"But Caitanya Mahaprabhu informs us that one can even have sexual engagement with the Lord. This information is Caitanya Mahaprabhu's unique contribution ... No one, however, has conceived that there can be sexual engagement in the spiritual world. There is not a single instance of such theology anywhere in the entire world ... The impersonalists have no idea; they cannot even conceive that God has form. But Caitanya Mahaprabhu says that not only does God have form, but He has sex life also. This is the highest contribution of Caitanya Mahaprabhu."
-ACBSP, Science of Self-Realization, Chap. 8

If God wouldn't bang the gopis from time to time there would be no cows up there in heaven.
Somebody has to do it. Or, wait a minute. Doesn't the Upanishad say sa aiksati? Maybe for the old Hindoo gentleman sex is just that? "He looked at them", and oops, it happened again . . .

That would explain why women need to be so covered. Otherwise some male could look at them and, oopps...

The whole 'banging the gopis' all day and night sounds so much like a teenager's wet dream. And then you suddenly realise, oops, it is...

Is that it - is that all we can understand from that Lila of Krishna? (I somehow doubt it.)

Also, should we - do you - honestly consider the above employed term, applied to describe the congress of Krishna with His lovers, to be appropriate?

What, I often wonder, is this compulsion to run with the shock-jocks that haunts the forum; are we so deficient in philosophical insight that we need resort to paltry tabloidisms in order to affect the reader (and that to no positive end)?

Very well put.

I dont really want to slander gv tradition just need help with having faith in myself when it comes to accepting or rejecting some of the bizarre statements in this tradition. I owe so much to krsna and my gurus but some things I am asked to swallow just wont go down and I don't want to feel always that it is my fault because I am full of 4 defects. Some things are just plain stupid and I just can't and won't accept them but I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

So far i have not heard anything that was part of the Iskcon crazed statements, but i did hear crazed stuff from different individuals not representative of the whole. So i would recommend you not to swallow anything that people there say and reject what you see as bad, and accept the good. Sort of a dovetailing into Krishna's service the "accepting and rejecting" program.

I agree with Aran's remark about tabloidisms - and also syamasundaradasa's one about not throwing away wet, little children - so, did we actually get something positive out of our GV period?

I think the only thing I got out of it was a belief in personal forces that shape cosmos and lives (I was a buddhist before that). And then not personal in the meaning of a sort of superhumans but beings we can't comprehend at all because I think they aren't 3-D. That's why I don't use names anymore.

And perhaps a sense of what bhakti could be.

Thank you, Syamasundara. (Hang on to that Baby.)

I imagine that your need to critically examine the tradition without resorting to slander is probably consonant with the desire of most who find themselves awake to the more extraneous, culturally alienating and superstitious aspects of GV...

I venture that perhaps - and I'm not trying to stir up trouble here - but, just perhaps, our numbers (at GR) are so meagre precisely because we have failed to build a comfortable enough landing space for souls sensitive to what they may feel, after years of devotional practice in a specialised area, to be a psychologically and spiritually jarring environment...

Readjustment is a 'gradual process'.

I'd say that those "banging" statements had some vibe of that unprocessed sexual frustration and guilt endured while within Iskcon - just look how long-standing and dangerous those effects can be! It makes serious, adult and educated men speak like teenage boys driven crazy by their hormones, when they hear about the personalities their suchlike feelings are associated with. Not very conducive to philosophical insight, but - oh well, that is not something that is enforced or expected here.

Aran, you are on to something with your last post.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with mockery of GV. Otherwise, one may as well take issue with the very existence of this forum, in which many members (mainly former Vaishnavas) have mocked and continue to mock GV beliefs routinely, the severity of which can be very profound. And also, when it takes place in a section of this forum entitled 'Freedom From Faith', it can be expected that members will be prone to discussing the after-effects of the GV experience on their lives (if not faith as an entire construct) and revisiting some of it's more sillier aspects.

Everyone has their own schtick, or angle. Women, for instance, will have cause to take issue with the anti-women schemata exemplified by some oppressive and territorial individuals in ISKCON. Homosexuals will similarly have cause to take issue with anti-homosexuality statements by the Founder as well as current attitudes that pervade throughout the organisation. And so on and on with all the topics; guru falldowns, financial irregularities, literary irregularities, etc., each issue catching the attention of people who feel that it resonates most with their experience. A part of my schtick fits in very well with the topic of this thread, the 'sheer stupidity' of ideas that circulate within the community of devotees, that may have been engendered either in the statements of the Founder or even within the recommended texts. 'Sheer stupidity' does not only exist within the minds and tongue-slips of the more eccentric types, but is also endemic (read: written in stone) within the scripture. So no, I don't see any problem with openly laughing at the naked Emperor.

