Proselytizing for the Brave New World
In his classic dystopian novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley projected a future of human society, based on consumerism socially engineered to technocratic perfection.
One of the prominent features of this world, set in the distant future, was a complete separation of the sexual functions of erotic pleasure from reproduction, which was taken care of by advanced test-tube incubation centers and from-birth indoctrination in consumerist values. Without marriage or any need for attachments, sex was also separated from love in the sense of intense commitment to a single partner and simply a source of recreational pleasure, efficiently enhancing the qualities of life and smoothing social cohesiveness.
Though Huxley himself was rather sanguine about such developments, now it appears that his nightmarish vision is seeking realization. In their popularly acclaimed and controversial book Sex at Dawn, subtitled "How we mate, how we stray, and what it means for modern relationships" (Harper-Collins, 2010), Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha argue on the basis of primatology, anthropology and other evidence that human evolution should follow a course much like the one hypothesized by Huxley, even proselytizing for it with something akin to evangelical fervor.
Ryan and Jetha state that current social attitudes to sexuality and common received wisdom about male and female differences are fraught with misunderstanding, particularly if we examine the nature of our ancestors, both primate and primitive human. Indeed, in the introduction, the authors take pains to state overtly that our human character is only a thin veneer over our essential animal nature, claiming it is a mistake to say we are descended from apes, more correct to say that we are apes.
They point to the malaise in current sexual mores and ask whether this is the way for society to move forward, describing the current state of the marital institution as leading to an "unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark, sea of disappointment" (page 2).
Evolution gone wrong?
The authors' argument is this: About 10,000 years ago, humanity "fell from the garden of Eden" and left the social organization and lifestyle of hunting and foraging that had been its natural state since the beginnings of the race and took to agriculture. From that time, we have followed a social and sexual model that is patriarchal, by which is meant that in agricultural societies, the metaphor of planting seed and so on was applied to human sexual relations, and the male was considered owner of the field, or the woman, and its products, the children. In this model, fatherhood is an important value because it assures family solidarity and thus security in the land-bound agricultural community.
Agricultural societies differed from those of hunter-gatherers ("one-day return hunter-foragers") whose organization seems to have been rather closer to that of the bonobos and chimpanzees, who are genetically our closest relatives in the primate world. In these pre-agricultural societies, women were not Victorian ladies with the kind of loving fidelity that is so prized and championed by romantic idealists. The child rearing and so on that are the glories of motherhood in the family-based social organization are shared by the group in the hunter-gatherer tribe, whose numbers seem to be limited at about 150. Not only mothering, but fathering. By extension, a communal and communistic apportioning of roles seems to be the ethos that governs such tribal communities.
Like our hypersexual ancestors, the bonobos and chimpanzees, the authors argue that pre-agricultural humanity typically shared sexual partners, and the Romantics' much-touted female fidelity was non-existent. Moreover, the genetic patterns that governed our ancestors still remain an integral part of our physical and psychological makeup to this day. The monogamous ethos is thus unnatural and leads to the kinds of undesirable consequences that arise from all repression of natural tendencies -- fracturing, splintering, jealousy, enmity and so on.
So, accepted wisdom about men's and women's differing erotic psychologies, a prejudice found even in Darwin and many other scientists, namely that men tend to seek many partners to spread their genetic material to as many potential breeders as possible, whereas women seek a long-term partner to protect and provide for the offspring, is the prime target the authors wish to debunk. In other words, women are not the coy and wonderful creatures that the Victorian or Romantic idealist envisioned, but something a little more akin to the adolescent male fantasy of the ever-receptive and eager sexual partner.
Now there is much to be appreciated in Ryan and Jetha's argument, which is presented with almost religious conviction, though no definite solutions are promoted. Nevertheless, our problem is this: The ten-thousand year history of changed sexual mores in the human species and its evolutionary effects cannot be totally written off, nor can we expect that in the modern, urban society that has grown out of it there is much possibility of a return to our state "before the fall."
