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Friends,

So excited to finally be talking directly about sex and the occult on my show, and there's no one I'd rather do that with than author and teacher, and Christian occultist Lisa Romero! 

Lisa has written multiple (excellent) books on meditation and spiritual development, but the one that drew me to have her on for this episode was her excellent book, Sex Education and the Spirit: Understanding Our Communal Responsibility for the Healthy Development of Gender and Sexuality within Society. It's a book that looks at sex and sexuality from a developmental perspective, but in a spiritual way, rather than from a materialistic perspective.This episode goes really deep and presupposes your ability to go on the magical mystery tour with us. But there are lots of insights to be had by the secular as well. I hope whatever your belief system is, you'll stick with it.

We discuss:

• what sex is, anyway, from a non-materialistic view, especially in the light of the evolution of consciousness.
• how we all have individuated relationships to sex (and what that has to do with freedom).
• the scientific definition of sex and why that matters now.
• how sex and attraction get confusing when different aspects of our being get into conflict with each other.
• why a Christian occultist approach to sex never takes the form of "don't do this."
• how sexuality gives us the ability to transform our lives and bring our spiritual development forward.
• the Catholic Church developing its response to sex in response to the Reformation.
• the problems with the sex positive movement.
• the four levels of attraction and how they relate to the subtle bodies.
• displaced sex as a creative process.
• what anthroposophists can learn from Freud and Lacan.
• why masturbating men should hook themselves up to the power grid.
• why Conner doesn't do or care about "sex magic."

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Lisa and her publications go to her website. You can also find information on her upcoming events there: Lisa is constantly touring and teaching, and has multiple events in New York and New England in May. For another interview with Lisa, this time on meditation, check out her appearance on The Anthroposopher podcast.

• Steiner's book Cosmic Memory is probably not for beginners in anthropsophy and the occult, but it is intense and profound.

• I've written a bit about the scientific narratives of sex and what their value is to us now in a series of short essays called Life Superlives: On The Origins of Sex. That's a link to the first one, and you can just link through to the others at the end of each essay. (This essay set also includes my thoughts on sex with the Sun, which I mention late in the episode.)

• AEWCH 34: ARE BODIES OUR SELVES? or HOW SEX CONFRONTS MATERIALISM is mentioned in the episode, and I think lays the ground work for some of this conversation.

• "This is how we know the mind and body are in love. One creates a story, the other feels it." - from my  essay about early moments of my sexuality, "Looking At Men."

• I think you'll get a lot out of Felix Guattari's Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities, that is, if you can understand any of it! Not to worry, I'll be giving an online course on Guattari (pictured below) and his partner in crime, Gilles Delueze, this November. 

• "Are we talking about sex that comes through the genitals?...Sex doesn't have to come from the genitals...It comes from a patterned human process." It's a great consideration that Lisa raises. 

•  "There is no sexual relationship," is a famous quip from Jacques Lacan which relates to what Lisa says about how we are new people in every sexual act. There's even a book about this single quip.

• "Without desire, what would we create in the future?"

• AEWCH 43 with Tim Kinsella was such an honor for me, since his uncompromising music has been a huge inspiration throughout my life.

• A great quote from Rudolf Steiner about desire: "The basest enjoyments can be a manifestation of the spirit. The gratification that the hungry being experiences in taking food is a manifestation of spirit because through the eating of food something is brought about without which, in a certain sense, the spirit could not evolve. The ego can, however, transcend the enjoyment that this fact of necessity offers. It may long for good tasting food, quite apart from the service rendered the spirit by eating. The same is true of other things in the sense world. Desires are created thereby that would never have come into being in the sense world had the human ego not been incorporated in it. But neither do these desires spring from the spiritual nature of the ego. The ego must have sense enjoyments as long as it lives in the body, also in so far as it is spiritual; for the spirit manifests in the sense world and the ego enjoys nothing but spirit when, in this world, it surrenders itself to that medium through which the light of the spirit radiates. It will continue to enjoy this light even when the sense world is no longer the medium through which the rays of the spirit pass."

• Lorna Byrne (pictured below) is a mystic in Ireland who writes and speaks about angels simply and lucidly. You can read her first book, Angels in My Hair: The True Story of a Modern-Day Irish Mystic,, if you'd like. I recommend it, even to those who might feel some intense resistance.

All right folks, until next time, enjoy yourselves ;)

XO CH