For the past two decades, I have been learning that it’s all right not to do everything people expect of you. This idea has been positively liberating for me. The way we were raised—the way our institutions raised us, I mean—trained us to think it’s our job to be correct in everything we do. Others’ approval of our actions implies success. 

But it doesn’t. Do you see? We can have our own thoughts and inner lives. To know who we are we must seek to unknow. We can do as we please if we only learn not to care so much about what people think. In my Pentecostal childhood, I was taught to be perfect, yet later, as a teenager in my Baptist upbringing, I was required to be good. Therefore, in my meditation mantra, one phrase unknows this: “To be enlightened. Not to be good or perfect, but to be whole.”

We hear a lot about wholeness these days. My book, The Quest, posits that the Holy Grail of the Quest is wholeness. I believe enlightenment is wholeness. The treasure of the quest is that wholeness occurs when the four essentials of self integrate as one. This concept is challenging to grasp- let me simplify it. I call it my Theory of Being. And it is an easier way to be than what most of us have been taught. 

Here are the basic principles of my Theory of Being. 

1. We have four aspects of being: Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual.
2. We have an essential for each aspect. If we get to know ourselves, we can identify those four essentials. My essentials are Sensuality, Curiosity, Communion, and Freedom. The essentials will be different for everyone.
3. Our quest is to identify and cultivate people, places, memories, and events that integrate all four essentials. When integration happens, we begin to experience wholeness.
4. It is much easier to BE when we pursue and experience wholeness rather than goodness or perfection. 

Here is an example you won’t hear every day. Every orgasm has the potential to be a whole-being experience. Think of those glorious moments—of perfect wholeness, of yourself in perfect unity, of expanded awareness that transcends the split between body, mind, soul, and spirit and integrates all your parts (essentials) in ecstatic consciousness. 

When you bring that awareness to your sexual practice, you can become directly conscious of—connected to—that wholeness that continuously flows through you. Sex is an opportunity to experience and enjoy wholeness.

Life becomes easier when we begin filling a significant percentage of our lives with people, places, memories, and events that trigger and activate our essentials.