To find oneself in a human body is to find oneself either male or female. This curious circumstance not only makes life more interesting; it also makes it more complicated.
Sex is, as any student of advertising and publishing knows, a highly intriguing phenomenon, charged with explosive possibilities and accompanied by an infinite number of strange, beautiful, and terrible ramifications. With it are involved the most intense of human emotions: love, hate, jealousy, treachery, betrayal, cruelty, sacrifice, devotion. Suicide and murder frequently take place because of it. Life is brought into being as its consequence. Lives are dramatically and drastically changed through its agency. Little wonder, then, that sex has been the endless thematic source for poetry, song, drama, and literature of every kind in every age.
As with all other realms of human life, the reincarnation idea enables us to see sex on a far wider screen of vision, and at the same time makes clear and reasonable matters that otherwise would seem chaotic and senseless.
For one thing, we find that from an enlarged and cosmic point of view, the notion of sex being the “original sin” must undergo substantial reevaluation. The principle of sex, as we call it on the biological level, underlies the entire manifest universe. Vegetation and animal life would be non-existent without sex—and this is obvious. But it is equally true, even though less obvious, that mechanics would be impossible without its “male” and “female” aspects; so would electricity and so would the very structure of an atom. If sex—or more properly speaking polarity—were truly a “sin,” then the entire universe is sinful.
It is not sex that is a sin, any more than atomic power or electricity can be said to be a sin. It is the manner in which any principle or any force is used that determines whether it is good or evil.
Sex is, obviously, just as dynamic a force as is atomic energy, and the recognition of its power has led all peoples, all over the world, to put various regulations upon its expression. These regulations differ markedly in different societies and in different ages. Among the Samoan islanders, for example, it is customary for adolescent boys and girls to sleep together until such time as they decide to marry; among the Eskimos, the loaning of wives to passing visitors was at one time common practice. Obviously, what is “good” in one society is unthinkable and “evil” in another.
But the reincarnation of souls takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, and karmic action operates on lines of force that cut through all the varieties of social and sexual arrangements. It becomes apparent from the study of the Cayce files, and, indeed, from the study of the case records of anybody working systematically with age-regression, that the sex of the body, like any other aspect of that microcosmic miracle, is at the same time a trial and an opportunity, a punishment and a reward, a testing ground and a playing ground of the soul. Sex experiences, like all others, are educative experiences. Both joy and agony come to us because of sex, but both joy and agony are a necessary part of the enrichment and perfection of the soul.
Moreover, from the enlarged point of view made possible by reincarnation, it becomes clear that there is a universal ethics of sex which transcends the differing moral codes of various eras and places, and this cosmic code of ethics is rigorously enforced by unfailing laws of karma.
The universal ethics of sex would seem to be based on the simple formula which we see again and again in the Cayce readings. As you mete, so shall it be measured unto you . . . What you do to others, will ultimately be done to you . . . Or, as Revelation 13:10, puts it: “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”
Sex cannot be considered in isolation: it is intimately involved with many other aspects of character.
One is given power. How does one use it? This is the test—the most crucial and basic of all tests. In a man, the sex power is usually in conjunction with superior physical force, and the test of power is twofold. In a woman, the sex power is usually in conjunction with the magnetism, in varying degrees, of beauty; and the test is also twofold. Where physical force is lacking in the man, and beauty in the woman, there is present still another kind of test: how does the individual react, having one power and one deprivation?
A woman who deliberately uses her sex and beauty as a means of self-aggrandizement, indifferent to the hurt she causes men and other women, is obviously generating karmic causes that she will have to face someday. A man who physically abuses a woman will one day, probably in a lifetime as a woman, attract physical abuse. If he shows callous indifference to the biological, emotional, or social consequences he causes a woman to suffer, he will receive the very same callous cruelty later, even if the outer social arrangements of the time be diametrically opposite. Wherever suffering is inflicted, wherever one person is exploited or his freedom of will is obstructed or his best welfare is made subservient to another’s own selfish ends, wherever selfishness or sensuality override a spiritual concept of life—there a karmic cause has been generated and the price must one day be paid.
