The Tao - What Christians Should Learn of True Intimacy

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Promoting Intimacy and Other-Centered Sexuality

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The Tao - What Christians Should Learn of True Intimacy
By Dave
Introduction
As I reflect on our Lifestyles convention experience and reactions from many others who have written us, I have a desire to explore more deeply and suggest more ideas on intimacy and long-term caring loving polyfidelity relationships over the typical "Swinging" mentality. We have extensive research supporting biblical responsible non-monogamy. But we want to share more ideas on intimacy. Our report "Christian Tantra" showed wonderful Eastern ways of Tantra which integrates spirit and sexuality. In this paper, I will expand these ideas and discuss the Tao.

Further motivating me in this direction was an experience shared with a couple where the wife tried my Sybian. Afterwards, with her husband's encouragement, I shared sexually with his wife. The three of us had a very good discussion at the same time. The husband indicated his interest in learning to be a more sensitive, soft lover. His wife replied "His idea of foreplay is - ready -brace yourself!", and he agreed. So my idea is for men - brace yourselves - and perhaps together we can learn more about loving intimacy that makes sex that much more emotionally fulfilling, not just a physical thrusting act.

The Tao is Not A Religion
The symbol of Tao is water - indicating its benevolence, flexibility and its lack of formality. It flows as opposed to most religions full of ritual and dogma. Tao refers to the Chinese Tao Te Ching written 2500 years ago.

The first teaching of the Tao is universal love. To love, it is necessary to be loved. The counterpart in Christianity is the teaching to first love God, then yourself and then others. You can not fully love others until you first love yourself. Tao teaches that you can not love yourself unless you have experienced love from others.

Tao is about techniques and attitudes of love which results in maximum happiness. Happiness has nothing to do with material wealth, but our inner peace is the result of universal love. Invariably, the happiest people are those who are most loved by their mates, friends and acquaintances; the unhappiest ones are always the loneliest. The conclusion of the Tao is that harmony of Yin and Yang (male and female energy) is essential to the well-being and happiness of us all.

Practical Ways To Maximize Love
Many of the Tao techniques are similar to those we have written previously about. See "Getting In Touch With Intimacy in a Sexually Immature Culture" and "Christian Tantra", as well as previous discussion of the Stan Dale Workshops, all of which are wonderful examples of Tao teachings of loving intimacy.

Wild Woman/Weak Man
From the time a woman reaches puberty till she dies of old age, she is ready for action and competent to sexually receive the man. In contrast most men have a much lower capacity. Are the sexes, then, hopelessly mismatched? Do not despair. The Tao can help.

To make matters worse many women are repressed in their natural sexuality since they so much want intimacy and even many younger men can't last long enough to fully please a woman. If a woman has an affair with a man that combines passion, intimacy and sex, she may be frustrated with her mate. Almost all men over 40 will no longer be able to get hard all the time which is another frustration for both men and women. The Tao teaches practical ways to overcome this including previously discussed techniques and learning "soft entry".

Julie and Thomas - Typical Lovers
Julie has a typical healthy, uninhibited appetite for love that frightened potential mates. She has overcome her shame-based false religious upbringing and experienced the full sense of sexuality God gave women, which is natural and wonderful. According to the Tao, this is a manifestation of woman's inborn urge for harmony of Yin and Yang. To Julie, the pain of love hunger was infinitely more excruciating than hunger for food. A man who knows the Tao would welcome such a woman with open arms. Unfortunately, few men today know how than can and should be done.

Before reading the Tao, Julie and her lover Thomas, like most people, measured man-woman satisfaction in terms of orgasms and ejaculations. When a relationship is based on such a dubious foundation, it is hard to achieve true satisfaction. As a rule, neither of the partners arrives at the exalted state of true harmony by the conventional man-must-ejaculate route. For, when a man makes love in the conventional way, he usually finds his partner unsatisfied, still craving for more loving after his ejaculation. But he himself is definitely finished, at least for the time being. Of course, some women will pretend to be satisfied each time to please the man, but that never solves the problem. It only builds up tension and resentment.

