Energy and Eros: Teachings on the Art of Love by James N. Powell

Starting from Foucault's premise that sexuality, culturally specific thinking about sex, deeply influences how sex is actually practiced in various societies, this book describes how--in some Western, Eastern, and Oceanic cultures--religious thought has influenced sex. The chapters on Western, Indian, Tantric, and Chinese Taoist approaches are descriptive rather than prescriptive, with the author first presenting and then critiquing them.

The author saves the "how-to" dimension for the final chapter, when discussing teachings derived from observing romance in some South Pacific cultures. It was in the book's Japanese translation, however, that these teachings really caught fire as a new member of the already popular Slowness Movement.

When Buddhist scholar Hiroyuki Itsuki, Japan's most popular writer, read Energy and Eros and wrote two volumes based on it, the "polynesian love" craze was born in Japan. Celebrities began promoting this way of slow loving, and the head of Japan's family planning association, Kunio Kitamura, chimed in, recommending it to Japanese couples for more meaning on the mattress. In Kitamura's words, "Polynesian sex. . . .involves taking a long time . . .and. . . allows energy in the form of weak electromagnetic waves, similar to the concept of ki to flow, building up to create large waves that encompass the entire body and bring enormous pleasure and happiness."

Both Itsuki and Kitamura recognized, as did much later, Peggy Orenstein, that contemporary sexuality has been appropriated by the porn industry: and that subsequently relations between lovers have become dictated and devalued by the tone and imagery pumped into the media by that industry. Itsuki and Kitamura, however, also recognized in the teachings on South Seas sexuality as presented in Energy and Eros, a tranquil, natural, and physically and spiritually passionate alternative: an antidote to the increasing acceleration in every realm of human life. This alternative is based upon the truth of accomplishing more by doing less. It is not surprising that the Japanese were the ones to fully appreciate these teachings, because their culture has been deeply influenced by the Chinese concept of wu wei "effortless action," which inspired for instance judo, literally the "easy way." Just as the author critiques some aspects of Tantra and Taoist sexuality, after Itsuki and Kitomura's writings encouraged lovers to embrace the South Seas teachings in Energy and Eros, this volume became more than a mere book. It became a quiet rebellion against digitally delivered, dehumanizing, and hyper-imagistic sexual culture.

In the book's conclusion, Powell pulls the rug out from under the reader, which is where the reveal takes place. This happens in the last four sentences. The inactive and empty vacuum state of quantum physics, Powell states, contains within its emptiness all the excited states of "matter." In other words that vacuity is a totality. He then goes on to say that it should not surprise us that the god Shiva, the theological personification of that vacuity, a formless state of eternal, shoreless consciousness, enjoys simultaneously all the bliss of the 186 thousand sexual forms. This explains why some yogis (and yoginis), even though celibate, are aglow with such beatific smiles.