Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 57
It was used for contraception in the anarcho-communist "free love"
commune of the Bible Perfectionists of the famous Oneida Colony in
upstate New York, circa 1840-1870. Contemporary Tantric teachers tell
pupils to imitate the famous statues of the Black Temple near Benares—the
one with the erotic carvings—and seek a similar immobility; cf. Donne's "We
like sepulchral statues lay." This position can be continued far longer than
any other sexual pastime, and Baba Ram Dass may have been using it on the
famous occasion when, under LSD, he remained in sexual ecstasy for hours
and hours; cf. Donne's "All day the same our postures were."
As for Donne's claim about the souls leaving the bodies—well, ask
anyone who has mastered this art. You will hear even more astonishing
claims. Dr. Bergler's notion that the infant thinks the mother's breast is part
of his own body may not be so fanciful, after all.*
It is remarkable that this poem has been mistaken for some ethereal or
Platonic idealism. Donne's other poetry of that period is explicitly bawdyt
and even here, in The Ecstasy itself, he ends by explicitly rejecting traditional
spiritualization of the love relationship, saying:
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
Bui yet the body is his book.
[Italics mine]
Some readers, acknowledging that there is abundant evidence of a secret
sexual-occult tradition in Europe from the Templars onward, will yet
question that the Tibetan double-lotus sitting position was part of this. If
Donne is not explicit enough, here is his contemporary, the "alchemist"
Thomas Vaughan, hinting at the same secret teaching in his Coelum Terrae
(1650) under the guise of discussing the "First Matter" or "Philosopher's
Stone":
*See the accounts of people who under the influence of marijuana could not tell what
was their own body and what was their lover's, in my Sex and Drugs (Falcon Press, 1987)
**Here are a few tender verses from his To His Mistress Going To Bed:
Your gown's going off, such beauteous state reveals
As when as when from flow'ry meads the hill's shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
he hairy diadem which on you doth grow.
License my roving hands and let them go
Behind, before, above, between, below.
To teach thee, I am naked first. Why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man?