Spiritual Awakening & Surrender

In this episode, Jenny talks about the importance of surrender to both spiritual awakening and transcendent sexual experiences. She explains how both culture and the church have distorted the true meaning of surrender and how to reclaim this ecstatic experience. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Why Didn't I Know podcast, episode 33. I'm your host, Dr. Jenny Martin, and this episode we're talking about spiritual awakening and surrender. So let's talk about the idea of surrender and it being absolutely an essential key for both spiritual awakening to really step into not just the intellectual knowing that you are more than flesh and blood, but the visceral experience of it. Surrender is a key aspect of that. Also, when we're talking about the transcendent experiences that love making, that sexual intimacy can give us, surrender is absolutely key. However, it becomes very misunderstood in our culture that sees sex as all about a power dynamic. We have porn today that has given people an idea that surrender is important to sex, but it's one human dominating another human or a group of humans, depending on the particular video that you're watching. But the point here is that it's an ego surrendering to another ego. And that whole notion is very popular out there in the world that in order to have an altered state of consciousness during a sexual experience, you need to have someone who's submissive and you need to have someone that's dominant, and you need to turn over your will to that person. That I suggest to you is never going to give you the full-on transcendent experience of merging with the divine that you can get when you don't give your will over to another human, but you give your will over to a higher power. That doesn't need to be a religious concept, but we can talk about it in terms of the Christian mystical tradition, which I'll do on this episode. But why don't we want to turn our will over to another person? That is because you stay at a certain vibration in your spirit when you have the belief that another human is now in control. When you surrender your will to another human, you are dealing with a finite individual, and usually turning the will over has to do with pain that is involved in it and humiliation and so forth. And that is the antithesis of the mystical experience that is possible to us without having to pay a price. And I throw this out to you to consider that it is often suggested that to have this kind of quote, forbidden sex, where you turn your will over to another person and there is pain and domination involved, that you're doing something wild and crazy, and it's really, you know, going against religion. But if you dig into the history of the Christian church, what you will see is that the church actually canonized women who did this kind of mortification of the flesh in a very erotic way. They didn't have intercourse associated with it. But then again, a lot of BDSM bondage discipline, sadomasochism does not involve intercourse either. But what these nuns did in medieval times is they were erotically charged with passion for Jesus Christ. There was a very much erotic charge over their desire to be connected with Jesus. They call themselves brides of Christ and so forth. And it was a real passion that went beyond just a subdued sense of religiosity. There was a real fire of passion. And because the church after the fourth century made the sexual fire somehow wrong, these women had to channel it into a belief that this wasn't sexual, even though it was, but it was somehow spiritual. But how they expressed that erotic passion with Jesus was to destroy their flesh in different ways as an offering, as a sacrifice, what we might see in a scene, in a bondage discipline scene today. So these women would do all sorts of things like carve a cross into their chest and engage in different ways to basically harm themselves to prove that they were worthy of Jesus' love. Now, rather than the church correcting these people and saying, look, you can be connected with Jesus Christ and you don't have to harm yourself. You don't have to do that. And your passion for Jesus doesn't have to be expressed in these bodily painful ways. But no, they didn't do that. They actually held these nuns up as examples of superior type of spirituality, and these people were canonized. In other words, they were made to be saints by the Church of Rome. And so I just share that to tell you that these practices we have today, thinking that, okay, we're doing something that is very anti-religion. Actually, it's pretty much what the church wanted people to do is to fuse the idea of pain and pleasure, to fuse the idea of harming your body as somehow an access to a higher state of mind. And this is a distorted view of Christianity that frankly, if the world is going to enter into a new era, you could call it light in life, you could call it a new earth, the Bible calls it the new Jerusalem. Basically, it's the prophecy that a lot of different indigenous people have had that we're going to go into a time where there's a sense of enlightened spiritual understanding, more access to different supernatural powers and so forth, and just an era where people are thriving. Now, if that is going to happen, which it's destined to do, we need to be preparing ourselves to live differently than we are now, because there is this idea that there needs to be a price paid for that transcendent state, that we need to somehow earn it through different practices that induce pain. And so surrender becomes, whether it's through BDSM or people trying to access this natural transcendent state by activating the natural psychedelics in the body, people often default to, people often expect that it's going to have to be a really almost dangerous, terrifying experience to activate the natural psychedelics in the body. So they'll live in darkness, or which can activate the DMT, a darkness retreat, or they'll do extreme breathing practices that cause hyperventilation. That really the reason why you're getting the transcendent state is because your brain is starved of oxygen and it believes that you're dying, so it surges the DMT in an effort to save your brain. DMT is an antioxidant, it has an oxidative effect, and it's surging basically just to protect your brain, but as a side effect of