Eros Ascending: The Life-Transforming Power of Sacred Sexuality

by John Maxwell Taylor

***FINALIST, USA Best Books 2010 Awards – Spirituality & Relationships

The quest for lasting love is one of life’s essential pursuits, in some ways the most essential. But it’s also a quest that’s impossible to separate from spiritual and sexual needs. In Eros Ascending, author John Maxwell Taylor offers a wide-ranging study of sexual dysfunction in society and explains how healthy sexuality can be an entryway to universal love and higher consciousness. Based on Taylor’s twenty-three-year experience with Taoist practices, the book presents an engaging analysis of love, relationships, and sexuality from spiritual, romantic, and sexual perspectives. Taylor melds essential ideas by Jung, Gurdjieff, and Taoist Master Mantak Chia with science, biology, spiritual tradition, and current popular culture to shed new light on this eternal yet misunderstood subject. Not just for couples, the book is equally useful for single people who want to understand the methods for “learning to love yourself ” in preparation for a fulfilling, long-term relationship. Taylor draws on his eclectic background as a successful playwright, composer, actor, and musician in this persuasive plan for converting ordinary sexual energy into food for the soul.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Sexuality, Spirituality, Psychology, Nonfiction, Health

418 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 13, 2009

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a bit of a marathon to get through this book. It has a conversational, storytelling style, and at times I found it hard to extract a tangible practical knowledge from this. Which is a bit of a shame, because the author is clearly full of wisdom and experience and would be a great person to learn from. The book is a meandering journey through a plenitude of ponderables, which does inform enough to purvey insight, and also provides some illumination to initiate one onto new paths to further explore and study. The author is kind of an “omnist”, in that he seems to recognise and draw from all religious and spiritual traditions and somehow merges seemingly incongruent philosophies, particularly about sex and eroticism, into a complementary whole. This might not be to some peoples tastes in this very segregational and denominational world, and perhaps even a bit of a blasphemy in some circles, but I tended to like his sentiments and underlying contention of universality. After all we do all live in (a yellow submarine?) the same divine, cosmic, eternal, material and temporal existence, there are just multiple ways that it has been expressed, interpreted, and attempted to be explained over the Millenia, so why can’t it all be tied together and unified in some way?
That possibly contentious question aside, I think the main message of the book is that an alignment of sexuality and spirituality is possible, and indeed, necessary for a person, and the world for that matter to achieve a greater enlightenment, not to mention to have more fun and enjoyment in the sack…

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book, but it seemed a bit disjointed to me. It was almost like the book was a collection of 2-3 page separate essays with minimal transition between them.

People more into ideas and some of the more spiritual and "woo woo" elements of sexuality will enjoy the book far more than those who are looking for more concrete techniques.

[Nathalie]

This book is painfully heteronormative, sexist, has a condescending tone and radiates bad energy. Everything a truly “spiritual” text should stay far away from in my opinion.

[Anca Isailă · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book for me so far!