It is not for anybody else to sit and comment on whether any such statements can be taken as indicative of "lack of realisation" or whatever, as that is a private matter that is up to the individual to choose to reveal or talk about. Similarly, it is not of my concern whether anyone gained any positive experiences within ISKCON; that is also up to the individual to talk about and there are already several threads there for one to go and register their appreciations if they have any, or politely discuss the Emperor's nakedness in hushed tones. There's always one.

Frankly I feel irreverence is a breath of fresh air. You can't fail to find something funny in grown men trying very hard to become little girls and have sex with God.

While I may not agree with some tones in the comments that provoked the discussion, I am also uneasy over terms like slander, which imply our acceptance of certain holy premises, on which a negative view would be considered slander. Many old taboos break down only to unveil a deeper dimension beneath the surface, and the more we pamper them, the less likely we are to get to the bottom of things. I don't think mocking for the sake of mocking is of much worth, but when there's an actual point that's being made, let's give a bit of leeway in the way of language people choose to use as long as the point is relevant to the issue itself.

In the case of GV and sexuality in their mythos, the whole of Radha-Krishna-lila has clearly featured in the capacity of erotic poetry in the courts of the kings of yore, whose court-poets (such as Jayadeva and Vidyapati) composed several of the seminal Radha-Krishna narratives, and have since ascended to the position of supreme devotees in the eyes of the tradition. In that, I believe the Radha-Krishna-lila has served a noteworthy role as a vicarious outlet for the sexuality of the aristocracy of the times, in the very same classical Sanskrit cultural environment in which works like Ananga-ranga and Kama-sutra developed.

A second facet, all too often overlooked, is the tantric aspect of a dual sexual deity, and in particular the supreme male in whose supersexual exploits with his female emanations and companions the whole of cosmic meaning culminates. This is a very definite undercurrent seen in both the abundance of tantric source-works from which GV authors borrowed aspects of their theology, as well as in many other Vrindavan traditions (the Vallabha-sampradaya and Radha-vallabhis in particular come to mind), seen in its full bloom in the so-called apa-sampradayas of sahajiya fame that have their roots every bit as deep and far in the pages of history as the so-called Gaudiya orthodoxy.

Reformers such as Bhaktisiddhanta have sought to conceal these overtly clear aspects of the whole Radha-Krishna tradition, evidently in an attempt to preserve the "theological pristinity" of these narrations the tradition holds sacred and of the greatest universal importance. This is, however, a slant brought about by the construction of extensive theological frameworks atop an older and more libertine tradition, and as such I question the idea of taking these constructions as a central consideration in our approach and attitudes toward classical Sanskrit poetry and Puranic lore, whether it's Radha-Krishna or any other of your gods of choice in action.

It seems evident to me that the whole of the erotic narrative surrounding Krishna has played a number of "mundane" roles in culture and society from the very days of its written origins, and the more we convolute its natural fullness with theological apologetics, the further away we will be from anything that holds fundamental value in our understanding of the entire tradition.

Then, to rephrase Gaurasundara's original in light of the above:

"The whole 'sexual union with the gopis' all day and night sounds so much like the fantasies of an Indian aristocrat of yore or an emerging tantric sadhaka. And then you suddenly realise, oops, it is..."

Would that be more acceptable, philosophically adept, psychologically astute, and politically correct? And how different is it in its central import from what was said before?

ok then, lovingly inserted

And here's a position I want to add atop all that vaguery of where I stand on this:

I believe Gaurasundara is wrong in his assumption that these were the fantasies of teenagers, as the teenagers of the times were not at a level of male sexual and psychological "maturity" we could fairly consider comparable to contemporary youth and their fantasies. I also don't think they used the term "banging"* back in the days, rather they were fond of clandestine poetic expressions such as "loving insertion" and the such, the likes of which are found all across the more "confidential" of narratives. The stories themselves certainly were fantasies in their own right, and catered to a whole society with their respective psychological and cultural needs, especially in the realm of approaching sexual taboos from an acceptable cultured angle.

