On the Beach

I am fortunate to live fairly close to a town that at its north end provides miles of fairly empty beach.  A little stroll up the beach, and you can find yourself alone with the ocean.   It is an experience that I have come to treasure more and more.
The ocean....imagine.. it formed 4 billion years ago, it covers most of the earth's surface.
Walking along the shoreline,  over and over hearing the sound of it.  Perhaps this is where the the sacred OM was first heard... the syllable of creation.    A few times now..lying in the sand by the ocean..i have had intense experiences... so intense as to be sexual.
The ancients described material existence as consisting of basic elements,  earth air fire and water.     The elements were alive and compelling at the shoreline... Earth.. turned to grains of sand by the ocean's power,  Air, the endless wind blowing ever shoreward, Fire  older than the ocean... heating my naked skin,  and Water...tasting it on the air.. hearing it,. smelling it,  feeling it... seeing it.. Mother Ocean, Goddess Ocean.
Two aspects of the experience have stayed with me.  First was the feeling of the greatness of this force that I was connecting with.  billions of years old, covering the earth, and that perhaps just an aspect, someone greater.  It was not difficult to realize my smallness, my momentary-ness.  And more i felt as if She was there all around, except for this darkness, or a fear, which was me.  I was that which resisted dissolving into the vastness for now.
The other aspect of this experience was that it was... sexual.  I found myself touching myself, particularly my breasts to enhance my consciousness of Her.  There is no question that the energies experienced in meditation have connections to sexual energy.  I have for a while associated intensity of energy in meditation with habits of controlling my sexual behavior from day to day, particularly refraining from orgasm.  ( Something which is easier for a girl on hormones than what those poor boys go through)   Still, this was an experience more like masturbation than meditation.   Specifically a fantasy of sexual encounter with Devi.  And you can't really say that a sexual encounter with the Goddess who is eternal, all pervading, and all knowing is a fantasy, at least I don't think you can.   At any rate, it is an experience that compels me, and I do want to repeat it.
But I may need to be patient.    Unfortunately,  even the most deserted beach i know is not completely deserted in June, and I need to feel alone to have this experience.  Worse, I spotted a green head fly near the dunes this week.. The foretaste of a horde.    The unforgettable experience of being repeatedly bitten by a swarm of hungry flies could be a kind of fore-play to a creature more splendid than I.   In fact, the only relief at that point is total immersion in the Ocean, though they do seem to have an uncanny ability to keep biting while underwater at least for a little while.  So I have a little time to think about my next encounter.  Being a lapsed Catholic, I am rather startled by the whole thing.  The little boy inside says... "that is not an acceptable way to know God. "  but then again St Theresa who is a better Catholic than I ever was, had experiences that might make a greenhead blush.
So following her example, i shall walk shoeless on the deserted shore, and seek ecstasy, just as soon as the flies leave.

Forever Female

"Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks.  Religion is a light in the fog"    Edie Brickell

It's summer time when the sensible retire to the beach shielding their faces from UV with the latest offering from James Patterson, and the unhinged search obsessively for discussions of the gender of the soul on the world wide web.  This offering will not give away any kickers regarding Alex Cross's latest exploits.
Surprisingly the immortal soul would appear to be a rather critical piece of the theological edifice, but descriptions of its quirks and qualities seem far removed.  Not much that rises above the description of a ghost or a wish or a hunch.  There seems to be a fair consensus that it is the type of thing that can get some nasty stains, which aren't going to get "Shouted Out", unless the shouting invokes the term Hallelujah liberally, otherwise there seems to be surprising indifference to what is going to die and what is going to continue.

I not surprisingly am interested in the question of whether the soul is gendered.   I have touched upon it briefly in a couple of recent entries,  Gender Queery , and Case-of-miss-taken-identity where I briefly talked about the biological and cultural side of things, where gender can get quite complicated and crazy.  The question of the soul is interesting because it is a question about essence.  Is gender an essential part of me, which is separate from my body and upbringing?  There is certainly an idea like that common in the transgender community when people talk about being born in the wrong body.  If I am born in the wrong body, then one conclusion would be that my soul has a different gender than my body.

In general,  I have found that religious traditions that teach a single ensoulment,  (they deny re-incarnation), are more likely to ascribe gender to the soul, but there isn't a consistent message.  It seems that the Bible, Quran, etc is either ambiguous or mute on the subject.  The philosophical traditions in which Western Theology grew, generally reflected the cultural norms which were everywhere in the ancient world, which is to say that " boys are better than girls"..nyah nyah nyah.  Having defined a weaker sex, it kind of messed up the even playing field that those immortal souls are supposed to be on,  so in my interpretation, the issue is largely ignored in doctrine.  For a very nice discussion of the issue from a wonderfully sensible Christian perspective,  I found a site which is more about the discussion of the immortality of souls..  Myth-one.com
There it is argued that immortal souls are not gendered, because gender exists to support reproduction which is not a something the immortals want to get involved with.  (Even a low birth rate leads to horrendous population problems when nobody dies)
 On the other hand, the popular view seems to be that if I am to survive death, then I certainly am gendered, and so that is that.   One religion clearly states that gender is eternal, supporting that popular view.  That is LDS, the mormons.  A fascinating discussion of this Gender, Mormonism and Transexuality  shows that while immutability of gender was declared by church leaders  to oppose some ideas in the transgender community regarding the mutability of gender.  These ideas of church leaders are quite consistent with the traditional view of a female or male soul being born in the wrong body.

This morning, I was reading the upanishads to get away from all this gender nonsense, and they supplied the answer without my asking , because the issue is central to the Eastern religious traditions.

naiva strI na pumAn esa na caivAyam napumsakah ....

This is not like a woman, not like a man, and not like a hermaphrodite...

Shvetashvatara Upanishat

and so....  I would perhaps like to envision my real self as forever female. After all i am accumulating a wardrobe that should make it through the first half of eternity.  What?  Souls don't require clothes?  They don't accessorize?  Now what really would be the point of that?   ... but probably not to be....Of course a couple of reincarnations as a tall thin red head...and then I'll hurry on to nirvana,   I promise.  OK I lied.. in the lastest one... well I didn't see it coming, but it turns out that Alex Cross was born a woman.. go figure.