Evolution
Now I personally do not take the rather disingenuous position of the modern-day Vaishnava fundamentalists and Christians, etc., who flail in myopic indignation at the Darwinian fallacy. It is no sin to observe the world and to come to conclusions about how it operates. As far as I am concerned, that does not change the fundamental principle that "life comes from life" or that consciousness precedes matter, even though the mechanics of such an idea may be a little harder to demonstrate. But for the time being let us keep aside debates about evolution and simply accept that we may be better off in a public debate by accepting much of current scientific knowledge, or at least dealing with it on its terms rather than engaging in the dubious endeavor of trying to fight it. We tend to follow Bhaktivinoda Thakur in this department. for he says that thought is progressive.
At least on the microcosmic scale, we are ourselves engaged -- as are all religions -- in an exercise of social engineering of sorts. Religions usually make the effort to explain the human condition on the basis of certain principles which are then applied prescriptively to society as normative. Now that religion has been replaced by science in many minds as providing the explanatory metanarrative for humankind, many of the narratives provided by religious traditions have been jettisoned, and nowhere is this more the case than in the relations between the sexes. Religion for too long has promoted a patriarchal model of social organization that in the present society seems entirely outdated and retrogressive.
Religions are also asking which way forward for humanity, but not in purely physical or psychological terms. The various religious ideologies will survive into the new age, but simply take new forms, as long as they keep their mission of providing solutions for the spiritual needs of humanity at the forefront. The old wine will go into new bottles, but it requires a deep understanding and experience of the current human situation as well as of religion, both in its theoretical and functional aspects, in both its universals and particulars.
We can to some extent control our evolutionary direction; this is what human intelligence permits. In this article, I wish to propose that any argument that states that we have taken a wrong turn evolutionarily speaking and that the solution is to revert to the norms of our primate ancestors and hunter-forager forefathers is disingenuous and should be put into question.
In this case, we ask whether the biological predisposition to a particular behavior, or the social structures that were successful in hunter-gatherer societies of the pre-agricultural age—and which were usurped by it—are going to be adequate or even useful indicators of the way forward in the new, post-agricultural, technological world.
Evidently, we cannot go back, even though we may draw on our experience. In other words, we must look at what the essence of human development is and where the way forward lies. In the case of those who are following Vaishnava dharma or prema-dharma, we ask whether the only benefits of monogamy were the promotion of a patriarchal social model that ignored or marginalized the feminine and in which women and children become the chattels of the males, the atomic family becoming the replacement for tribal organization as a median unit for an ever-increasingly more complex society.
In fact, much of Sex at Dawn ignores the other features of sexual sublimation, etc., pointed out by Freud as being the real motor of "civilization" as well as of its discontents. The kinds of repression religion introduced in order to control the potential anarchy of untrammeled sexual desire is fundamentally rational: it points to the victory of dharma over kāma, whereby kāma can only be fulfilled after passing through the necessary prerequisites of dharma and artha, requirements that appear to be fairly consistent and resilient even in the modern or post-modern world. In other words, there is no free lunch when it comes to sex.
But since these authors are all more or less agreed on the absence of a soul or a real spiritual consideration in their world views, though they may be still concerned with the discontents of the repressiveness in human society, their answers are seriously flawed.
But one thing that must be pointed out is that the problems of sexuality highlighted by Ryan and Jetha are not irrelevant to our religious concerns. Many Hare Krishna devotees adopted the conservative sexual ethos of Vaishnava Hinduism as a reaction to the lowering of restrictions on sexuality in the 60s and 70s. But they did not adjust easily and Western devotees have not shown themselves to be more capable of marital fidelity and parental commitment than their non-believing fellow citizens. It would be well to bear this cruel fact at the forefront of any discussion of the subject by religious idealists.
The Radha Krishna myth and the evolution of love
The Radha-Krishna myth is fairly simple, and yet directly appropriate to the concerns expressed here. Krishna is portrayed as the all-attractive male, whose sexual prowess and success is limitless. He is God in the sense that everything a man could want, he has; he is "full in six opulences." He is the Oriental potentate with a harem that encompasses the globe, the leader of a primal horde to whom all females accrue without competition. He is the sole male. In short, he is the masculine ego apotheosized to infinity.
But although the story stops there at the Rasa Lila in the understanding of most devotees, it is in fact only the pūrva-pakṣa for the second act of the drama, which is most clearly expressed in the Gīta-govinda. The pūrva-pakṣa is expressed in the viśveṣām anurañjanena verse (1.11), in which Radha watches Krishna cavort with cowherd women hanging to his every limb, the very incarnation of śṛṅgāra-rasa, and becomes annoyed that she has been treated as just another of his women.
