Sex and salvation

Apr 27, 2010, 12.00am IST

DEBASHIS CHATTERJEE.

Salvation is the destination. Love is the way. However, sex provides three interesting detours – procreation, recreation and creation – on the path for one who wants to be God!

Recently a swami from south India was caught on camera in what the media calls a ‘compromising position’ with a couple of women. There was a public uproar and he has since been arrested. The swami, in his early thirties, would have gotten away with what is perhaps the result of a hormonal surge had he not vowed to be, well, a swami. Literally, a swami is someone who is a ‘master of his senses’. Popular culture tends to look up to a saint or swami as some kind of divine entity.

Strangely but true, there is very little room for sexual adventure on the path to salvation. Yet, Nature wholeheartedly designs a 30-odd-year-old man’s body for what Nature needs to do: propagation of the species. Nature puts forth several smart promotional schemes to get this job done through its species. The physical and physiological pleasure associated with the sex surge is the soft packaging for the hard nuts and bolts reality of giving birth to a baby. It is difficult not to be seduced by this pleasure when all our senses converge to draw us to it. Leonardo da Vinci puts this across from the artist’s perspective: “The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, Nature would lose the human species.”

When the contraceptive pill arrived, sex evolved from the basic need of procreation to sex for recreation. The inventive human mind was apparently able to checkmate Nature’s ploy of painful procreation by recreating the pleasure of sex without producing a result. This is somewhat like sniffing around in a pastry shop with the intent to do just window-shopping. Nature made sure that the residue of recreational sex remains as sensory impressions in the mind in the form of vasanas – burning embers waiting for the next gust of passion to flare up. These vasanas are potential desires that incarnated themselves at the opportune moment.

The real challenge for human evolution was then to put out the embers of vasanas that transported sex in the head from where it actually belongs. This challenge of transforming sex-for-procreation into sex-for-recreation has been productively met by saints, explorers, artists, writers, inventors, innovators and wealth creators. They lifted the sexual energy from their thoughts and emotions and expressed them in their creative works. While saints like Buddha, Krishna and Christ created new maps of human consciousness; explorers like Galileo and Columbus redrew maps of our physical world.

On the path of salvation celibacy is not a prerequisite but a consequence – an effortless by-product of creativity. Celibacy is a kind of flowering of consciousness and not a moral given, as most sermons would have us believe. It is easier to cover a raging fire with a piece of cloth than to contain libido with sermons. A celibate is like an austere tree in winter that has seen the whole cycle of life from seeding to flowering and stands to rejoice as an enthralled witness in having completed the cycle of creation. The human consciousness scripts the whole journey from being the creatures of sex to the Creator Herself. The “fallen,” swami, like any one of us, is somewhere on the path. I would just let him be.

(The writer is director, IIM. successsutras@gmail.com )