Café Philos: an internet café

The other day, I was reading a blog dedicated to practicing sex as a way to enlightenment. Reading the blog reminded me how Jiddu Krishnamurti sometimes remarked that sex seemed to be the closest many people came to having a transcendental experience.

I think there's some truth to that. In a transcendental experience, the subject/object divide abruptly ends, while the continuum of experience goes on, leaving no sense of a distinction between the observer and the observed. In some sexual experiences, partners report experiencing themselves as no longer separate people, but rather as profoundly united with each other into something like one being. So, in both cases, you have what seems to be a radical end to subject/object perception, ending any apparent distinction between the witness and the witnessed.

No one really knows what causes transcendental experiences. They seem to come about in a variety of ways: At times, through some forms of meditation, through some drugs, through some injuries or illnesses, through some sexual episodes, and even spontaneously. But no one knows what role, if any, those things play in causing the experiences.

Krishnamurti believed no sure and certain path to transcendental experiences existed. He likened our condition to that of someone sitting in a room of their house waiting for a breeze. All the waiting person could do, Krishnamurti said, was make sure the windows were open so that if a breeze came, it could enter the room. Beyond that, the person had no control over whether or not there would be a breeze.

If Krishnamurti is right, a couple who wants to have a transcendental experience cannot force such an experience to come about, but can only open the windows, so to speak, and wait for an experience that might or might not come. Even sex is not a guaranteed path to transcendence.