that, you get the mystical transcendent state, the natural psychedelic experience. And what's happening in sex these days is people are using choking to invoke a transcendent state. Now, this again is another practice where people believe you have to be somehow in pain or discomfort to get the payoff. But that is a complete distortion, and I believe that distortion started with the church. That to get this transcendent state, we have to pay a price. Now, most of the people doing choking during sex have zero interest in the religious implications for that, but to realize that these things don't just start organically, believing that we have to pay a price. There's an underlying story that a culture holds. And even if you call yourself atheist or have nothing to do with religion, you're still part of this collective consciousness that holds the story that overcoming is as a result of some price being paid. And that's just a false doctrine that was not generated by the original people that were part of the Christian religion before the fourth century. It was something generated by the political individuals that formed Christianity in the fourth century, in the Council of Nicaea and so forth. So when we're talking about surrender and spiritual awakening and surrender through a sexual experience, it's really important to realize that this is not about surrendering to another person and having them do something like the choking or the different ways that you can basically go into an altered state of consciousness because your brain believes there's imminent death. The only reason you get the high from choking is that your brain believes you're gonna die. And it's surging the psychedelic to help aid you from dying. The problem is that can cause brain damage over time. You're messing with this emergency response system in your body, and if you continually put yourself through that, there is long-term consequences. And what we need to realize is our creator designed us to be able to experience the DMT inside of our brain not through pain and restriction of breath and hyperventilation breathing exercises. We can experience this state of surrender to a higher power by being very clear that what we're surrendering to is not another human. We're surrendering to the cosmos, to a larger sense of awareness, to a presence with a capital P. And some people would say that's to their higher self. You can interpret it that way. But it's also, I believe, quite important to go beyond the limited idea that the divine is only within you. Of course, it's within you. That's how you're able to access it. If it was completely separate from you, these transcendent experiences would be very hard to access. So of course it's within you. And DMT, the spirit molecule, is part of the interface between you and that larger reality. But you are not the epitome of the divine. You are not God in and of itself, or the goddess in and of itself. There is a larger, higher power that we can tap into, but we are not the epitome of all of it. And why do I make that distinction? Because tapping into a psychedelic transcendent experience, whether it's through a plant medicine or whether it's through sex, we need to be careful that ego inflation doesn't happen. So what do I mean by ego inflation? What I mean is in that moment, in those moments when you tap into something greater and you feel the bliss, you feel the unconditional love, you are aware that you're connected to the all. When you come back into your normal waking consciousness, if you interpret that, that this is exactly you, and there's nothing else outside of you, you are the epitome of this, you can walk around with what we might call a messiah complex that basically has you look down on other people and has you have a superior attitude. And this doesn't always get talked about in the psychedelic community, but that can definitely happen where people take a psychedelic, have a psychedelic experience, and then walk around and believe that they're God's gift to humanity. And there needs to be a good dose of humility in all of this because we're all people in the making, in the process of waking up to our connection to the universe. And as long as we're in a physical body, we'll still be in that process. But the surrender to this higher power that can happen during sex in particular allows us to glimpse, allows us to connect with an awareness that there is something much more to us than we're aware of on a given day. You know, we we get so wrapped up in work and taking care of family and doing different things that it's not very practical all the time to plug into the awareness that, hey, all of these different problems might be happening in my life, but there's a larger reality that I'm a part of. And I came here for a reason. And even though it might look like the different issues in my life are gonna take me over and I'm gonna succumb to them, they're not because there is this higher guiding presence that I can go to for ideas, I can go to for inspiration, that I can go to for guidance, and that it never leaves me. And I think it's one of the most beautiful things for us to realize that we don't need to sit on a mat cross-legged for hours on end to try to contact this entity, this higher power. We can contact it through the most natural instinctive act of lovemaking. Now, of course, it has to be not just fucking, it needs to be a heart-centered connection with another person that you're bringing a higher awareness to the act and not just allowing yourself to be taken over by the moment. And you're bringing awareness of your divinity to the moment and an awareness of the other person's divinity. And that's the other aspect of this. When you realize that you're surrendering to a higher power during sex, it also involves your partner. And all of this happens through partnered sex. There's something that can happen through partnered sex that just can't happen through a solo experience. So part of this is realizing that this higher power is what runs your partner, is the life force that is allowing your partner to be alive with the light in their eyes and the sparkle that connects the two of you. When that light in their eyes goes out and they're, you know, in a coffin, then that essence of God, that essence of their consciousness is no longer in their physical vessel. And so you're in love