From there, the drama develops until we have Radha's total victory over Krishna and her feminine immortalization as the svādhīna-bhartṛkā. The Gīta-govinda is a myth, but its purpose is to say: "The collapse of the male ego before the divine feminine is the path to happiness."
On the Sahajiya path, we hold that monogamy, in which the romantic urge is spiritualized through the awareness of conjugal unity as a practice leading to and promoting the highest realms of prema, is the way forward for evolution. Not even the svakīyā or dharmic marriage, which indeed is fertile ground for civilization's discontents. As such we do not feel that marital fidelity is a value that usurps the natural desire to seek a spiritual partner with whom the culture of spiritual love (prema) is given primacy.
In Europe, the romantic notion, as I will discuss in a future article, had its origins in the medieval period. As with most of the other romantic ideals, including that of Radha Krishna, the story is a sad one, as if such an ideal was automatically associated with ultimate sacrifice, disappointment and impossibility. Though on the one hand, the man was edified by the love of a woman and became a better man, introducing an idea which is the optimistic essence of romance, whereby it is love and the feminine that are civilizing forces, not masculine strength, logic or technological superiority, on the other hand it contrasted the ultimate limitations of human love with the perfection of divine love of God.
But such love will be valued inasmuch as it reaches a profound and total unity that transcends its human limitations, where it is not only a spiritual experience in itself, but a doorway to innate understanding of the Absolute. In this, the profound difference between mere sexuality and romantic love (for want of a better word) is highlighted.
Sex at Dawn, like Huxley's dystopia, is a profoundly anti-romantic treatise, as are most atheisms. This is because there is no knowledge of the soul, and physical, mental and intellectual satisfactions alone are the rule of the day. Religion or spirituality is seen as being of purely subjective value, not in itself incorrect, but incorrect only due to its marginalization of the subjective and the role of the idea.
The way forward
When we look at the way forward, we must be careful to examine what is of value and what not. It is not that the romantic ideal has been attempted and found wanting, it is that it has not been properly understood or fully attempted. Civilization's discontents have been noted, but civilization's real meaning has not been plumbed.
The fact is that we, not even men, do not pine for numerous sexual partners: we pine for the One soul-mate. If we do not find a human soul-mate, we look for it in either God or a pet dog.
Ryan and Jetha have no discussion of love and its perfection. It talks of an attitude, patriarchy, associated with social forms that developed with the agricultural society. But the underlying craving for spiritual intimacy with a "soul mate" appears to be too religious, too mythical and impractical a psychological attitude. But we ask the question whether bonobos or primitive hunter-gatherer jungle tribes are to be the model on which the future of human behavior is to be constructed.
On page 236 of their book, the authors publish a revealing chart that says bonobos and chimpanzees, which both have frequent sexual encounters through the day with various partners, have average copulation times lasting 15 and 7 seconds respectively. The human average, according to this chart, is between 4-7 minutes. In other words, the average human sexual encounter lasts only that long before being obstructed by the male orgasm.
This is not "expertise" in action. Nor is it a sign of fulfilled sexuality. But most of all, it is a sign of a failure of love. Is it any wonder that most people are bored or frustrated with their love lives? So they take to unnecessary and artificial chemical means like Viagra to compensate -- hardly a satisfactory solution, and certainly not a natural one.
Anyone who has experienced meditative and ecstatic devotional lovemaking that lasts for hours is unlikely to have any questions about the costs and benefits of seminal retention. But stated in ways that a spiritual practitioner will understand, let it be said that 4-7 minutes of lovemaking is approximately equivalent to 4-7 minutes of meditation or kirtana, a pretty pitiful attainment for an activity that is supposed to provide so much meaning and causes so much anxiety.
Our fundamental philosophical, psychological or behavioral problem is to recognize the difference between sexuality and love kāma and prema, even though they may externally take a similar form. premaiva gopa-rāmāṇāṁ kāma ity agamat prathām.
