Sex provides most men and women with both intense pleasure and heart-wrenching pain. Pleasure because sex allows a deep dissolution of boundaries, opening your body and heart to be filled with love and energetic delight. Pain because, as your boundaries open, your heart is exposed, and few people know how to give their love as a vulnerable gift -- which is the only way to offer yourself sexually that doesn't create suffering.

Many men in America today -- the so-called evolved men, the new-age men -- are heart wimps. They have grown beyond the macho rigidity of their fathers but have yet to grow through their fear, to face their deaths fully and to discover the purpose of their lives. They are hesitant and ambiguous. They can't feel the depths of their consciousness and don't know where they are going, so they can't take their lovers, sexually or spiritually. Most women today feel 'untaken' by their men, unravished to God by their men's relentless, forceful, and exquisitely sensitive loving.

Many women in America today, the independent women who have learned to love themselves rather than look for love elsewhere, are deeply unfulfilled. Their bodies are angular with a mission adopted to cover and hide yearning hearts. Distrustful of men's love -- having experienced betrayal or simply inadequate men who are unable to open their women's hearts and bodies to God through deep sex and committed daily loving -- many modern women are afraid to surrender, open, and trust love to live through them. Because they are unable to open fully, divine love cannot enter them, claim them, take their hearts to God and lift their bodies as offerings of devotion. And so they settle for good food, nice homes, and relationships that leave them wanting more, wanting deeper, weeping inside, acting self-reliant on the outside.

Modern American culture has moved from macho men to sensitive men, from submissive housewives to career women. And though nobody wants to go backward to old sex roles, nobody is God-blissfully happy either. Something is still missing. The heart's deepest desire remains unfulfilled. Today's more balanced men and women are still dissatisfied, and thus another step is beginning to take place, beyond old-fashioned, narrowly defined limits and also beyond modern financial, social, and political equality.

American sexuality is in a transition phase. A dissatisfying arrangement of false characters populates the cultural cutting edge: women who have betrayed their own hearts' desire by protecting themselves in tense-body forts of independence, and men who have lost touch with the clarity of consciousness that cuts through every moment to reveal their hearts' deepest truths. Relationships are safe, respectful, and often boring.

Sex between so-called spiritually evolved men and women often seems like a session between therapists, each partner discussing needs and feelings in a civilized fashion, waiting for permission to bodily yield as expressions of their greatest impulse: to offer themselves so fully that they are gone in the giving. And even when sex is infinitely loving, what happens after great sex? How can a habitually heart-protected woman and a man who is afraid to murder her open in love's obliteration sustain love's bliss throughout the day?