5.7.3.3 The second step: the natural flow of sexual energy 

This may usefully be read by both sexes, although it refers primarily to the male aspirant. From your experience to this stage, you know, as a fact, that your body has a sexual energy centre located in your groin, and that your organism is keenly aware of the unrefined, hard to control, all-consuming nature of this energy. Now you are ready to begin the natural process of refining and transmuting this raw energy. Males will learn either to raise this energy or to release it, usually via orgasm: for what seems the longest time, a male will probably utilise both practices.

As a male or female, before you begin the practice of raising and transmuting your body’s naturally produced sexual energy, it will be helpful if you have some understanding of how your psycho-physiological organism is constructed to accommodate and assist this process. Be clear: you have no need to understand the mechanics of this process to achieve success in transmuting sexual energy. Your heart lasts a lifetime, whether you understand its functioning or not.

The sexual energy, raised, purified and transmuted naturally, flows round your body in a continuous circular motion, powered by each inhalation and exhalation of breath. With the in-breath, the energy rises from the sexual energy centre, physically moves up the spine to the back of the brain, then moves to the crown of the head. With the out-breath, the energy passes to the front of the brain, down through the tongue which is touching the roof of the mouth, and down through the chest, accumulating in a swirling motion in the abdomen before returning to the sexual centre.

This cyclic flow of energy occurs naturally and spontaneously as you develop in this meditation. In time, with diligent daily practice, the energy will flow entirely automatically, requiring no effort on your part. This is a very good sign: be satisfied with your progress, not pleased with yourself.

In the practices of the Taoist esoteric yoga, Tibetan Buddhist yoga and Hindu Kundalini yoga can be found very detailed and precise techniques to achieve this circulation of energy. These yogas are the product of very sophisticated, highly developed, implicate technologies. From the perspective of our Western cultures, based on the Judeo-Christian code of ethics and lacking broad-based spiritual depths, these yogas require specialised cultural terms which make them generally inaccessible to our spiritually under-developed Western societies.

This meditation, in fact this whole book, is an attempt to articulate the first steps in the process of integrating oneself fully into reality, in terms accessible to an ordinary, intelligent, Western person. What is taught here is a yoga as valid as its Eastern counterparts. It is expressed in a simple direct way because, spiritually speaking, we in the West are at a post-primitive and pre-civilised stage of cultural development.