One of the prominent features of this world, set in the distant future, was a complete separation of the sexual functions of erotic pleasure from reproduction, which was taken care of by advanced test-tube incubation centers and from-birth indoctrination in consumerist values. Without marriage or any need for attachments, sex was also separated from love in the sense of intense commitment to a single partner and simply a source of recreational pleasure, efficiently enhancing the qualities of life and smoothing social cohesiveness.
Though Huxley himself was rather sanguine about such developments, now it appears that his nightmarish vision is seeking realization. In their popularly acclaimed and controversial book Sex at Dawn, subtitled "How we mate, how we stray, and what it means for modern relationships" (Harper-Collins, 2010), Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha argue on the basis of primatology, anthropology and other evidence that human evolution should follow a course much like the one hypothesized by Huxley, even proselytizing for it with something akin to evangelical fervor.
Ryan and Jetha state that current social attitudes to sexuality and common received wisdom about male and female differences are fraught with misunderstanding, particularly if we examine the nature of our ancestors, both primate and primitive human. Indeed, in the introduction, the authors take pains to state overtly that our human character is only a thin veneer over our essential animal nature, claiming it is a mistake to say we are descended from apes, more correct to say that we are apes.
They point to the malaise in current sexual mores and ask whether this is the way for society to move forward, describing the current state of the marital institution as leading to an "unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark, sea of disappointment" (page 2).
Evolution gone wrong?
The authors' argument is this: About 10,000 years ago, humanity "fell from the garden of Eden" and left the social organization and lifestyle of hunting and foraging that had been its natural state since the beginnings of the race and took to agriculture. From that time, we have followed a social and sexual model that is patriarchal, by which is meant that in agricultural societies, the metaphor of planting seed and so on was applied to human sexual relations, and the male was considered owner of the field, or the woman, and its products, the children. In this model, fatherhood is an important value because it assures family solidarity and thus security in the land-bound agricultural community.
Agricultural societies differed from those of hunter-gatherers ("one-day return hunter-foragers") whose organization seems to have been rather closer to that of the bonobos and chimpanzees, who are genetically our closest relatives in the primate world. In these pre-agricultural societies, women were not Victorian ladies with the kind of loving fidelity that is so prized and championed by romantic idealists. The child rearing and so on that are the glories of motherhood in the family-based social organization are shared by the group in the hunter-gatherer tribe, whose numbers seem to be limited at about 150. Not only mothering, but fathering. By extension, a communal and communistic apportioning of roles seems to be the ethos that governs such tribal communities.
Like our hypersexual ancestors, the bonobos and chimpanzees, the authors argue that pre-agricultural humanity typically shared sexual partners, and the Romantics' much-touted female fidelity was non-existent. Moreover, the genetic patterns that governed our ancestors still remain an integral part of our physical and psychological makeup to this day. The monogamous ethos is thus unnatural and leads to the kinds of undesirable consequences that arise from all repression of natural tendencies -- fracturing, splintering, jealousy, enmity and so on.
So, accepted wisdom about men's and women's differing erotic psychologies, a prejudice found even in Darwin and many other scientists, namely that men tend to seek many partners to spread their genetic material to as many potential breeders as possible, whereas women seek a long-term partner to protect and provide for the offspring, is the prime target the authors wish to debunk. In other words, women are not the coy and wonderful creatures that the Victorian or Romantic idealist envisioned, but something a little more akin to the adolescent male fantasy of the ever-receptive and eager sexual partner.
We're being misled and misinformed by an unfounded yet constantly repeated mantra about the naturalness of wedded bliss, female sexual reticence, and happily-ever-after sexual monogamy—a narrative pitting man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations, snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment... "the tyranny of two."The sociological role of such a freer sexuality is also defended. Thomas Hobbes' famous description of prehistoric or primitive human life as full of the danger of violent death, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" is extensively repudiated.
Now there is much to be appreciated in Ryan and Jetha's argument, which is presented with almost religious conviction, though no definite solutions are promoted. Nevertheless, our problem is this: The ten-thousand year history of changed sexual mores in the human species and its evolutionary effects cannot be totally written off, nor can we expect that in the modern, urban society that has grown out of it there is much possibility of a return to our state "before the fall."
