[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 17 - The Joy of Sex

My relationship with sex and sexual energy really started around the age of seven, but at that age we can’t really call it “sex.” Seven is a bit on the early side, but still within Freud’s “Latency” stage of psychosexual development, so this type of experience was probably not unusual for others around my age as well.

The feeling I experienced was in the form of a desire to grow sexually in some way, but as the sexual organs were far from formed, this desire tended to be less organ focused and more full bodied. Around age eleven, these feelings began to change, and although they still weren’t directly associated with my sex organs, the feelings were easily identifiable as sexual and physical in nature.

It was during this time of my youth, while climbing a tree, I felt a warm wave of physical pleasure in my entire body. The more stress I put on my muscles, the more the sensation grew to a blissful climax of pleasure that was not only indescribable but also uncontrollable. My whole body twitched in ecstasy and it was all I could do to not fall out of the tree.

I didn’t understand what had just happened. The experience was not centered in my genitals. I had no erection and emitted no bodily fluids, yet it can only be described as a mind-blowing, full-body, prolonged orgasm. Well, this changed everything! I still had no idea what sex was. I knew it involved some kind of touching of body parts, but I thought little of it, as I had no interest in it—yet. I certainly did not associate sex with the experience I just had, which was about to become my new favorite pastime.

I found myself climbing ropes and trees a lot more often. During school recess, I would climb the flagpole. It turned out I could just make it to the top of the flagpole to bring on one of these super-awesome body explosions. Sometimes I’d get to the top a little too soon, so I had to stay at the top pretending to climb to nowhere until it happened. I don’t think any of the kids had a clue what was going on up there, but I’m sure I was an obvious sight to the adults. There I was, twenty feet up a flagpole in the middle of the playground, humping a pole long a dog until I convulsed, then going limp and sliding down to land with a thump on the ground. Perhaps they thought I was a budding patriotic pervert. I didn’t care. As with the fusion and out-of-body experiences, I assumed everyone experienced this amazing, beautiful energy that expressed itself in corporeal explosions of intense physical and psychic pleasure, but if so, why wasn’t everyone lining up to climb the pole?

This went on for a few years until a friend taught me how to masturbate. It wasn’t a compelling idea to me, but he talked me into it by explaining how amazing it felt. Naturally, I thought masturbation was yet another way to achieve these amazing orgasms but perhaps with a bit more discretion. He showed me how to put my penis between my hands and then rub my hands back and forth. I gave it my best shot. I couldn’t imagine where he’d learned such a brutal technique because by the time I’d had my first genital orgasm, my tender little cock was sore and blistered, and the orgasm I had was as satisfying as cold pizza. I was horribly disappointed, but I kept trying, once the scabs healed, with similar results.

Then my full-body orgasms stopped. I assumed the change was temporary and the sensations would return, eventually. When they didn’t, I was even more depressed and pessimistic about the human condition. Everything amazing and beautiful in life was either off limits, frightening to people, or destroyed in one way or another, and the primary source of this disharmony, confusion, and ignorance was people, without whom life would be so much better. I understood, years later, exactly what Sartre meant when he said “Hell is other people.” Maybe it was puberty or maybe it was my festering, repressed anger. Regardless, I was starting to see the world as a hard, unforgiving, unjust place, and not the miracle-filled paradise of my youth. The child in me was dying.

What I wasn’t aware of, was that the energy growing inside me wasn’t purely sexual in nature, per se, but was merely defined as such due to our lack of knowledge about the energies we have within us. Later in life I found it more useful to think about this energy I’m referring to as that of the raw, impersonal life force that exists in all beings. The transformation of a child’s body and energy into that of an adult facilitates this energy’s ability to express itself, or perhaps this energy has evolved us to serve as a better conduit for it. This energy is the energy of life, and therefore it has an expression in sex, which is an expression, and source, of life—but this energy is much more than sexual desire. In fact, human sexuality is one of the least significant expressions of this creative life energy that is behind all creativity, be it childbirth, love, music, philosophy or any of man’s creative pursuits. I found this energy best described by what Dr. Wilhelm Reich referred to as orgone energy.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a prominent doctor and one-time favorite student of Sigmund Freud, was the creator of somatic psychology. In the 1930s his extensive research led him to theorize that a massless, omnipresent, self-organizing universal life energy was the foundation of not only all life but all the structures of manifestation from the microscopic to the galactic. This is very similar to Reich’s orgone energy. One of this energy’s primary forms of expression in animals was through sexuality. He believed the orgasm (from which the word orgone was derived) was a release of this energy, and well-being could only be achieved if orgasmic release was not blocked by emotional or sexual repression. According to his work, the proper release of this energy was experienced in full-body orgasms. Orgasms limited to the genitalia were repressed versions due to emotionally based body armoring. Reich argued, “It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human thinking and feeling.” His goal was to restore the naturally sensual, vibrant, loving state of human nature.

