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Sex that makes the earth move
Jenny Wade believes sex really is a religious experience.
The Marin psychologist has examined scores of people who say they literally see the face of God on their way to orgasm.
Wade, who says she, too, has had out-of-this-world sex, details her study in a new book, “Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil” (Paraview Pocket Books, $14).
While no one reported spotting Jesus in the bedroom, some said the Holy Spirit showed up during foreplay.
Some experts, though, insist such experiences are caused by biological reactions, not the spiritual world. But Wade and her 91 subjects — men and women — say they have experienced spiritual states found in the traditions of shamanism, yoga, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
For one woman, “The entire room went completely blank,” Wade says. “She could see nothing. Then she heard this vast crack, as though the Earth had split open and she could see the primordial sea. Undulating out of these big waves was this huge sea serpent.”
Usually, the spiritually enthralled don’t miss a lovemaking beat, she says. (Their partners, though, might be a little shaken by the sudden screams of ecstasy.) Most of her subjects were reluctant to tell their partners, for obvious reasons.
What’s actually happening has nothing to do with the heavens, but a person’s brain, says William Fitzgerald, a San Jose sex therapist and founder of www.sexdoc.com. He has heard patients tell of such experiences in his 20-year career.
“When people are sexually excited in general, and when they have an orgasm, in particular, they stimulate their pituitary gland,” he says. That, in turn, triggers morphine-like endorphins, “which cause people to think that sex is a somewhat transcendent experience.”
Such states can also be created by hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, or hypoglycemia, low blood sugar.
“People feel like it’s a spiritual, religious experience: `I saw shimmering waves of gold,’ ” Fitzgerald says. “In fact, it can be explained by lack of blood sugar or hypoxia.”
Whatever the cause, says Guy Albert, a 43-year-old Ukiah child counselor who was one of Wade’s subjects, the experience is real. He has repeatedly seen visions of his little sister, an angelic figure who died when he was 10 years old, and a blissful white light.
It’s a “sensation that I’m leaving my body and I’m going somewhere,” Albert says. “What happens in the brain, happens in the brain. I’m a believer in experience.”
One woman, a devotee of paganism, converted to Christianity after “transcendent sex,” Wade says. She even enrolled in a school of theology and plans to become a minister.
“These are people who are atheists, agnostics or hard-core materialists,” Wade says. “They don’t believe in the supernatural phenomenon.”
Some people entered into these states during one-night stands; others while in long-term marriages. It can be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, or a regular occurrence, she says.
Wade, 52, has experienced this state many times. She says she been transported to another place, another room. Other times, she says, she encounters a “brilliant white light.”
It’s not always a pleasant journey. Some subjects reported enduring “past-life” deaths and other grim scenarios.
Regardless of the cause, no one is ever the same, she says. People report to having more compassion for others and not fearing death anymore.
“There is more to life than just what appears in front of us,” Albert says. “We spend too much time thinking about ourselves in this ordinary dimension of existence. There is so much more to our existence and life than what we perceive.”
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