with, you might feel like you're in love with their body, but really, if that person dropped dead, you know, you would not be in love with the body. You would miss and long for their spirit. That is what we are connected to as beings. We are connected to that spirit of another person. And for us to be able to be aware of that during the love-making moments, that you are connecting to the spirit of that person. Now, sometimes people misunderstand this and think it has to be a real serious, somehow pious experience that you somehow have to control yourself and start meditating on God when you're having sex. No, it's not a forced, uncomfortable, awkward idea. It's a meditative idea that you're allowing yourself to go out of the normal frame of reference that you have. So your partner is someone that you do errands with, you take care of the kids with. I mean, this is a person that you see in a very certain light in a certain context during the day. But now, during these moments of sacred lovemaking, you allow your mind to go to a new conception of your partner. They're no longer the person that helps you take care of the kids, the person that pays the bills, the person that cooks or cleans or whatever. They're not that functional, just static type of individual. What they are is this dynamic, fluid expression of the divine itself. And when you can allow yourself to see them through those eyes, and that of course involves dropping all your judgments of them, dropping all your resentments of them, dropping all of your worries or fears about how they feel about you. Now, let me just preface this by saying this can only happen in a consensual, loving relationship that's safe. If you're in an abusive relationship, then none of this applies. Let's just believe that this is a safe consensual relationship. And if that's the case, one of the prerequisites to be able to enter this surrendered state during sex is to be willing to suspend all the little grievances, all the little things that just get at you about this person during the week, and to be able to enter into a zone of acceptance, a zone of what we would call unconditional love for this person. And in that, when you make that decision that you're going to suspend all of your concerns and judgments and so forth about them during sex, that decision in and of itself allows you to pull in a higher vibration. Because as long as you're in a state of, God, I'm so mad at what they said the other day, or oh my God, I can't believe they did this. When you're in that type of mindset, it's not going to work. It's not going to be possible to enter into a fully surrendered state to the divine because your vibration is too low and it's too chaotic. You need to be in more of a harmonious vibration, a coherent vibration, a heart-coherent vibration to be able to bring forth that divine life force energy that connects you with the cosmos, that connects you with your partner. Now, this might sound a little bit like it's lofty woo-woo conversation, but there is a science to it, and there is a life force energy that connects us to the cosmos. And it's real, it's not talked about in schools, but it is talked about in science that basically intelligence agencies have been working on for decades. There is a torsion physics, and it's not completely understood by even those scientists, because there's an aspect to it that they can't understand either. There's a scientist I'm thinking about, his last name is Shipov. He's a Russian scientist, and he talks about the different levels of empty space, what we call empty space, but it's really not empty space. And the very highest level is GOD. Now, would you expect a Russian scientist who doesn't proclaim to be a believer actually say, okay, there's this very, very highest level that's GOD. And below that are these different layers, including this life force energy that our Western science won't even account for. So what to realize is, yes, we can know a part of this through this advanced physics, but there is an aspect of this that is beyond any type of linear intellectual understanding. And I think that that's great. Why is that great? Because we can't get there through the intellect. We have to get there through the heart. We can't get there by analyzing. The only way that we can really get there is by surrendering to this higher power. And I'm reminded of a book I read a long time ago when I was working in the corporate world. It was called Conscious Business. It was written by a guy who came from very left-brain business background. And he had always approached every decision with a rational mind until he met his wife and until he fell head over heels in love. And that feeling of love caused him to change his entire life and marry her and now live as a couple. And he wrote in the foreword of that book, Conscious Business, which is basically about bringing a more heart-centered approach to business. He wrote in the beginning of that book that he got a real education by falling in love with his wife. He realized that some of the most important decisions in our life, we don't make them from the rational mind. We make them from the heart. It's the emotions that drive things. Marketers will tell people that, that if you're wanting to appeal to people, appeal to the emotion, not just the reason. And we even know that in entrepreneurial schools, they will tell you that don't follow a business idea just because it looks good on paper. Follow that business idea if you have a real passion for it. Because it's that emotion, that heart-centered emotion that will keep you going at it, that will keep you working on it even when it looks like it's not going to work, because you have that passion. It's the emotion that drives us forward. And that is where we meet the divine. And so I find it incredibly beautiful that we don't need to go to theology school. We don't need to study scriptures and learn ancient languages to decipher their meaning, to become closer to the divine. We don't need to do any of those intellectual things to be completely merged with this higher reality. Through our own instinctual sense of wanting to be loved, to love, and to experience pleasure with another person, we actually merge with the divine in a more powerful way than we could with any of those other intellectual pursuits. You know, a number of years ago at age 