No sensitive man can really be satisfied in lovemaking when his partner is not. Because of that, the man usually finds himself in a most delicate and difficult position after ejaculation. He wants to help but he cannot. He is not unlike a soldier in heavy fighting who suddenly realizes that he has used up all his ammunition.

In such an awkward situation a conventional sexologist would advise afterplay, which mainly implies digital stimulation of the woman. Such stimulation poses at least three problems. First, it is not all that easy to use one's fingers to satisfy a woman. It can be as difficult as playing a musical instrument. Second, many women do not like their clitorises and vulvas manipulated by fingers. Third, too much digital stimulation can be tiresome for both partners, and no ideal relationship can be maintained in this manner for very long. Some sexologists comfort their clients by saying that fingers can be even better than sex organs. This may be true, but only if one has not learned how to use one's sexual organs for maximum pleasure!

Julie and Thomas discovered after experimenting with the Tao that the secret of loving is not only learning how to use one's sexual organs property. The true happiness of loving depends mainly in a successful fusion of two bodies and spirits into one - the harmony of Yin and Yang.

Before learning about the Tao, Julie believed that loving satisfaction for a woman depended on orgasms. The more numerous and more intense the orgasms, the more the woman would be satisfied.

Things began to change dramatically as soon as they started testing the Tao. First of all, Julie noticed that Thomas could make love to her almost daily, often many times daily. Then she noticed that she was not quite so desperately hungry as she had been before. Finally she realized that loving satisfaction could not be directly identified with orgasm. What she now believes is that it is nice to have orgasms sometimes, but the most important, most satisfying pleasure is the fusion of two bodies and spirits as often as possible. Julie says before learning of Tao techniques, lovemaking could only be called "sex." Now she says she can truly call it "love."

Julie's love partner, Thomas, also discovered something new and interesting. Like most other men, before the Tao he had always regarded ejaculation and male orgasm as one in the same. Now he no longer believes that. Before the Tao, each lovemaking session was tense knowing he probably would not be able to satisfy Julie before he was "spent". Thomas was thirty-seven years old and not able to rise to every occasion like when he as in his twenties. Like Julie he has also discovered that the fusion of two bodies and souls, the harmony of Yin and Yang, is the greatest joy in life. In comparison with this great joy, the spasmodic sensation of ejaculation is nothing.

Chasing The Orgasm
Many women admit confidentially that they have never experienced orgasm, but they enjoy making love immensely all the same. Many others do not experience orgasm but pretend to do so. Still others reach orgasm easily but do not really enjoy it. Other women don't care whether they reach orgasm or not as long as they have enough lovemaking, with lots of variations. The problem is that some men make women feel that they are abnormal unless they have an orgasm each time they make love. It is no exaggeration to say that "chasing the orgasm" benefits neither women nor men. Let us pay less attention to orgasm and more to the Tao teachings of more fulfilling love.

Many women can enjoy their orgasms as a bonus whenever it comes their way. For most men the situation is quite different. Men should learn to control their ejaculation, for whenever an ejaculation comes it temporarily terminates the lovemaking session. The man should ejaculate only when both partners feel that it is time to pause. There are many ways of controlling male ejaculation which are taught by the Tao.

The Monogamy Myth
Are we monogamous by nature? Far from it. In an essay called "Polygyny and Polyandry," George Bernard Shaw promulgates the theory that our monogamous nature was a myth invented by inferior and insecure men. Instinctively women sought out the strongest, ablest men's seed to impregnate them so they would produce the best children. If a woman had to choose between monogamy with a second-rate man or a shared relationship with a first-rate one, she would choose the shared relationship. Second-rate and third-rate men created the law of monogamy so that they wouldn't be without women.

It appears clear that monogamy is not the usual historic relationship, nor is it the norm in other animals. The Tao was written in a culture where neither man nor women were monogamous. And only in that free atmosphere were the Taoists able to formulate the Tao of Loving to equalize the disparity in sexual capacity between men and women.