When one considers the great variety of human behavior with regard to sex, and especially of the ruthlessness and violence with which men in particular have accomplished their desires in all ages of human history, one is struck with the tremendous task of karmic justice. We have to go no further back than the Old Testament to find atrocious, incredible examples of the bestiality of men with regard to women. We read in 11 Samuel, chapter 13, that Amnon, the son of David, raped his own sister Tamar, and then coldly had her locked out of the house. In the Book of Judges, chapter 19, we read of a man who gave his concubine to an angry mob of men to do with what they pleased, so that they would not harm him; they abused her all night and left the man alone. Afterwards, the man rewarded the young woman for having saved his life in this manner by cutting her body with a knife into several pieces. In Genesis we read of Judah, the patriarch, who had sexual relations with a young woman and later demanded that she be burned alive for whoredom and pregnancy—until it was made inescapably clear by the bracelets he had given her that he was the man responsible for her pregnancy.
Men have not been the victim of this kind of brutality and heartlessness, except in unusual cases. We read of men being emasculated, for example, as punishment for crimes or as a retaliation in wartime or because other men have wanted only eunuchs to guard their woman. But by and large it has been women who have been the most brutally victimized because of sex. They have been used, abused, raped, drugged, beaten, sold on auction blocks, forced into prostitution, and treated as objects of concupiscence, discardable when no longer usable. When the full story of the karma of sex can be told, we will have a panorama that for clinical and dramatic impact will be unequaled in all the literature of the world.
It is little wonder that we read almost daily in the newspapers of sexual crimes of unbelievable atrocity. Their victims must have merited the experience from their own past-life brutality; their perpetrators must be egos of a still bestial level of consciousness who become the agents for fulfilling other people’s destiny at the same time that they are unfolding their own.
In the Cayce files we do not find any particularly lurid examples of sexual depravity and crime, but we do find instances where karmic action in the sexual realm is clearly illustrated, either within or without the sanctions of marriage.
The case of an eighteen-year-old college girl in Norfolk, Virginia, is a case in point. A thirty-nine-year-old man with whom she had fallen in love induced the girl to go with him to a hotel room in one of the city’s hotels. Afterwards, the man became indifferent to her, refused to see her again, and told her she should marry someone her own age. For four months the girl would not leave the house; she “nearly went crazy,” her mother reported; she wanted to commit suicide. Hoping to help her “get him out of her system,” the mother and brother decided to bring breach of promise suit against the man.
In the Cayce reading which the girl obtained, it was not stated specifically what she had done to merit her present seduction and suffering, but Cayce made it clear that it was exactly merited.
“In the present,” the reading states, “you will find disappointments in individuals, just as you caused disappointments in the experience of others. For know: this is an immutable law! As you sow, so shall you reap! It is the sorrow and the disappointments you have caused in others in past experiences that you meet from others in your present experience. But showing mercy, asking judgment, being patient, you may overcome.”
“Would it be best for me to marry him, if he agrees?” the girl asked, in the question period. “Never!” Cayce replied emphatically.
“You mean I should never marry him, or he would never agree?” she pursued. “It would be best NEVER to marry him; your ideals would be destroyed!”
In Many Mansions (Part I) a number of comparable instances were related in the chapters on marriage. We saw there how infidelity to one’s mate in a past lifetime, for example, can lead to suffering from the infidelity of one’s mate in the present. The incident of a husband who forced his wife to wear a chastity belt while he was off on the Crusades resulted in one case in the impotence of the husband, and in another in the frigidity and sexual fear of the wife.
The taking of vows of celibacy in one lifetime can have far-reaching consequences in succeeding lifetimes. By the continuitive rather than the retributive aspect of karma, frigidity or the incapacity to make a sexual adjustment usually results from such vows.
But it is when a vow of celibacy is broken that karmic penalties in the retributive sense become quite severe. One case concerns a Catholic priest and nun in England. They fell madly in love and broke their vows of celibacy together. The Cayce reading indicates that the priest dominated the woman and persuaded her against her own better judgment. It seems apparent also that their love was largely of a sensual nature.
In this lifetime these two came together again as man and wife, again of the Catholic faith. From the very beginning of the marriage the wife was frigid. At the end of the first year, the man became a helpless cripple, physically incapable of any sexual activity whatsoever.