While there may be a bit of repetition in the above, we all know that repetition of loving insertions is the mother of enjoyment, so please bear with me here.

* While I believe there are indeed a number of terms — in both classic kama-shastra and in the erotic poetry specific to gods — that could be translated as something akin to "banging", the cunning linguists of the day steered clear of openly vulgar expression, a tone the word "banging" would hold in contemporary language. This of course doesn't change the fact of the act of coitus serving as a central aspect and climax of the said narratives.

Ananda, as one would expect, your post (# 12) is intelligent, well-balanced and scholarly...

I agree with much of what you say, and consider your approach in matters philosophical to be user friendly (I am, again, thinking of our prospective 'readjuster') in both form and content.

And yes, at least to my mind, that would have been a more acceptable way of discussing the emergence of the Radha-Krishna tradition(s); I am a member of Sunthar Visuvalingam's Abhinavagupta forum, and such subjects - he has a particular fascination with what he terms Transgressive Sacrality - are not at all uncommon there.

Thank you Aran.

We need to remember that Gaurasundara is our resident tantric somesuch, and as such it's in his nature to try and break the shell of conditioning by reaching for the polar extremes. In the classic left-hand tantric approach, you would employ anything from human skulls to graveyards to copious liquor to copulative gang-bang retreats, and shock the hell out of everyone else while you sought the cosmic pinnacle. That's one way to shake the status quo and penetrate one layer deeper beneath the material sheath so central to all of this.

Yep, yep. Now if we try to do as Ananda has suggested, to break the taboo to see what deeper level of truth it might contain, then one level that is evident for me would be, for the male practitioner, to break out of the superiority straitjacket the culture of that day put him in.

To yearn to be a woman in that culture is comparable with the European medieval saints putting the worms eating them alive back onto their open wounds if they fall off.

Plus the forest -- not the village where you stay in the bounds of your privileged position and where everybody scrutinizes your every move. And breaking the rules. Making yourself effectively impossible in the society.

It goes against your self-preservation instinct. It is quite something to ask of an aspiring bhakta. It might bring about an encounter with another aspect of oneself.

"Gaurasundara"? How wonderfully reminiscent.

Regarding teenagers, it seems that no one has (as yet) got the tongue-in-cheek reference to the transcendental teenaged autocrat who is ever inviting the fallen conditioned souls to associate with him in his eternal hydro-pornographic mood. And, by the way, I was not the originator of the term that has so offended the sensibilities of some, so lets have some balance here and less rush to comment on "readjustment" and such.

On matters of doctrine and such, there's only so much dancing one can do on the outer petals of the Yogapith. One has to wonder about the causes that led to the formulation of a religious tradition devoted almost entirely - at it's very core - to the constant contemplation of "loving insertion". What does that say about the psychology of individuals, who not only experience an irresistible attraction to this, but also go a great way in making this a priority of their pursuits? Sometimes it seems that the construction of layer upon layer of intricate theology to explain this, even that which is meant to assist the individual in understanding the reasons for and causes of his attraction, actually seems to serve the purpose of removing oneself further and further away from the embarrassment of having to admit and confess to what it actually is at the end of the day.

Oh no, I was as always constantly totally aware of this fact. In fact, teenage? Wasn't it acarya-wise stated he was merely eight years old and therefore no banging was physiologically even possible and therefor only the bad, I repeat, evil, section would insinuate mundane sex (disgusting).


I used it without much thinking (possibly w/o any at all). That's probably why it caused such a stir. But as always, as far as I can see the best of you valiant heroes remain unshaken.

So on GR you are a disgruntled ex-HK and on the Caitanya Symposium you are an interested proof-reader of GV translations. What are you?

You mean "loving insertion" (please, some beautiful music here and maybe images of rivers flowing etc)?
The choice of language in these connections can veritably mean that one ends up just beating around the bushes. It is like some people think soft porn is OK, but at the same time hard core porn is just too much for them. In actuality it is the same thing, just that in the other one they are not beating around the bush, but showing and doing everything as it is.

Of course I do not know how these ultra spiritual personalities perform their loving insertions, but I am ready to change my opinion as soon as they show me the proof in the pudding.

