. All human beings need some kind of privacy, and this is a particularly useful kind to have. Just because of this, because it is done ‘secretly’ in privacy does not make it dirty. It is easy for parents to make their children feel that anything done in secret is dirty when it isn’t. It is simply a matter of privacy. The essence of sexual guilt is based on images of sexual purity that incorporate sexless ness as an image of purity. This again goes back to divine figures that are worshiped and held up high as examples of what we should all be like. Humans are rarely perfect or pure even when they try very hard to be in any aspect of life, but it is insane to define sexual purity by its non-existence (as we want to do with children) and as we want to do with our priests, nuns, monks, and gods. There will always be something wrong or imbalanced within us as long as any sexual guilt remains. We will always be deprived of the full power and strength of our bodies and beings when at the core we unconsciously feel shame or guilt around the essence of our sexualities. This does not mean that we cannot identify the pollution that we dump into its flow, the mind trips and obsessions and bad habits that we can purify. This book is about seeing and embracing the whole of our sexualities. In our work of identifying our problem area, which we will work with over long periods of time, guilt and shame are not aids. We can forgive ourselves in advance for all our impurities and any understandable mistakes we might make for we are human and are trying to grow ourselves out of a difficult situation which is thousands of years in the making. In final it should be noted why guilt or conscience are untrustworthy guides in the steerage of the ships of our lives. For a person can be guilty of some misdeed or mistake and feel no guilt, and/or not even recognize having done something wrong. And one can feel guilty about something that was not wrong, but which perhaps one mistakenly believes was wrong. This should just highlight the least of the reasons that guilt, shame and sex should never be mixed. It is in their mixing that sex becomes the problem it is. It is in their mixing that sex becomes and obsession and dirt that creates pain and even disease. On the deepest level what guilt and shame do, even in mild or subtle cases, is create self-consciousness. Self-consciousness and inhibition are bedfellows and they work to create tension and reduce sexual pleasure through a complete let go. As we say in the last chapter this is the key to the psychology of orgasm, pleasure and bliss, this letting go, the ability to forget oneself. Women are much more sensitive to these issues, to inhibition so they are the ones who have always lost the most. But men lose in other ways for when their women lose out on their potentials for love and joy so do they. If deep down there was absolutely no shame and no guilt there would be no controlling the power of the bliss that would flow through and this is incredibly frightening to anyone interested in controlling society and its members. What early religious leaders failed to see and what even we still fail to see is that all of this openness to bliss is possible within the context of love, responsibility and respect. A woman can open herself totally and not be a slut. Inhibition is not the only pathway to discretion. Intelligence alone can bring us there; we do not need shame and guilt to remain descent in public. We do not need to destroy the very fabric of our humanity for the simple illusion of civilization on the street. Look what are streets are like anyway today. What society has come to? It does look like some major mistakes have been made. Do we have the courage to correct what is wrong?
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