The theory of orgone was in stark contrast to Freudian ideas, which stated that human nature must conform and adapt to society. Reich believed Freud’s ideas led to social developments such as Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler. Reich’s solution was to begin sex education courses in Germany and then in the United States, to where he migrated in 1939, but his work was perceived as perverted and pseudoscientific. In 1956, all his books were burned by FDA agents. He died in 1957 in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary where he was serving time for distributing his invention based on orgone energy, and in violation of the Food and Drug Act. Today Reich is considered a visionary and his inventions are used globally. His work has been validated and recognized by much of the scientific community, though some still dismiss his work as pseudoscience.

Orgone energy is the same as prana. Prana, according to the Upanishads, is that which distinguishes the difference between a dead body and a live one. The experience of increasing prana is called pranotthana, which is also a precursor to awakening kundalini. It’s said that those who have mastered their kundalini can perform miracles, control the weather, manipulate mass consciousness, and many other paranormal feats. Wilhelm Reich’s orgone-generating tools had similar abilities. His cloudbusters could control the weather. His experiments with negative orgone generators, which sucked the life energy out of the land, actually caused local farmers in Maine, where he was living at the time, to demand he stop his experiments as their crops and all life in the area became feeble and sickly.

Reich’s Orgone, the Vril of the Germanic tribes, the Great Spirit of the Native Americans, the prana of Hinduism, the ch’i of the Chinese, the Holy Spirit of the Constantine Bible: these are attempts to identify a power of life that flows through all things. Each thing acts as a channel for this power’s expression in whatever capacity that channel provides. In animals, sex, in all its varied forms, is one such form of expression, and survival is the side effect. As the body develops, so too does the energy’s ability to express itself via that body. Puberty is the human transformation in which the body finishes its first stage of development and is ready to become a more effective channel for this energy.

Hindu belief states that this life energy lies dormant coiled up at the base of the spine. At puberty, it expands upward into the first of seven energy centers. The center where this coiled energy resides is called the Muladhara chakra, according to Hindu Sanskrit scriptures of the original Aryans who traveled to India 3,500 years ago from what is now Iran, and what used to be the Garden of Eden. This energy center located at the base of the spine is the axis point of our drive to survive, our right to exist, especially in this material and physical world, and therefore our ability to stand up for ourselves and be independent. This is the energetic essence of adolescence.

I should add here, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the traditional scientific view of the chakra energy system is rather skeptical.

• The alleged energy of the chakras is not scientifically measurable […] and is at best a metaphysical chimera and at worst an anatomical falsehood (The Skeptic’s Dictionary)

This may be true, but the fact that science can’t measure most aspects of reality, but only the physical aspects of a narrow slice of the reality spectrum, doesn’t give such dismissals a lot of weight, at least to me.

This energy expressed itself through me before my body was prepared to respond to it, before I had any sexual identity. I suspect this was why I had spectrum fusion and out-of-body experiences at such a young age. My rather unusual isolation, psychologically and cognitively, from the world around me, my sun-gazing, and slipping into trancelike states, a trait common in spectrum children, may also have contributed. Consequently, the psychological, and perhaps even biological changes that resulted from this unchanneled sexual energy moving inside me, resulted in additional stress I didn’t care to, or know how to, deal with in any proper manner. Instead, I self-medicated with cigarettes, drugs, and booze. It was obvious I was slipping into a dark place, but in a town of poor, uneducated mill workers, this tailspin into despair, violence, alcoholism, and addiction was considered part of growing up.