Hello everyone and welcome to Wisdom of the Ages. This is the time and place where we discuss topics that weave the sacred into modern day reality. So one of the reasons I decided to create the Wisdom of the Ages podcast is because I saw quite clearly that the sacred feminine is not taken seriously and that’s at our peril. So it’s a time for shifting consciousness and its happening. So our current dualistic split isn’t just found in Judeo-Christianity, it’s found in most of the world’s religions including Buddhism and Hinduism. So I enjoyed, in my quest, finding the fairy grail, which you can read about in my Legends of the Grail series, and the fairy grail gave me some hope that we might just find our way back to a non-dual, non-hierarchical approach to spirituality. But if you really want to experience the in-breath and the out-breath of creation, I have the guy for you.
So Mark Whitwell, with his new provocative book, God and Sex: Now We Get Both, is here with us today and I’m so excited to have him on the show because he dares to ask why the concept of God can inspire violence and he explains that sex is an invitation into life. He writes that sex is the substance of reality itself. The attraction of equal opposites that create life. So we’re going to discuss this book on the show. So Mark is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, a non-profit committed to yoga education around the world. Mark has taught yoga for many decades throughout the US, Europe, Asia and Oceania, adapting the principals of the great tradition to the needs of the people from many cultures and countries. So here we are. We’re going to talk about God and Sex. Hello, Mark Whitwell.
Thank you so much, Ayn, for that beautiful introduction. It’s a very great privilege to be talking to you and talking to all those people out there. All those lovely people. Thanks everybody for giving me the privilege of talking to you for a moment.
I just love you, Mark, and I’ve watched you over the years and just feel like you’re a dear, dear friend, not only to me, but for all of humanity. Thank goodness that you’re here on the planet.
Thank you so much.
I have a question for you. Why did you put God and sex together as a title?
My observation in my life is that this cultural assumption that’s universal, all around the world, that God and sex are two different phenomena. He has actually made both vulgar and useless, less than useless, even destructive to human life. This automatic assumption that God and sex are two different things, because of course they’re not. Of course they’re not. The union of male females is the very method of God or method of life. The word God can be a tricky word to use and I use it cautiously but I could replace God with reality of the power of the cosmos, the source reality that is arising is everything. But I’m happy to use that word, God, because I see it as a correction of the right use of the word, God.
So obviously, it is God’s method to combine male and female in the perfect union, a perfect harmony. A great power, an extraordinary beauty that is life, that is everything in the natural world, is the beauty of God, of reality itself. And I think everybody’s noticed that. If you look at anything in the natural world, it is unspeakable beauty and guess what, everybody listening, you are of the natural world. You are the beauty. So this is how life is working, how God is working to join the two and the great spark of life is suddenly appearing, God knows how. Here it is, you know, and new life comes. That’s how… that is the process. So God and sex are indeed one reality.
It seems like humanity has suffered a lot over both of these, both God… God because of all the wars and so forth, and also sexuality. Just poor men. I was reading in your book about the men who had to give up the love of the world, the love of the feminine, the embrace of everything natural to do what they think was good and to intern to service and how, in a lot of ways, not only has it denied women of something sacred, but also has broken the hearts and bodies of a lot of men.
Of course, and that is still the situation. We are in a, thanks to the internet, and universal publishing and smartphones everywhere… we can be, we are in a dialogue that perhaps even our parents didn’t have the benefit of this dialogue but now we’re in a keen investigation, like, is this valid? And even the model of the perfect person that is so intrinsic to our own thought structures of social mind is implying that everybody else is not perfect. You have the perfect person and everybody is in some sort of struggle to become perfect and the arbitrary methods given by this idea. And let’s be clear, civilization had been created by that idea. It’s been the power mechanism of creating societies all around this world and it’s time-
You talked about the great chain of being. You go into that quite deeply in the book and it’s sort of horrifying, actually. And you actually bring up that enlightenment is actually a hoax, which I found quite shocking.
I call it a male fantasy.
A male fantasy, yes. Yes.
The model of the perfect person is implying that everybody else is not perfect and that is the thought structures of our societies that we’ve been born into. So we have those in us. So it’s time to put God and sex together as one statement. Now We Get Both is the subtitle, and we is any two sincere people talking to each other in the same sex or opposite sex intimacy or I mean the public. We the public, we get both. It’s time to investigate this instrument of power that was imposed on humanity with the invention of doctrine and see clearly that, of course, each and every person is the beauty, is the power of the cosmos, is the pure intelligence of life… how life is functioning. And each body, everyone is in perfect harmony with the entire cosmos, with air, with light, with water, with the green realm. And that the male/female collaboration as equals and opposites, where one empowers the other in an endless mutual exchange is the very reality of every single person. And it is our birthright to acknowledge that perfection that is the cosmos.
If I wanted to work with you, what’s your website?
And I know that you have a course coming up so we can actually move and work with some of these concepts, so we’re going to talk about that after we come back from a break.
I want my book and all of our conversations to be very practical and very useful to everybody so they can take some practical action. That’s why we’re putting a course out on January 1st. That’s wonderful, and so, just in 30 seconds, what would you say would be the course is about?
It helps every person, no matter who they are, do a yoga that is right for them, adapted to each individual and their unique needs. Their body type, their age, their health and their cultural background is all respected and each person can do a simple practice that is, indeed, the union of the male/female qualities of life that are in every beautiful person. That’s what it’s about.
That’s incredible. Let’s talk about it some more. I just need to take a break and then we’ll come back and talk about it in a few minutes.
Thank you, thanks Ayn.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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