Can sensuality be spiritual?
Sensuality is the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, but no one has a good word to say about it. Moralists regard it as degrading, selfish and wasteful, if not actually evil. Hedonists, on the other hand find it frustrating and disappointing. It offers so much and rarely delivers. So is sensuality always bad or unsatisfying? Can it be redeemed? And is it possible for sensuality to be part of a spiritual life?
We’re inclined to forget that some cultures have enthusiastically embraced sensuality as a natural part of the good life. Ancient Rome was a tolerant and promiscuous society in which every conceivable luxury was enjoyed. Married women were as open about their affairs as their husbands.
Similarly, Japanese culture has an enormous capacity for sensory pleasures, from sex and pornography to moon-viewing and flower arrangement. The tea ceremony is a masterpiece of delicate sensuality. A traditional Japanese meal is a work of art, and all this indulgence is remarkably free of shame or guilt. Even today, well-bred schoolgirls happily sell their bodies for extra pocket money. It pays better than working in a fast food chain. Sex and sensuality, in that culture, are as natural as breathing.
The philosopher Jeremy Bentham described life as fundamentally about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It is hard to argue about this unless you are a masochist. John Stuart Mill reintroduced the moral dimension by saying that there is a hierarchy of pleasures (in other words, some are ‘good’ and some are ‘bad’). For example, the appreciation of great music or literature is more likely to satisfy you more than getting drunk. Of course, it is all comes down to a matter of taste.
Even though some pleasures seem more spiritual than sensual, Aristotle still give sensation its primacy. “There is nothing in the mind”, he said, “that did not first arise in the senses.” Even the most abstract or spiritual thoughts have their original, if long forgotten, bases in sensation. And if you can’t trust your senses to say what is right or wrong for you, what can you trust? A holy book? A pop psychologist? The newspapers?
Research suggests that happy people commonly have a rich sensual engagement with the world. Conversely, people who are depressed are often ‘anhedonic’: i.e. nothing gives them pleasure. Happy people are usually ‘here’, with their senses and their heart open. Unhappy people, in the other hand, tend to fearfully disconnect from the sensory world and ruminate endlessly about the past and future.
This is all common sense, and yet hedonism is still under the curse of our Christian heritage. We can still feel somewhat embarrassed about enjoying life. To openly indulge the senses, as the hippies did in the ‘60s, still feels somewhat rebellious or naughty. We feel the long shadows of St Paul and St Augustine even today.
Throughout history, we find that spirituality is usually vehemently antagonistic towards sensuality. After all, why would anyone who enjoyed the world think about God? Spirituality is usually more attractive to the disappointed and depressed. In fact, many spiritual leaders have deliberately poured bile on ordinary human pleasure as a way of cultivating followers.
For most of the last two millennia, Christianity has described lust, gluttony, and avarice as deadly sins, and monks would attempt to extinguish all pleasure in their search for purity. St Origen in the 3rd century cut off his penis in his battle against the flesh. Even the most innocent kinds of sensuality – playing games on Sunday, for example – were seen as the trademark of ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’.
Similarly, Yoga idealises those trance states in which the mind turns resolutely away from the world. This is called ‘pratyhara’, or ‘sense-withdrawal’. You try to focus inwards so intently that you literally don’t hear or see or feel anything at all. This kind of insensibility is a precondition for ‘samadhi’, which is the union of the mind with God. Conversely, the outer world is seen as illusory, deceptive, and the source of all misery.
Likewise, the Buddha said that all pleasures are ultimately painful because they won’t last forever. Even the pleasure of marrying a beautiful, 16-year-old virgin from a good family will not satisfy you, he said. (She gets old and nags. You get fat and impotent.) The noble person should therefore abandon every kind of sensory engagement with the world, and seek only what is impervious to change and decay.
The Buddha has put his finger on the one problem with sensuality: it is particularly vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns. The first piece of chocolate is Paradise. The fourth is okay but the fifteenth could be almost tasteless or even repulsive. After the first sensory contact, it’s all downhill.
This is called ‘habituation’, and it is hardwired into our nervous system. Habituation means that the more you repeat a certain sensation, the more rapidly its intensity fades. For example, you may be acutely aware of a foul smell when you walk into a room, and yet a minute later you can’t smell it at all. Familiarity breeds contempt. The olfactory nerves literally switch off, as a kind of neurological safety valve. Imagine how much chocolate you’d eat if it all tasted like the first bite!
The downside of habituation is that you become jaded. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” says the Bible. An ex-monk that I knew had been a boy prostitute between the wars in London. He said that many of the European aristocracy he met were so sexually jaded by their thirties that they became celibate.
Unfortunately, you can’t ‘own’ pleasure. You may be an oriental potentate with an abundance of food, wine, music and dancing girls at your fingertips, but there is no guarantee that you will enjoy any of it. Kublai Khan conquered China and enjoyed all the pleasures of that mighty culture, but he died obese and utterly depressed.
Yet the path of sensuality doesn’t have to finish in gloom and despair. Years ago, a girlfriend gave me a formula for managing a chocolate addiction. Buy small quantities of expensive chocolates, she said, and consciously enjoy each one. Buy truffles from Belgium, not the bargain slabs at the supermarket. Become a gourmet, not a glutton.
There is no doubt that gluttony is just as destructive to body and soul as Christianity says, and that we have now become a gluttonous and avaricious society, to our great cost. There is a certain kind of lowly pleasure that comes from eating two or three pizzas in a row, but it will also kill you. However this kind of thoughtless excess is not the only way to exploit the senses.
Some people are connoisseurs. They consciously love music, or food, or clothing, or art, or nature, or a craft or a sport. The gourmet, for example, eats with deliberate appreciation. Each bite then becomes unique, and rich in memory and associations. Furthermore, this kind of value-added sensuality gets even more sophisticated and satisfying with age. And you don’t finish up like Kublai Khan.
It is not hard to train yourself in this skill. Any sensation – a bite of food, a kiss, a song – becomes more satisfying if you give it your full attention. If you do this deliberately over time, you accumulate a vast body of intuitive knowledge about your subject, and about yourself.
So are you a gourmet or a glutton? Do you taste your food or devour it? Do you just ‘hear’ music or do you listen to it? Do you really know how your body feels when you walk, do exercise, make love? Do you live in a world of detailed, ever-changing, subtle sensuality or do you just get through another boring day?
Even if a connoisseur loves what he or she does, to know anything well is still a discipline and a sacrifice. In ancient Greece, an athlete was regarded as an ‘ascetic’, because of his single-minded discipline and dedication to training. To pour your attention into one thing means you sacrifice everything else you could be doing or thinking about at that time. Even nowadays, we regard some athletes as semi-divine as much for their phenomenal discipline as for their successes.
All that training aims for transcendent moments in which you become almost preternaturally alive. In states of deep sensuality, you go beyond words and thought. The English language and the 21st century disappear. You know and love and become one with your object, be it music or a human being or the dirt in your garden. The circle is complete. Through the senses, you can occasionally touch the face of God. At the very least, you know you are in a blessed and glorious world.
This is where sensuality can become spiritual. A connoisseur is literally ‘one who knows’, and it can be argued that to know any one thing perfectly is to momentarily know everything. Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven were masters of sensuality, but you wouldn’t call them unspiritual because of it. They saw the eternal through their conscious love and appreciation of the senses, and we can do the same.