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| Bonobo ape. Found only in a shrinking patch of forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this endangered species relies mostly on fruit and plant vegetation. |
Evolution
Now I personally do not take the rather disingenuous position of the modern-day Vaishnava fundamentalists and Christians, etc., who flail in myopic indignation at the Darwinian fallacy. It is no sin to observe the world and to come to conclusions about how it operates. As far as I am concerned, that does not change the fundamental principle that "life comes from life" or that consciousness precedes matter, even though the mechanics of such an idea may be a little harder to demonstrate. But for the time being let us keep aside debates about evolution and simply accept that we may be better off in a public debate by accepting much of current scientific knowledge, or at least dealing with it on its terms rather than engaging in the dubious endeavor of trying to fight it. We tend to follow Bhaktivinoda Thakur in this department. for he says that thought is progressive.
At least on the microcosmic scale, we are ourselves engaged -- as are all religions -- in an exercise of social engineering of sorts. Religions usually make the effort to explain the human condition on the basis of certain principles which are then applied prescriptively to society as normative. Now that religion has been replaced by science in many minds as providing the explanatory metanarrative for humankind, many of the narratives provided by religious traditions have been jettisoned, and nowhere is this more the case than in the relations between the sexes. Religion for too long has promoted a patriarchal model of social organization that in the present society seems entirely outdated and retrogressive.
Religions are also asking which way forward for humanity, but not in purely physical or psychological terms. The various religious ideologies will survive into the new age, but simply take new forms, as long as they keep their mission of providing solutions for the spiritual needs of humanity at the forefront. The old wine will go into new bottles, but it requires a deep understanding and experience of the current human situation as well as of religion, both in its theoretical and functional aspects, in both its universals and particulars.
We can to some extent control our evolutionary direction; this is what human intelligence permits. In this article, I wish to propose that any argument that states that we have taken a wrong turn evolutionarily speaking and that the solution is to revert to the norms of our primate ancestors and hunter-forager forefathers is disingenuous and should be put into question.
In this case, we ask whether the biological predisposition to a particular behavior, or the social structures that were successful in hunter-gatherer societies of the pre-agricultural age—and which were usurped by it—are going to be adequate or even useful indicators of the way forward in the new, post-agricultural, technological world.
Evidently, we cannot go back, even though we may draw on our experience. In other words, we must look at what the essence of human development is and where the way forward lies. In the case of those who are following Vaishnava dharma or prema-dharma, we ask whether the only benefits of monogamy were the promotion of a patriarchal social model that ignored or marginalized the feminine and in which women and children become the chattels of the males, the atomic family becoming the replacement for tribal organization as a median unit for an ever-increasingly more complex society.
In fact, much of Sex at Dawn ignores the other features of sexual sublimation, etc., pointed out by Freud as being the real motor of "civilization" as well as of its discontents. The kinds of repression religion introduced in order to control the potential anarchy of untrammeled sexual desire is fundamentally rational: it points to the victory of dharma over kāma, whereby kāma can only be fulfilled after passing through the necessary prerequisites of dharma and artha, requirements that appear to be fairly consistent and resilient even in the modern or post-modern world. In other words, there is no free lunch when it comes to sex.
But since these authors are all more or less agreed on the absence of a soul or a real spiritual consideration in their world views, though they may be still concerned with the discontents of the repressiveness in human society, their answers are seriously flawed.
But one thing that must be pointed out is that the problems of sexuality highlighted by Ryan and Jetha are not irrelevant to our religious concerns. Many Hare Krishna devotees adopted the conservative sexual ethos of Vaishnava Hinduism as a reaction to the lowering of restrictions on sexuality in the 60s and 70s. But they did not adjust easily and Western devotees have not shown themselves to be more capable of marital fidelity and parental commitment than their non-believing fellow citizens. It would be well to bear this cruel fact at the forefront of any discussion of the subject by religious idealists.
The Radha Krishna myth and the evolution of love
The Radha-Krishna myth is fairly simple, and yet directly appropriate to the concerns expressed here. Krishna is portrayed as the all-attractive male, whose sexual prowess and success is limitless. He is God in the sense that everything a man could want, he has; he is "full in six opulences." He is the Oriental potentate with a harem that encompasses the globe, the leader of a primal horde to whom all females accrue without competition. He is the sole male. In short, he is the masculine ego apotheosized to infinity.
