07/18/2007 Is God An Addiction?

07/18/2007 Is God An Addiction?

Think of a person, any person. Your mother. Your best friend. Your dog. The true love of your life. When you thought of these people, what image flashed through your mind?

In the past, I have taken vows of non-masturbation. At other times, I'm glad I'm able to do it. When I do, I often search the internet for pictures of beautiful women that I can fantasize about.

One day I was looking at a picture of Martina Hingis, the tennis player. I have always thought that she had the such a pretty face. When I had enough pictures of her, I just signed off the internet and had my viewing program display a slideshow. I had pictures of her face, of her rear end, of her playing tennis and lots modeling. But at the end, I stopped on a picture of her face.

What made this day different than most others is that during the orgasm I kept my eyes open. As the pleasure built, my vision heightened. I stared at her face as ecstasy began to overtake me. As I was looking into her face, it became more than a face to me. All of me disappeared, and Martina was looking back at me from a divine plane; with a beauty that I was not otherwise able to perceive. Her beauty was a great presence that I could only begin to see, but I could feel it throughout my entire body. As the pleasure overtook me, I reached out my hand to touch the screen in reverence, more concerned with it than the pleasure I was giving myself. I have never been so gracefully lost.

My point here is, we think of each other as faces. When you think of someone, you think of them as their face. The face is the identity. If someone shows you a picture of your mother's hand, and asks you what is that, you'll say, “my mother's hand.” But if someone shows you her face, you'll say, “That's my mother.”

though masturbation, I guess, should be though of as one hand clapping (or perhaps one hand “slapping”), we have to understand it not as a lower urge but a higher one. It is a deeper form of prayer, and indeed a subset of meditation. At no time does one see the divinity of the real world so clearly as during orgasm. During that marriage of the male and female halves of the world, the reflection in the divine mirror shows us nothing superficial. This act does not deserve the derision of Christians, nor does the saying, “beauty's only skin deep” signify anything but a lack of soul. The beauty of those we mate with is central to our spiritual life, no less so for the pain those of us feel who do not possess it.