Commonly Asked Questions
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12. What's the difference between the physical pleasure of sex and the pleasure of feeling love? Chia: Your pleasure is limited only by your level of consciousness. The difference between whole body orgasm and ejaculatory orgasm is the difference between human and animal love. The animal frantically ejects his energies. The higher man responsibly conserves vital energy and changes it to love. The truly free and wise man ever restores himself and his partner. This supreme art is his duty, privilege and joy. The purest pleasure is far beyond any sensory feeling perceived through our emotions or intellect. When you cultivate your original spirit, your delicate sense of subtle energy flows as well as your physical sensations are a quantum leap beyond what most people accept as pleasure. The quality of your feeling determines the quality of energy you generate and absorb. If your desires are selfishly erotic, the energy may temporarily heighten your animal vitality but will not rise and open the higher genius of your heart, mind, and spirit. These principles apply universally, but the act of love is particularly momentous for a human being. It involves one's entire destiny. The energy of every act and thought is preserved: one who thinks egotistically will find nothing but egotism from others. Another finds love everywhere because he unfailingly brings it within. When you raise your sexual seed-essence to a high level of spiritual intention, it becomes a light-essence, or light seed that illuminates your path through life and beyond. This is the Taoist enlightenment taught in the higher levels of meditation. 13. If the goal is to build up one's sexual energy, what's the harm of sleeping with a lot of different women (or men) to increase your ching chi? Chia: The goal is not to build up one's sexual energy—it is to transform raw sexual energy into a refined subtle energy. Sex is only one means of doing that. Promiscuity can easily lower your energy if you choose partners with moral or physical weakness. If you lie with degenerates, it may hurt you, in that you can temporarily acquire your partner's vileness. By exchanging subtle energy, you actually absorb the other's substance. You become the other person and assume new karmic burdens. This is why old couples resemble each other so closely: they have exchanged so much energy that they are made of the same life-stuff. This practice accelerates this union, but elevates it to a higher level of spiritual experience.