But although the story stops there at the Rasa Lila in the understanding of most devotees, it is in fact only the pūrva-pakṣa for the second act of the drama, which is most clearly expressed in the Gīta-govinda. The pūrva-pakṣa is expressed in the viśveṣām anurañjanena verse (1.11), in which Radha watches Krishna cavort with cowherd women hanging to his every limb, the very incarnation of śṛṅgāra-rasa, and becomes annoyed that she has been treated as just another of his women.
From there, the drama develops until we have Radha's total victory over Krishna and her feminine immortalization as the svādhīna-bhartṛkā. The Gīta-govinda is a myth, but its purpose is to say: "The collapse of the male ego before the divine feminine is the path to happiness."
On the Sahajiya path, we hold that monogamy, in which the romantic urge is spiritualized through the awareness of conjugal unity as a practice leading to and promoting the highest realms of prema, is the way forward for evolution. Not even the svakīyā or dharmic marriage, which indeed is fertile ground for civilization's discontents. As such we do not feel that marital fidelity is a value that usurps the natural desire to seek a spiritual partner with whom the culture of spiritual love (prema) is given primacy.
In Europe, the romantic notion, as I will discuss in a future article, had its origins in the medieval period. As with most of the other romantic ideals, including that of Radha Krishna, the story is a sad one, as if such an ideal was automatically associated with ultimate sacrifice, disappointment and impossibility. Though on the one hand, the man was edified by the love of a woman and became a better man, introducing an idea which is the optimistic essence of romance, whereby it is love and the feminine that are civilizing forces, not masculine strength, logic or technological superiority, on the other hand it contrasted the ultimate limitations of human love with the perfection of divine love of God.
But such love will be valued inasmuch as it reaches a profound and total unity that transcends its human limitations, where it is not only a spiritual experience in itself, but a doorway to innate understanding of the Absolute. In this, the profound difference between mere sexuality and romantic love (for want of a better word) is highlighted.
Sex at Dawn, like Huxley's dystopia, is a profoundly anti-romantic treatise, as are most atheisms. This is because there is no knowledge of the soul, and physical, mental and intellectual satisfactions alone are the rule of the day. Religion or spirituality is seen as being of purely subjective value, not in itself incorrect, but incorrect only due to its marginalization of the subjective and the role of the idea.
The way forward
When we look at the way forward, we must be careful to examine what is of value and what not. It is not that the romantic ideal has been attempted and found wanting, it is that it has not been properly understood or fully attempted. Civilization's discontents have been noted, but civilization's real meaning has not been plumbed.
The fact is that we, not even men, do not pine for numerous sexual partners: we pine for the One soul-mate. If we do not find a human soul-mate, we look for it in either God or a pet dog.
Ryan and Jetha have no discussion of love and its perfection. It talks of an attitude, patriarchy, associated with social forms that developed with the agricultural society. But the underlying craving for spiritual intimacy with a "soul mate" appears to be too religious, too mythical and impractical a psychological attitude. But we ask the question whether bonobos or primitive hunter-gatherer jungle tribes are to be the model on which the future of human behavior is to be constructed.
On page 236 of their book, the authors publish a revealing chart that says bonobos and chimpanzees, which both have frequent sexual encounters through the day with various partners, have average copulation times lasting 15 and 7 seconds respectively. The human average, according to this chart, is between 4-7 minutes. In other words, the average human sexual encounter lasts only that long before being obstructed by the male orgasm.
This is not "expertise" in action. Nor is it a sign of fulfilled sexuality. But most of all, it is a sign of a failure of love. Is it any wonder that most people are bored or frustrated with their love lives? So they take to unnecessary and artificial chemical means like Viagra to compensate -- hardly a satisfactory solution, and certainly not a natural one.
Anyone who has experienced meditative and ecstatic devotional lovemaking that lasts for hours is unlikely to have any questions about the costs and benefits of seminal retention. But stated in ways that a spiritual practitioner will understand, let it be said that 4-7 minutes of lovemaking is approximately equivalent to 4-7 minutes of meditation or kirtana, a pretty pitiful attainment for an activity that is supposed to provide so much meaning and causes so much anxiety.
Our fundamental philosophical, psychological or behavioral problem is to recognize the difference between sexuality and love kāma and prema, even though they may externally take a similar form. premaiva gopa-rāmāṇāṁ kāma ity agamat prathām.
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