From lecture 251, THE EVOLUTION AND SPIRITUAL MEANING OF MARRIAGE — NEW AGE MARRIAGE:

Just as it is foolish to turn into an atheist because of the errors of religion, so it is foolish to discard marriage altogether because of previous distortions. Before marriage began to be doubted as a valid institution by many, the attitude toward it had already begun to change considerably, especially in the last several decades. Individuals began to choose partners freely, motivated generally by love. This often led to errors, however. Too often individuals who were too young and immature to form a really meaningful union chose marriage based on superficial attraction, without deep knowledge of self or partner. No wonder such marriages could not survive. But this step was necessary before maturity could be gained.

Just as individuals cannot learn unless they experience mistakes and immaturities, neither can the collective consciousness. New ways have to be tried by both before the soul would reach wisdom and truth. The freedom to choose independently, to experience sexual and erotic pleasure, to make mistakes and learn from them, to grow into different and more mature relationships without condemning less mature ones, are all necessary to learn the real significance of marriage. It has to be seen not as a shackle imposed by a moralizing outer or inner authority, but as a freely chosen gift, the greatest, most desirable state imaginable, the keenest pleasure and fulfillment for which the soul and the personality have to become strong, resilient, mature, and capable. Bliss, ecstasy, pleasure supreme can never exist gratuitously, can never be cheaply snatched. They cannot be borne that way. They can be borne only when the personality has reached sufficient purification, security, faith, self-knowledge, comprehension of the universe, Christness.

Sexual liberation has to go through some stages that may seem exaggerated, or may even be exaggerated, before further sexual liberation — the unification of love, eros and sex — can create the new-age marriage. Fleeting sexual encounters should not be looked upon as the final state of liberation. They are, at best, a very temporary and limited phase. No one who has ever experienced this stage has ever truly been satisfied by it, not even on the merely physical level. You may delude yourself into thinking that this is the best you could hope to experience, but it is not. You may deny your deeper unfulfilled longing because some of the hitherto unfulfilled longing has been assuaged. But you have so much further to go in order to give yourself what you really need, want, desire, and what you should indeed have.

As with the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, too, had to go to some kind of extreme — at least temporarily. So some women had to become as hard, as unyielding as their greatest enemy, man, in order to experience their strength, their capacity to be independent, self-responsible, creative, and resourceful. As long as this is a passing phase from which further changes will emerge it is all right. But when this is seen as the final ideal, it becomes as damaging as the suppressed and dependent child-woman you no longer want or need to be. The new-age woman combines independence, self-responsibility, full-fledged adulthood with the softness and yieldingness that was previously associated exclusively with the dependent parasite. The new-age man combines his heart feelings, his softness, his gentleness with his strength and abilities, not like the woman, but in a complementary way. The two can form the new-age marriage.

The new-age marriage will not be formed early in life. If the participants are young, they will have reached considerable maturity as a result of a genuine, intense pathwork, such as this. The new-age marriage is a nucleus of strength, with the partners fortifying each other as well as others in a commonly undertaken task for the greater cause. The new-age marriage is totally open and transparent. There are no secrets whatever. The soul process of the pathwork is totally shared. This openness and transparency has to be learned. It is a path within the path, as it were. You need to expose your difficulty in achieving this openness, rather than denying or hiding it. If you do not expose your difficulty in being open, your unfulfillment cannot be alleviated no matter how much you try to blame it on your partner or on outer circumstances. Part of this openness consists of revealing your fear of the strong spiritual current, of the forces released by the unification of sexuality and the heart. When the fear is shared — even though you may be unable to shed the fear as yet — the obstructions will be eliminated relatively fast, and a kind of vibrant fulfillment comes even from this sharing.

In the new-age marriage, being on a path of profound self-development and bringing into the light the hidden parts of the self are the prerequisites of fulfillment in an alive and vibrant relationship. When the vibrancy ebbs away, the causes need to be explored by both partners together. There may be any number of reasons for the stagnation, none of them necessarily bad or shameful.

When all levels of the two personalities are open to each other, join and finally fuse, the intensity and vibrancy of the sexual encounter will surpass anything you can at present imagine. You deeply long for it, because this fulfillment is your birthright and your destiny. It can exist only in a partnership such as I have described: as the new-age marriage. This kind of fusion cannot come about easily. It is the result of infinite patience, growth, change, transformation. But it should live in your vision as a possibility you can indeed actualize one day.

The fusion on all levels of the personality means the fusion of all energy bodies. This is very rarely the case. You will come to know when the fusion exists only on the physical level, and when it happens on the emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. All these energy bodies exist in reality and can fuse or not according to prevailing conditions. When the fusion takes place on all these levels, you not only become one with your partner, but with God. You realize God in the mate and God in yourself. No wonder the power current is too strong to bear unless your personalities have reached a high degree of inner development and purification.

Once you realize that sexual fusion is insufficient and uninteresting unless it includes all the energy bodies in the process of coming together, your approach to a sexual encounter will become very different. Sex will never be casual or haphazard; you will consider it a holy ritual. These rituals will be created by the individual couples and may change over time. They will never deteriorate into fixed routines. The sexual encounter is a true fusion of the masculine and feminine principles as universal forces. Each sexual fusion will be a creative act, bringing forth new spiritual forms, new heights of development in the two selves that can be passed on to others. The complementary merging of these two divine aspects — the feminine and masculine forces — will create not only total fulfillment, ecstasy, and bliss, but enduring new values and a true experience of divine reality, of the Christ in the self and in the other.

My beloved friends, this lecture should by no means discourage you, no matter how far away you may seem to be from the destiny I outline here. You are moving in this direction merely by being able to comprehend this lecture, by being capable of choosing to use it in the most positive way no matter where you are. Knowing this truth will free you as any truth must free you, even if you cannot attain its realization in this life. Rejoice that it exists, that it waits for you. Know this truth as an enrichment given to you.

There exists a tremendous tension between the male and female energy currents. This tension can manifest in a positive or a negative way. If it manifests negatively, sexuality is fraught with denials such as homosexuality, repression, asexuality, impotence, frigidity, or with negative expression as in sadism, masochism, fetishism. To a degree, it may be necessary to give some expression to negatively connected sexuality, for if it is completely denied, the total personality is being thwarted and the tension is so powerfully accumulated that nonsexual violence is acted out. If these expressions occur in fantasy or in situations of mutual consent where no one is harmed or forced, they can lead to a more cohesive, connected sexuality, especially when this process is not glorified but understood in its true meaning.

When the tension manifests positively, it is truly a psychic nuclear point. The new-age marriage is a psychic nuclear point. The energy released, the creativity liberated, the mutuality of ecstasy are all deeply spiritual experiences that happen in, through, and with God. Divine sexuality must be recognized in the New Age. It is not to be found in old taboos and denials, nor in moralizing judgments about this creative force, neither is it to be found in deviations that occur as a result of incomplete development. The explosive force of the male-female tension and its release permeates the total personality and transcends the finite. It truly spiritualizes the body and materializes the spirit, which is the task of evolution.