Guru-student love and sex

I have never studied with any teacher who was celibate, and most had sexual relations with their students. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why so many criticize such relationships as abusive, accusing the teacher of "humiliating abuses."  This is a kind of 1970s-style feminist position regarding the woman as being weak and vulnerable, taken advantage of by some lust-driven, power hungry male authority.

First, I object to looking at sex between a spiritual student and a teacher as being an abusive relationship, and that in consensual sex within such a relation that the woman is the victim of abuse. I experience that women  are well aware of their own sexuality and attractiveness such that they can beguile and manipulate even the strongest, self-assured male.  I see women as intelligent, very interpersonally aware, very centered, and quite manipulative in most relationships.

Secondly, no matter what your spiritual path, at some point you have to become aware of your energetic body, the so called Subtle Body, with its energies, flowing rivers of light, bliss and ecstasies, and totally alive with energies in order to bring joy to an otherwise barren practice of observing emptiness and loosening identification with the personal self.

Love and sex are a beautiful entryway into making the body come alive to its own Subtle Body underpinnings.  Not only sex, of course, but even moreso, romantic love.  One needs to awaken one's heart through love, whatever type it is, but nothing awakens the energetic body so much as romantic love and associated sex, especially when the love is so deep, and the sex so moving that one experiences orgasm in the brain and entire body, not just genital orgasms.  Most cannot imagine the energetic movement involved in such orgasms.

Then just ordinary conversations between such lovers leads to a completely open and surrendered heart such as one's own internal energies get intertwined "visibly" with those of your lover.  One actually "sees" rivers of light and energy flow between the couple in the most ecstatic wonder, such that both experience the presence of God, the divine existing separately from the couple, and to which both bow in abject surrender at the feet of the Life Force.

The Life Force, that energetic presence which is you deeper than the body, thrives in love, thrives in sexual union, demands unlimited sexual contact, loving touches, verbal touching, massage, etc.  Nothing is held back in the exploration of the other in divine union.

This is what spirituality has to awaken in you before their is a complete Self-Realization: a total awakening Shakti within you, and Shakti knows no boundaries, no rules of exclusion, no limits to her lust and desire, and in fact, generally it is the woman who carries the light of Shakti, and is the gatekeeper of Shakti, not the man, unless he is as open as is she.

Thus the ultimate awakening relationships are determined totally by how open each partner is to their own desires, lusts, energies and the life force, and finds someone as open as the other.  It is this openness that is important, not the presence of love, or sex.  The openness has to be total, allowing full access to all one's inner depths and even inner demons, and a full expression of those own's own depths to the other.

To me, someone who is that open should be that open to anyone else so capable.  If a teacher can give this grace, this opening to a student, so be it.  And if a student can bring this grace to a teacher, it is a great gift to both.

Only if you see and experience spirituality in this way can you possibly understand love and sexual relationships between a spiritual teacher and his or her students.