But this changed drastically when the Confucians became politically dominant around the beginning of the first century AD After that, women became virtually men's property; they lost the freedom to choose. But whenever a woman was in a position to choose, she was nearly always polygamous.

The situation in the West was more or less the same. Cleopatra was an outstanding early example of a polygamous monarch. Even the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I of England, was thought to have enjoyed many men in her life. Catherine the Great of Russia was of course even more famous for her fondness for numerous men.

In modern times the situation has not changed much. Whenever a woman has power or wealth, she will do exactly as men do: She will be polygamous if she has the inclination, or polygamous in succession like Barbara Hutton, who married and divorced six times.

All ancient books of the Tao stress the life-giving importance of natural stimulation from the opposite sex and the supreme importance of variation - of changes in sexual partners. If both love partners have equal rights of freedom, then "variation" does not have to mean jealousy or something bad. Since most people are polygamous anyway - either in their minds or in reality - it would be futile to deny it.

Far too many people today suppress this natural need for variation. The result is many mentally and physically unhealthy people. Sublimating this natural desire often results in excessive eating, drinking, smoking or other forms of self-destruction.

Ironically, this tragic waste, this unnecessary human suffering caused by love hunger, is completely man made. Nearly everywhere on our planet objects of love and sex - men and women- are in ample supply, especially because love is a very unusual thing in that the more we give and consume the more we will have. If we could just liberate ourselves from the attitude that people are private property or chattel (like women were in biblical times), then no one would have to suffer from this terrible love hunger. For men open relationships show courage. You will be rewarded if you treat your lover or lovers with freedom. A woman will love you more and prefer you far more over those who regard her as private property or a prisoner.

In the popular book The Collector, by John Fowles, a collector of butterfly specimens meets a beautiful young girl and decides to treat her as he would a wild butterfly. He keeps her locked in the cellar of an old house. In his own mad way he perhaps considers himself in love, but she soon dies in captivity. Humans cannot be treated as property. Love can grow and prosper only in an atmosphere of harmony, equality and freedom.

The Tao concludes: Marriage is a fine institution if it is kept flexible and open. Individuals, of course, are all different from each other. Some people flourish gloriously in monogamy, while others thrive only in freer relationships. A truly free society should be able to accommodate all life patterns and support alternative lifestyles.

Francois Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952, once described himself as a combination of the best of all the women in his life. That description might have come from the heart of a Taoist. All of us, men and women, are a mosaic formed by the total of our love experiences.

"The prerequisite for a good marriage Is the license to be unfaithful" - Carl Jung

Loving Satisfaction: A Guaranteed Human Right
When a man has mastered the Tao, he is easily the sexual equal of any woman. If knowledge of the Tao is widely disseminated "the ungovernable cyclic sexual desire of women" becomes easily satisfied and there is no longer any need to govern or repress that drive. Women who are completely satisfied in love are the most peaceful, positive, and constructive citizens of the world! Only when that is accomplished - when the greater half of our world's population has been thus transformed -can we see a tangible hope for an ideal world!

The Prisoner of Sex Liberated
Norman Mailer's Prisoner of Sex leaves many readers with a bitter taste of hatred and hostility between the sexes. So much energy, so much love cast away on the ground!

Who is the prisoner? No one need be! Love and sex ought to be our best friends, better even than food, sleep or intellect. We are all bound to our three meals every day, nearly a third of our lives is sleep, and some of us devote the greatest part of our lifetime to learning. Yet few complain that we are prisoners of food, sleep and learning!

No one is a prisoner of sex. And the pleasures of love and sex are meant for us. They are our natural bounty. When the war between the sexes is over at last, the resulting peace will spread to all classes, nations, and races. It will be an almost automatic step to the ideal world of which we dream!

This paper is based on and makes extensive use of material from "The Tao Of The Loving Couple- True Liberation through the Tao" by Golan Chang. Mr. Chang is a world-famous expert in Chinese-and universal- sexology.

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