This exploration did not begin as a spiritual search. It began with curiosity about a physical sensation — something very close to orgasm, appearing in meditation-like states. What I eventually discovered was that pleasure as signal, not temptation, would transform my entire approach to practice.
A Childhood Suspicion of Pleasure
Like many people raised in Western societies of my generation, I grew up with a religious education shaped by Judeo-Christian ideas. One of its messages was that pleasure — especially sexual pleasure — was morally suspicious.
I later abandoned religion altogether when I discovered how closely the official church had supported a dictatorship. That experience exposed, at least for me, the political and intellectual fragility of religious authority.
Yet even after rejecting religion, a residue remained: the unexamined assumption that pleasure and spirituality belonged to incompatible worlds.
An Unexpected Collision
For a long time this contradiction did not matter, because together with religion I had also discarded the very notion of spirituality. I saw it as little more than another conceptual trap.
Then, unexpectedly, my own experience began to lead me in that direction.
At first my exploration was driven simply by curiosity about a bodily phenomenon. The investigation was naturally encouraged by the extraordinary pleasure the sensation produced. But gradually the questions changed. My curiosity drifted toward much older questions: what am I, where do I come from, what is this experience I call myself.
These are questions traditionally monopolized by religion, and for that reason I had always considered them irrelevant. Finding myself confronted with them again was disconcerting.
Pleasure as Motivation
At that stage the practice still revolved around pleasure.
During the period of tantric union, what this meant in practical terms was that I was having extraordinary daily sexual experiences with a woman. Later, when the practice became solitary, the intensity increased even further. Sexual pleasure blended with other powerful sensations—love, joy, emotional warmth.
From the outside it might have looked like an extremely elaborate form of masturbation.
Which made the growing presence of spiritual curiosity even more puzzling — and, for someone carrying religious residue, vaguely suspicious.
Pleasure as Signal, Not Temptation
This is where I had to unlearn my conditioning.
Instead of seeing pleasure as a distraction or a temptation to indulge, I began to view it as a physiological signal — the body indicating that the process was moving in a productive direction.
In that sense, pleasure was not the goal of the practice. It was more like a by-product of the body reorganizing itself. A feedback mechanism, not a trap.
This reframing was essential. Without it, I would have constantly fought against the very current carrying me forward. The religious view of pleasure as sin — something to resist, overcome, or feel guilty about — would have turned every session into an internal conflict.
For practitioners who carry this cultural baggage, recognizing pleasure as signal may be one of the most important shifts they can make.
The Changing Texture of Pleasure
Another change soon became obvious.
Experiencing overwhelming pleasure occasionally is very different from experiencing it every day. Habituation inevitably sets in. What once felt extraordinary gradually becomes familiar.
But something deeper was also happening. The pleasurable phase of the practice seemed to contain the seeds of its own transformation.
Obstacles and Flow
Over time it became increasingly clear to me that the waves of pleasure appeared whenever some obstacle in the internal flow of sensation was reduced or removed.
In the early stages everything felt blocked. Each small opening produced an intense surge of pleasure, sometimes almost orgasmic.
Later the situation reversed. Instead of a landscape dominated by darkness with occasional points of light, it began to resemble a field of light punctuated by a few remaining dark spots—the last obstacles, gradually shrinking.
As that happened, the peaks of pleasure became less dramatic. Not because something was lost, but because there was less resistance left to dissolve.
From Orgasm to Bliss
The intense orgasmic surges slowly faded. What remained was something quieter.
No longer sexual pleasure, nor the emotional excitement of love or joy, but a softer and more continuous quality of experience—something that could perhaps be described with the word bliss.
A gentle background presence rather than an overwhelming peak.
Instead of explosive episodes, there was a subtle sense of permeation: the body, and even the surrounding perceptual space, seemed quietly saturated with this calm intensity.
Conclusion
This seems to be where the trajectory leads. The violent orgasms disappear, replaced by something softer — a bliss that diffuses through the body and the surrounding perceptual field.
With no remaining points of tension to capture attention, the field becomes continuous, without clear boundaries or form. What once demanded attention now simply remains present, quietly permeating everything.
At that point the discursive mind — which had been guiding the process almost automatically — finally comes to rest.
None of this would have been accessible if I had treated pleasure as the enemy.
Leave a Reply