17, actually, I discovered uh something called the Unity School of Christianity, which is categorized as new thought. It is Christianity but metaphysical. So they interpret, for instance, the 12 disciples as you know, 12 energy centers in the body. It's quite fascinating. And it came about because a guy, Charles Fillmore, this is over a hundred years ago, his wife was dying of tuberculosis, and they couldn't figure out how to heal her. It was basically a terminal illness. And you know what? They just decided to pray. And lo and behold, she gets 100% better. And that was a turning point in their life. And they founded a Christian church movement with this metaphysical viewpoint. It's down in Lee's Summit, Missouri, and it's a beautiful Spanish architecture buildings down there, and then there's unity churches around the place. But anyway, when I found that at age 17, it felt like such a breath of fresh air after being a part of the Catholic religion, you know, growing up, Ireland and so forth. And so I applied at 17 to be a unity minister, to go down there to Lee Summit after high school and to study to be one of their ministers. And I was told at that time that I needed more life experience and that they wouldn't accept me. So I go, okay. And I went off and I did other things. And then, gosh, about 10 or 12 years later, I applied to the Seattle University School of Theology and entered that program. Of course, they did accept me at that point. Entered that program to get a Master of Divinity degree, which allows you to lead a variety of different Christian denominations. And I was looking for the most open-minded one, and it was Unitarian Universalists. Now, I had never really attended a Unitarian Universalist church at that time. So I was trying to like figure out what they all believed so I could fit into the mold of one of the prescribed denominations because you couldn't just show up and go, I want this credential, and I don't really have any affiliation. You couldn't do that. You had to belong to one particular faith. And so I tried to do that, but it didn't feel right. You know, so I ended up leaving there and thinking, okay, this is so strange. I had such a strong sense that I was going to be in some kind of ways in the spiritual ministry, and it didn't work out. And lo and behold, what I realized is my divine calling was not to teach the prescribed traditional religious teachings that have really, you could say, have led humanity astray to some extent. This idea that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and there was some kind of blood sacrifice made by God. Now I see it, why I needed to step outside of other religions. Now, just to be clear, Unity School of Christianity does not believe Jesus died for your sins or anything like that. They don't. But what they're missing is any sense of the sexual being an integral part of spiritual practice. There's no allowance for that in the unity. There's certainly not any allowance for that in the Unitarian Universalist or any of the other denominations that my Master of Divinity degree would allow me to, you know, be a part of. Not belonging to any of those denominations allowed me to step outside and look, okay, what is missing? And I didn't do this in an analytical way. It just organically happened and basically happened because of my own awareness growing that there was this suppressed teaching in early Christianity that sex was the way to union with the divine, that the original sacrament of Holy Communion was a sexual sacrament. And that's something that we'll discuss more on this podcast. But what a different world it would be if there was a sacred expression of the life force energy rather than it being suppressed and coming out in all sorts of abusive ways, as we see not only in the church, but also outside of the church. But really, it's a new understanding about sexuality, it's a new understanding that we can access this sublime state of oneness with our creator, with our the creatrix, through the act of surrender during sex. Surrender not being that you're losing out on anything. Surrender, not meaning the idea of defeat, surrender meaning, wow, I'm honoring that there is something that created my consciousness. There's something that allows my heart to beat. There's something that is giving me breath. I'm not having to consciously think about beating my heart. I'm not having to think about where my breath is coming from. I take these things for granted that there's something higher than me that is causing all of this to happen. And the greatest happiness in my life has been with the awareness that I am part of this and it's there all the time. Now, it is easy to forget that. And to be able to return to that awareness and remind yourself, re-remember that there is this larger reality existing all the time below the surface of our awareness. That is a sense of steadiness, a sense of order, a sense of harmony, and sense of love. And this is why spiritual practice is so important. And this is why the act of love making can be a spiritual practice if we allow ourselves to truly surrender to the moment. If we allow ourselves not to be a person thinking about having sex, like your mind is somewhere else and your body is doing something else. And that happens very easily. People have trained their awareness to be separate from their bodies. And it takes something, it takes conscious practice to drop all of your awareness from your neck up to below your neck and to be present in your body without thinking about what you're doing, but just the actual moment to moment happens with a suspension of thought. And that's when you're in that, you could call it a flow state. And that facilitates this even more dynamic state, the psychedelic state, the transcendent state. And what is so beautiful to realize is we don't have to pay a price for this. We don't have to suffer for it. We don't have to trade something like, okay, I'm gonna lose this so I can gain that. That shows up in a distorted understanding of what the original alchemical principles were in early Christianity. And that's again another topic for another time. But I will leave those ideas with you. And thank you so much for joining me. I'll have the link down below for the Substack so you can connect there and also for social media. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time.