Time for Sex and Death

In a way, it is hard for me to fathom the experience of someone who is asexual. I can imagine not being attracted to anyone in that way, but I’m a bit challenged to frame that state of being in any other way than “something’s missing.”

It seems to me that a person who lives without experiencing the push and pull of erotic desire is a person who lives without experiencing time.

Let me explain. One of the curious things about sexuality is the compulsive attention we give it. The adage that “sex sells” is a marketing truism because most people can’t resist the impulse to investigate when something overtly or implicitly advertises that it has to do with sex. Research from 2011 suggests that a man will think about sex 17 times per day, on average, while a woman will think about sex 10 times per day. (Men typically also think more about eating and sleeping, according to the study.)

It’s difficult to imagine there’s any other subject matter that spontaneously flits through our attentive consciousness that frequently. We nervously point our fingers at those who enjoy sex “too much,” and call them names; and, more recently, it has become de rigeur to wonder if one has a “sex addiction” — although many psychologists note that sexuality is only poorly compared with alcoholism, for instance, since desire for lots of alcohol is not natural or instinctual and always covers for dysfunction in the addict’s program of well-being, while desire for sex is a natural instinct that is life affirming, at least until it is distorted.

So, yes — people think a lot about sex. We shape our lives around it, to an astonishing degree. Aside from money issues and health issues(which harkens to basic survival), there is no realm of experience which animates us so intensely. It might seem odd on the level of personal experience to notice that, whereas children seem miraculously able to feel happy and complete, a spell comes over us as we enter adolescence wherein we are suddenly anxious to be liked, feel full of desire and wanting “to be completed by another” — to be understood, to be held, to be explored. Loneliness grips us in a new way.

From where comes this terrible spell? How dare it plague us! What is this moody, minor-key music that infects us?

Phillip Pullman famously created a world in the His Dark Materials series of fantasy novels which makes overt the crisis of this affliction. As the people in his world come of age, a mysterious “dust” begins to settle invisibly on them and their externalized animal “daemon” souls, coincident with their loss of innocence and happiness. The “Church” in that world wants to reverse this dust settling (and protect its congregation) by severing the connection between children and their daemons — a surgery that is safe, effective, and devastating.

In that vein, let’s look at the issue from the other direction. We do have the technology to subdue our libidos. So, why do we put up with the siren call and destabilizing urgencies of Eros? I think it is because erotic life and reproductive behavior helps us deal with our experience of time.

Consider this: sex is incredibly ancient. Sexual reproduction, in its earliest, most rudimentary form, goes back 2 billion years, and originated with prokaryotic cells — that is to say, cells which don’t even have a nucleus. In other words, the basic sexual dynamic of “exchange of otherness” predates even our own most distant eukaryote cellular brethren. It is older and more remote than our other most intimate cellular processes.

Something surprising also came into being with the advent of sex: death — at least, death as we commonly know it and think of it. This was the beginning of the death of unique individuals. Suave Don Juans of the sexual reproduction world stake their unique genetic identities like flags of come-hither. They can be explored intimately, but who are never fully identical, fully knowable…and then death takes them: our tall, dark, handsome strangers with their inimitable phenotypes. And, after death, they’re gone. Prior to this, every cell was the same, more or less — billions of mirror copies in a never ending chain.

And what else is time, but the measure of death, the never-repeating drumbeat of changes to the world? So, sex comes at great cost: it inaugurates our experience of loss and also our awareness of merciless time.

Our asexual, spawning cousins already cornered the market on efficiency of multiplying copies of themselves — you can’t beat them for speed and exponential growth. Our process of reaching sexual maturity is slower, and we hang in the balance longer, developing that individuality and a sense of self. And, while we live and wait for our inevitable personal, individuated deaths, sex brings us something else: reproduction not as a process of cloning but as a gamble with the unknown — a recombining through the alchemy of uniting two separate mysteries.

I am convinced that our reproductive programming is largely responsible for both our experience of time and death, and responsible for our erotic compulsion to thread the passage through the perilous reef of that conundrum and sail to the open waters of multi-generational compounding of family heritage. What a statement to hang one’s hat on! “I am the product of my ancestors, the progenitor of my descendents in whom I am reflected.” This is a mysterious higher order (larger scale) of identity, of being.

Seldom talked about in the coming-of-age experience is that transformation of the perception of time. What happens in adolescence is that the expansive fields of timelessness suddenly tilt and fold toward a hidden fault line of disappearing — a fissure in the landscape of our attention. The past suddenly matters. We become sentimental to guard against the event horizon, the point-of-no-return. We notice the mortality of our parents (more mythologically than accurately). We begin to sense the transience of ourselves in a first wave of direct awareness, which usually recedes in an undertow beneath the lascivious explorations of later teenage years and early twenties, but is perfectly captured in the motto “you only live once” — YOLO.

The constancy and shifting tectonics of friendships now matters in a hyperbolic way. Who is with us? Who is falling away? Daggers of betrayal don’t just stab us in the moment, they spear us for all time.

As adolescents, we begin to participate in the passage of time rather than having it wash over us like we are anemones in a tidal pool. We make plans. We help make the holidays happen for younger siblings. And, we’re aware of having reached the edge of an infinitely refracted prism of childhood: we can still look through it, but we can no longer inhabit it.

