"Enlightenment is not within the teachings of others, but
within the self... One must only be willing to view
themselves with an open mind and heart, to see
the cosmos and harmony within. For then, when they turn
their eyes from their own self, shall those eyes be open to
the rest of existence and see it for what it is... Existence
simply is."
-- Caliban Hyde
If you look at what we do it is as much a martial art
as Karate, Aikido, Kendo or the ancient western Art of the
Fence. It requires the acquisition and application of
physical skills that are then applied to another human being
It requires a certain empathy towards the other person,
which goes beyond normal human interaction. In the martial
arts these skills are applied to overcome the resistance of
an opponent, while in the S/m arts these skills are used to
overcome the mental resistance of a partner, but they both
require that empathy to be able to become that other person,
to know what they are going to feel and what they are going
to do before they do.
>From another direction, what we do can be considered a
fine art as the idea behind it is to make sure that someone
leaves a scene a better person than one found them. Whether
that has some kind of Zen connotation of taking them further
along the way towards "enlightenment" or simply is a
matter of giving them a rousing good orgasm, the idea is to
leave one's bottom in a better, more satisfied state than
one found him or her. We play on a submissive body much in
the same way a violinist plays a violin in order to give it
depth and pliability. The difference between music and S/m,
which makes so much of what we do so intense, is that music
exists for a mass audience, while we create music for an
audience of one. More importantly the instrument is also a
participant. It is a dance in which two people acquire a
different state of mind, a transcendental state has many
names but is without definition.
So where is this place, which we are attempting to go,
this state of transcendence. (Perhaps here is a good place
for the caveat since we are about, at least in my lexicon,
to be entering the world of Zen and the Tao. There are no
words that can describe exactly what I'm talking about; it's
been tried by poets and philosophers much better than me. I
can only write around it, without touching it. "Because
the mystery cannot be known or named, it is called the
Tao." -- Lao Tsu.) Viewed from yet another place what I am
talking about is a form of religious experience, the stuff
of mystics and shamans. While we use many of the same
techniques as they we call what we do recreation and they
call it religion. It is what Russell Shorto, in his book
Saints and Madmen calls a "god-drug", a physical way of
short cutting ourselves into the presence of the gods
without the mythology attendant on more traditional
religious practices. Moreover, we have found a way of doing
all this within the context of play, which makes so much of
this discussion much too serious to capture what it is we
really do.
Paul Fleishman -- Winner of the 1993 Pfister Award --
wrote, in his book The Healing Spirit about love:
"Every case of psychotherapy, to a greater or lesser
extent, is a problems of the failure to love. My interest
in religious issues in psychotherapy has been spurred on by
a series of patients who have told me spontaneously, without
prompting, that their impaired search for love was
floundering because they were seeking religion through
sexual intimacy."
In, Saints and Madmen, Mr. Shorto also quotes
Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda's commentary
on their translation of Patunjali's Sutras? they talk about
Freud's idea of religion as repressed sex and note that
Patunjali's response would have been "But then sex is
nothing but potential religion". Mr. Shorto goes on to
say, "The idea behind both of these passages is that the
sexual urge and the spiritual urge come from a need not to
be alone, a need to connect" and states that this is the
goal of psychotherapy as well.
This connection between sex and religion explains a lot
of historical phenomena. The distaste for sexuality found
in the early, apocalyptic Christian church, indeed its
general distaste for sexual relations throughout the years,
the crusade against porn from the French monarchy's
prosecutions of the Marquis De Sade through America's own
Anthony Comstock and, of course, the Meese Commission.
Sexual impulses and religious impulses are the two wildest
most creative and destructive drives that humankind is
subject to and so much of history has been an effort of the
latter to control the former. Both can be manifestations of
the ultimate sanity and the ultimate insanity, all in the
same package of competing ideas.
My sense of spirituality comes from the east. Taoism
(without the shamanist/magical appendage) and Zen (without
the Buddhist/Shinto encrustation) seek also to create a
unity between the world and the individual, which is
greater, more vivid than the normal fog that most of us, of
nature walk around in. At its simplest, most fundamental it
is Walking around Zen or the Tao of the Everyday, fetching
wood and carrying water. This means that everything is Zen
and that all actions are the Tao and we attain it by
emptying ourselves to the experiences of life, whatever they
are without judgment or critical appreciation. The Way
embraces suffering; the way embraces joy but it makes no
weighing between the two.
My experience of subspace is the same as my experience
of Zen. It is a giving up of the intellectual sense of
"me" and what "I" am. It is a surrender to the physical
part of me, the animal within, which reacts to the physical
without making a judgment about it. It is a willingness to
allow the body to take one where it wants to go without the
interference of the intellect. It is climax increased
logarithmically by the addition of endorphins, allowing one
to feel oneness with one's partner and the world.
Subspace is an easy connection to this religious
experience, but what about those of us who Top, who are the
yang to the bottom's yin? While the submissive is attuned
to the passive, accepting part of life, the Dominant is
attuned to the playful, giving part of life. He or she is
the connector of Yin and Yang. That's what makes us very
much separate from the traditional mysticisms, except
perhaps the Tantric investigation of sexuality. We do not
seek unity within individually (at least not the S/m part of
our lives) but unity within our relationships. The yin and
yang are separated into individuals, and individual roles
and it is the practice of the scene, which creates the
unity.
The idea of the scene is to weld myself so closely to
my partner that his or her climax becomes my climax. This
notion is at least one explanation of what we call the power
exchange. It is also the reason that so many of us feel the
sharp focus of illumination as we come away from a
successful scene. DomSpace is less physical than the
experience of subspace and considerably subtler, but it is
every bit as powerful as the experience of subspace.
So, what we are after in this exceptional act of
passion and cruelty we call a scene is that oneness, that
transcendence which is the same goal as religion, which is
the same goal as vanilla sex. This is why religion, in
general, discourages sexual experimentation; it is
competition. The physical and mental discipline the Art of
S/m requires to be successful means that the "suchness" we
experience in our sex lives is more intense, more long
lasting than the experience of vanilla sex. It attaches us
to the world of sensation rather than to the more ephemeral
world of mythology. This practicality does not make it any
less a "way" to experience our own godhood nor does it
make what we do any more than the mythologies of other ways
to find god. It makes it, instead, a way of life, a way of
fetching wood and carrying water, a way of getting one's
slave to fetch the wood and carry water, a way to find the
god-ness in ourselves.
? A collection of conversations rather like the dialogues of Socrates.
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