Jagat

It is true that to speak on dovetailing sexuality for bhakti to an orthodox devotional audience is inviting opprobrium. People have already (as I suspected they would) complained to other senior Vaishnavas about me. People hear the word "sex" and they immediately respond with their deepest saṁskāras . Sex is the desire for love manifest in the human body. Love is the desire for giving and receiving the pleasure of union. Union with the non-physical normally does not precede union on the physical plane. On the other hand, to think that experience of sexual union on the physical plane without spiritual maturity has ultimate benefit is a pipe dream. Union with God based on disgust with the material world is not love. It is mukti . The human organism has many levels. The foolish think they can reach the spirit and the soul without first purifying the gross anna-maya body, the prāṇa body, the mental body, the vijñāna body, and the ānanda-maya body. Similarly the ex...

I have been promising for some time a review of A History of Celibacy by Elizabeth Abbott . I did not do so primarily because I had not finished it and the book is fairly complex in its description of the varieties of celibacy, so I have been trying to come to some conclusion about what to make of it. Indeed, I think she may even have played with the title, The Varieties of Celibate Experience before settling on A History of Celibacy . Part of the hook used to publicize this book was the infobyte that Abbott had herself become celibate in the course of researching and writing it. This made her something of an oddity and short-lived media darling. She admits that she started the work with the idea that celibacy was aberrant or unnatural and finished with the conclusion that it is a genuine, normal human phenomenon that deserves attention on its own merits. Her general thesis, to which she returns again and again through all the complexities of rationales and motivations given for ...