Sexuality leads the way into the new experience of the timeless unfolding of that alchemical magic. You won’t even necessarily know what it is you’re responding to, exactly — there are the physiological and sexual dimorphism cues that biologists have identified, of course; but there is also a secret dimension of beauty that lies within and beyond those cues, a union of shared sensual vulnerability, diaphanous boundaries, the erotic alchemy of our identities blending that is mirrored in the sexual evolution of our cells. This is the paradox of feeling a fierce desire for intimacy with another who isn’t exactly there to be found. Hindus have enshrined this mystery in the story of the bond between Krishna and Radhika.

All of this is to say: you are about as likely to be able to avoid the dynamics of sexuality as you are able to avoid the experience of time passing. Not only is it alluring to wield it powerfully, to savor it, to play with it, to indulge in it, but it is the fundamentally dimensional to your experience.

Actually, the Buddhist texts of the Abhidhamma lay out a model of cognition and perception which has a very curious feature: desire or revulsion are said to arise as core attitudes toward the object of your focus before you can even identify the thing you perceive. You are drawn toward, or repelled from, a thing before you even know consciously what it is…or even that it is a thing.

This dimension to your experience was waiting for you all along. Like the gift (and curse) of reading words, once you see it deciphered, you can’t unsee it. Once the longing inherent in the erotic experience is felt, it is not at all easy to disregard. What you do with that dimensional change to your life — whether you dance with it, dress for it, play the part of the seeker or the sought (or both)…; whether you hide it or show it, rue its presence in you or exalt it — is up to you. But the perceptual shift, the reorientation toward the erotic paradox of individuality, complementary existence, death, sex, and time cannot be avoided…and should not be underestimated.

It is not an expression of you. You are an expression of it.

There is something even more fundamentally bizarre at work in the Universe. We now know that the (at least apparent) expansion of space-time is accelerating. It is very hard for us as gravitationally-bound, erotic creatures to wrap our minds around this, but the dominant flow of reality on the largest, most pervasive scale is not consolidation but separation. The Universe is actually flying apart at the seams.

Think about that for a minute.

Our customary perspective is so immersed in the realm of electromagnetic, chemical bonding that we struggle with the meaning of a universal metaphor that implies fewer and fewer interactions between bodies in motion. We have no grasp on what intrinsic causal property of reality could be repelling everything from everything else on the largest scale — or, more accurately, expanding the dimensions…let alone what might cause that dynamic to be speeding up. (Technically, we observe that space is inflating in such a way that distant objects appear to be moving away from us at faster-than-light speed velocities. Even more intriguingly, we can wonder whether time is also inflating.)

We do know that space-time is distorted by the stuff which is contained in it (and vice versa)…so we are left with the tantalizing hint that something in the architecture of our most familiar material reality (including ourselves) is driving the runaway inflation of the Universe on the galactic-cluster scale.

What does it all mean?

If it’s true that sexual reproduction both creates a different experience of time and provides a powerful relief from the loneliness of individuality and death by opening a portal to multi-generational transcendence of limitations…then it is interesting to consider what happens to our “sexual” experience of time on the largest scale of procreation, in the vast intergalactic distances and fringes of the visible Universe where gravity does not rule the roost, and things fly apart. What is intimacy beyond attraction, and what is the nature of the experience of time born from it?

We are changing, evanescent beings. There is no stable center of attraction, just as there is no center of gravity at the scale of galaxies sailing away from each other ever faster. We don’t so much fall in love as fall through love, meeting in a chasm of infinite distance. We don’t clone ourselves; we make babies, which involves a chemical fusion of genetics and an alchemical fusion of being to create a child in which the strangely familiar and heritable secrets itself within what is, in many respects, a brand new person.

It could be said that what we’re drawn to erotically, viscerally, is the void. The seething, pulsing emptiness that exists at the heart of the person before you, and within you, and beyond both of you. There is an expansive, propulsive energy, a fountain of potential becoming manifest moment by moment. To go toward the source of that explosion is to go back in time, toward who they were, not who they have become — that is the central paradox and mystery of intimacy when we are drawn to get closer to someone.

On the larger, deeper scale of existence, where “flying apart” happens and unbecoming takes over as the leading dynamic from becoming, we find this truth (which is at the heart of tantra) — that we are attracted to what is not really there: we’re propelled to the “luminous emptiness” between things rather than drawn in to the gravitational clusters and constellations that we perceive as things, as fixed objects. When I say “attracted to,” I don’t mean on an intellectual basis. I mean rather like how solder flows into a gap between metals, or air rushes to fill a vacuum. That is the nature of your erotic desire.

Could it be that the Universe expands ever more rapidly because it is rushing to meet its own emptiness?

Is there anything more to say of time? What is “tantric time,” which moves to the rhythm of the emptiness, the non-being of us all?

First, we discovered that our selves die. Then we discover that our selves are an illusion. They never existed…yet here we are. And suddenly, the tragedy of heroic, “sexual” time (the nostalgic drama that is the life-span of a unique, special individual) opens out into the complexity of what we might call trans-finite time…where an infinity of moments exist within every beat of “sexual” time.

It is on account of that vista of infinity-upon-infinity-upon-infinity which, in that moment (ha!) murders our sorrow, our loneliness, our self-centeredness…On account of that truth, that transformation and bliss, we seek erotic fulfillment so obsessively, so anciently, so ineluctably. We are not seeking to come together in sex. We are drawn (like solder in flux) to the moment where we fly apart to the infinite horizon, and time stops being time.