Many people struggle to reconcile sex with spirituality. The roots of Judeo-Christian culture were not sex-negative, however.
Charles Mopsik, a French scholar of Jewish mysticism, has written that our negative views about sexuality today stem from the idea of a monotheistic God, who is solely masculine with no feminine presence.
Jewish mysticism is rooted in a concept of God being neither male nor female but a union of both (androgynous). Human sexual desire is the divinity's desire to reunite with itself through the sex act. This mystical teaching is that through sex, God experiences itself, and humans experience both sexual and spiritual ecstasy.
And during orgasm, ego identity falls away, and we merge into the spiritual "one flesh" union. Not too different from the concept of ego death during a psychedelic trip.
Margaret Starbird, a Magdalene scholar, has drawn the same conclusion. She believes that the removal of the feminine from teachings about God created a strange vacuum of sexuality in Western religions, in which God is solely masculine. The mainstream religious doctrine of a "virgin son" and "virgin mother" elevated the notion of celibacy and lost the value of sexuality.
The hidden Christian teachings tell a different story. The Gospel of Philip evokes the sense that sex can be a spiritual practice, that it can elevate our consciousness and liberate our spirit. Not surprisingly, this was one of the books banned from the bible by the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.
We are embarking on a shift in consciousness on this planet. It's time we question what we have been taught and make up our own minds about what to believe. We don't need to accept the values of our patriarchal culture.