Were We Once Whole?
In Taoist, Hindu and Buddhist art, deities often are shown as part male, part female — or androgynous. There are also curious traditions maintaining that humankind itself once consisted of androgynous beings. Most insist that sexual desire is directly linked both to the split into genders and — with careful cultivation - to our potential for re-experiencing our native androgyny.
Does this rich and diverse tradition, hinting at an experience of completion or unity, encompass a mystery that requires control and rechanneling of the earthy aspects of sexuality? And if it does, how does one go about achieving it?
Taoist teacher Michael Winn believes the solution will be found in a new spiritual science with Taoist (water) and Tantric (fire) principles at its core. (See his lengthy, but fascinating, article detailing his decades of practice in different sacred sex traditions below, left-hand column.) He says we may have to integrate our sexual desire into a subtle body experience he calls 'spiritual orgasm,' in order to heal the cosmological splitting of our original non-dual being (first into an etheric androgyne and then into physical male and female sexed bodies). In Winn's view this vast collective wound drives the human incarnational process, and can only be healed by achieving what the Taoists call immortality, the alchemical re-fusion of spirit and body-matter into its original essence. This, for him, is the crucial focus of subtle body sexual cultivation.
What did other sources have to say about the concept of divine androgyny?
The Tibetan Buddhists teach that both the cosmos and primordial man were born of the Light and fundamentally consist of Light. Asexual and without sexual desire, they once radiated light....
Entire article