Because of her strict Catholic views, the wife would not divorce the man, despite the fact that they were extremely unhappy together. He continued to try to dominate her mentally, as he had once before both physically and mentally. But she had chosen, in the planes between lifetimes, to go to a realm where she could develop her mind and become more intellectually independent and self-confident. Consequently, he was unable to dominate her mentally or any other way, and constant friction was the nature of their marriage.
A case like this is not to be regarded moralistically, but psychologically and spiritually. The “punishment” here is surely not to be thought of as the vindictiveness of a jealous theological God, bent on avenging two hapless transgressors of Church law. The point at issue, rather, is weakness of character in that two persons permitted their sensuality to interfere with an express dedication to a spiritual career. The man was aggressive enough to persuade the woman; the woman was weak enough to permit herself to be persuaded. Moreover, a broken vow is probably to be regarded in the same way as a broken contract or a broken word—the second party to the contract in this case being, if not God, then one’s own Higher Self.
An extraordinarily painful life situation, dramatically appropriate to their own previous conduct, became the crucible in which these two souls were given the opportunity to fulfill their broken pledge, and to forge from their weakness, strength.
In the present lifetime they were brought into a situation where physical circumstances forced them into the fulfillment of their old vow of chastity, and into a life where there was no sensual expression whatsoever. This was karma, unquestionably; but perhaps karma is related to profoundly felt guilt feelings, and to the awareness, at superconscious levels, of a spiritual task unfulfilled.
It is possible, of course, for a frigid wife to be relieved, at the conscious level at least, that her husband makes no sexual demands on her. But in this case the woman was chained nonetheless to a distasteful situation: she was obligated to serve, constantly, a helpless, carping, and petulant cripple. For his part, the man lived almost his entire life in his mind and had no other alternative but to fulfill what had probably been his purpose before: namely, to study along religious and philosophical lines. And certainly at unconscious levels there must have been a deep sense of frustration, for both of them.
Karma in the sexual realm is not only an interpersonal matter, however, involving other people in a retributive drama. It can also be a biological matter, involving only oneself.
Biologically speaking, the karma of sexual excess in one lifetime can result, according to Cayce, in epilepsy in a succeeding life. There is some reason to believe also that cases of arrested mental development in one lifetime are traceable, in some cases at least, to sexual aberrations or excesses in the past.
The strength of the sexual drive differs, of course, with different people; what is normal sex expression for one person would be excess to another. In neurotic and repressed people, what seems to them normal sex expression can in fact be actually subnormal for themselves, and only psychological help can bring them to self-understand and normalcy.
But the point at which actual excesses begin is not so difficult for an individual to determine for himself. Each of us comes to sense this point with regard to food, and each of us can similarly sense it with regard to sex. Moreover, sex excesses almost inevitably involve other people, and any extreme is more likely than not—by mere force of mathematical progression—to cause physical and emotional hurt to others. A good criterion for the degree to which sex can be expressed is always: What effect will my gratification have on another person, or other people? And if the answer is: It will hurt someone else, one’s course of action becomes clear—one refrains.
Thus the reincarnation principle can affect our thinking and conduct with regard to sex in several important ways. It can serve as a deterrent to brutality, exploitation, and selfishness in the sexual realm, because we know that karmic law brings us exactly that which we give to others. It can also serve as a deterrent to excesses of sex because we know that excesses can lead to epilepsy, mental retardation, and other crippling conditions. It can make us doubly thoughtful with regard to the taking—and breaking—of any vows, but especially those having to do with chastity. Vows can be made on mistaken assumptions, on a basis of fear, ignorance, and insecurity, rather than on a basis of truly enlightened insight, and they can easily lead to rigidity and crystallization. But what is worse, broken vows can lead to guilt feelings of the profoundest sort, and the subsequent necessity to make the vow good, sooner or later.
“The love of economy,” Bernard Shaw once remarked, “is the root of all virtue,” and at the earlier stages of virtue, this is unquestionably true. In the later stages, however, one is not deterred from evil only by fear of consequences, or by the realization that it is uneconomical, in the long run, to do wrong.
Finally the sense of personal economy drops out of the proposition, and we come to realize that love itself is in reality the root of all virtue. But this is spiritual love: love of the best welfare of all other living creatures, including those little creatures whose cellular forms provide us with the body we use; love of the great Creative Energy and Beauty which we call God. And sex is evil only when it goes counter to this kind of love.
Excerpt from Many Mansions Part II: Healing The Karma Within You