Unique Self and sexuality
“The goodness of Eros integrated with Unique Self–realization is the portal to our authentic knowing. Through this portal we know that we are held, loved, chosen, and desired by all of reality in every moment”.
— From “A return to Eros” from Dr Marc Gafni’s and Dr Kristina Kincaid
Sexuality from a Unique Self perspective has its own chapter (chapter 20) in the Your Unique Self book. Since the book was published, the 6 levels of sexing initially described in the book have further evolved into a multi-volume Phenomenology of Eros, in which Gafni and Kincaid unpack a phenomenological map of sexual experience spanning seven distinct levels (or tastes) of the sexual, including:
- Vital sexing, or the experience of pulsing desire coupled with fierce or tender demand.
- Personality sexing, or how sex meets, expresses or covers up both the emptiness and pain as well as the joy of life.
- Mother sexing, describing the nourishing, holding and healing we receive from sexing.
- Pleasure sexing, which is the experience of pleasure itself as its own magic carpet.
- Mystical sexing, the experience of our true nature via the sexual.
- Unique Self sexing*, which is the only kind of sexing that liberates us from loneliness through the fullness of mutual recognition.
- Bodhisattva Sexing, or sexing for the sake of the healing and liberation of persons and all of reality.
Based on the premise that the sexual is an expression of the core life force -the Eros -that animates and drives all of reality. the Phenomenology of Eros profound ethical implications, which are developed throughout the work.
“The sexual is not merely an isolated engagement which happens to hold a pivotal place in our somatic psyches that has sometimes blessed and often unfortunately undue influence over our sacred autobiographies. The sexual is differentiated from but not at all disassociated from the Erotic. Indeed, the sexual models the erotic. Every core quality of Eros is modeled by our experience of the sexual”.
— From Your Unique Self, chapter 20, p 303.
“Sexing calls you to your divinity even as it invites you to your death. The French description of orgasm as “little death” feels into this invitation. John Donne’s call to his beloved in the moment of orgasm—come, my darling, that I may “die” with you—is compelled by this very invitation. Sexing is the place where you are most personally addressed, and it is the mystery through which you evolve to the transpersonal. Sex is the door to the twin mysteries of birth and death. In that sense, Sex is both the gateway to the personal—personified by birth—and the move beyond the merely personal to the radically impersonal, which is personified by death. Enlightenment, and indeed all of life, is found in the right relationship between the personal and impersonal.
The divine kosmos, all of reality, is one great puzzle. We are all puzzle pieces. In order to fit in, to become part of the great puzzle, you must accentuate the precise contour of your puzzle piece, for it is through that very uniqueness that you merge into the larger whole. That is the essence of the Unique Self orgasm. For orgasms are not in the least bit generic. They are rather a signature expression of the personal self. This is the essence of Unique Self personal tantra, where sex and story merge as one”.