Neurobliss: Sex & Meditation

Up until eight years ago, neuroscience didn’t have much to say in regards to orgasmic pleasure, seeing it as too subjective a field for objective data collection to take place. Times have changed though. According to recent studies, the brain’s right hemisphere appears to be inextricably correlated with sex, particularly the right prefrontal cortex which lights up during orgasm.

This was an initially strange find since scientists traditionally believed pleasure to be associated only with left-hemispheric processes as it was already established to be more active among people free of depression, when remembering happy memories, whilst thinking about loving someone, and for those enduring episodes of manic grandiosity. Coincidentally, Tibetan Buddhist monks, while meditating, generate large spikes in the left prefrontal cortex. Feel free to let your mind free-associate about left hand and right hand paths at this moment…

Nadia Webb, a practicing neuropsychologist at the Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, explains that a few stables exist in the experiencing of bliss, which include a diminishment of self-consciousness, a shift in one’s bodily perceptions, and a decreased sense of pain. Anyone who’s experienced an ecstatic awakening can most certainly attest to this yet, unfortunately, these tend to be fleetingly ephemeral moments.

The typical cognitive default of the ego is to perpetually fabricate consistent stories about our relationship between ourselves and the world which, in essence, creates, and furthermore seeks to substantiate, a veil of repetitive, friction-provoking thoughtforms. This is where meditation can help us.

Used as a tool, meditation offers relief from this self-preoccupation by allowing the individual to eventually realize that, funnily enough, there is no individual self; the goal is to progressively create a space between the identification of one's sense of self with the body or mind until you eventually find yourself in the eternal space of I Am consciousness, of pure unadulterated awareness. In practice, meditation reduces the need to continually judge, plan, compare, and self-scrutinize while increasing your awareness of thoughts and feelings without allowing them to control you.

Whether you choose the sex or meditation route, these are but a few of the innumerable ways in which to liberate one’s consciousness from the stranglehold of the mundane so as to ultimately awaken to the deep sense of awe that is the universe.

Image by Studiobaker, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing