Jagat

A friend of Facebook wrote a status: "I don't believe in sexiness," which elicited a number of comments. In a talk I gave last night here in Rishikesh, one person once again accused me of promoting "free sex": nothing could be further from the truth and indeed it gets tiresome defending oneself against such a shallow understanding of my theology and practice. We are in a world where hypersexualization has vitiated the spiritual potential of erotic love. But sexuality is so fundamental to human life that if we do not understand how to cultivate the sacred in that, we will never truly understand madhura-rasa . This also takes discipline because it is a sādhana . It is pleasurable, of course, because spiritual life IS about the highest pleasure, and the highest pleasure is love, and the highest love is the love of God, which we experience through our human love relations. So I too find it gross when I see a woman flaunting her sexuality, like the movie stars w...

Part I. All in all, on reading this book I expected to come to some more earth-shattering conclusions about celibacy or discover some new facts that might make me adjust my opinions. Rather to my surprise, after reading through more than 400 pages of historical information, I felt rather less enlightened than more. Nevertheless, Abbott's summary of modern developments, celibate movements in the current environment, did resonate with me. She describes, as I occasionally have also on these pages, the malaise in today's society that has grown out of the commodification of sexuality and its use as a tool for commercialization. (Indeed, the growth of sexual liberty seems to be an integral part of the consumer culture.) I also described in an earlier post my horror at the kind of sexual escalation that has developed in youth culture, to a great extent the result of easy accessibility of pornography . Obsessions with the body, bodily appearance, the idealization of sexuality itsel...