Given that the whole premise of the esoteric GV reality revolves around beating around the bushes, it's hardly surprising that we see such a grand level of duality on all things sexual. You worship a god who beats around the bushes of Vrindavan in order to get to beat around the bushes of the girls hiding their bushes in the bushes, and bang bang --- you have the cosmic climax of ecstasy laid out bare before you like a blast of sunshine coming from the world beyond, and you need to intensely celibate to be able to hold on to that holy bushy vision.

This is why for example the name of Rasputin, that hallowed mystic from the land of Rasiya, means "juicy bottocks", "wet underwear" or "juicy hollow", as also "any cake or pastry filled with seasoning or stuffing of any kind", depending on whether you use a soft (त) or a hard (ट) tee, and your choice of position for the tee. It all comes down to the science of linga-murtis, the shapes and curvature of the symbolic signs employed in beating around the bush, and the better your twist, the greater your spiritual success.

Actually I've always wondered about that myself. Did the acharyas state such things, and if so, who did and what did they say?

I was under the impression that these "8-year-old Krishna and 17-year-old Radha" (or whatever) were the domain of certain Indian swamis (such as Sai Baba) who protest loudly against sexual interpretations. I am sure if one looks hard enough one can find similar statements by other swamis too. But as far as Gaudiyas were concerned I thought everyone was on the same page about this. Reminds me of an old article I wrote for the SB people where I quoted the Sri Gaura-Govindarchana-Smarana-Paddhati of Dhyanacandra Gosvami, which says that (in nitya-lila) Radha is 14 and Krishna is 15.

The "child-Krishna and adult-Radha" theme is prominent in the Brahma-vaivarta-purana, much of which appears to be a work post-dating Chaitanya, as it finds notice in the works of the Goswamis only in stray references. The BVP has however gained a great deal of foothold in popular Hindu religiosity.

The commentaries on the participants' age in the Rasa-lila have to do with what the Gaudiyas term prakata-lila or the manifest pastimes (that often take awkward turns when you try to reconcile different versions of the same story), while the so-called "eternal age" is the couple's ages in their aprakata-lila, or the eternal sacred loop of eight-fold daily dalliances.

It’ll be great, because while all those PHDs are in there talking about modes of alienation, we’ll be in here quietly humping.

---Woody Allen

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I was always turned off by all that god is a man we are all women and lets be gay for god spiritual transvestitism they would preach to me on the gaudiya internet.

The thing is that when God is a woman the guys aren't out on the street crowing about it like they do with the homosexually oriented scriptural theology.

I have always believed in god as a woman. I will never talk about it. It may seem the opposite but some can see through it all as just my attempt to attract.

When we mock the god using the term banging or argue back no don't that is bad it may seem we are using the same words from the same books but we never received the Veda of it really. We are all mispronouncing the name of god as Thomas JJ Altizer would say.

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Cute
And it awakens echoes of some mellow poems on the theme of, Let others study and meditate etc etc... I am fully satisfied by... [followed by some cute description of, let's say, watching how Nanda chastises baby Krishna... or maybe, for the brave, something from another rasa.]

But when you say god is a woman aren't you doing the same thing as the people who are saying it's a man which was 'condamned' by your line "When we mock the god using the term banging or argue back no don't that is bad it may seem we are using the same words from the same books but we never received the Veda of it really." ?

The sheer fact that we discuss in grand detail the genital ventures of the said gods tells more than its fair share about the unchallenged sublime supremacy of this particular original form of the two-armed absolute autocrat from the cowherd village. It's the supreme godhead at his most universal appeal, we heard the doctor say. At least it was so to those who shared the peculiar taste of endlessly discussing the said ventures in and around the bushes of Vrindavan.

To each his own, but in my view the devotional concept of gods is a definite back-tracking from the older Upanishadic universals and the sacred cycles of nature, as far as directly touching the actual substance of existence goes, anyway. The less abstract a religion becomes at its heart, the faster downhill its track, with its supreme rulers and pontiffs in command, in its canon law and its hardening ideologies and decreasing freedom of thought, invention and discovery.

Click to view attachment

Hegel said abstract thinking is a characteristic of simple-minded people who only think in generalities. Some say, like Hegel, that the more abstract a religion, the more degenerate.

It's funny how people can come to the exact opposite conclusions.

See that I said I have always believed "in god as a woman." I purposefully did not say "god is a woman."

My intent is to not subtract anything from god by my affirmations. It has nothing to do with thinking about other people with their gods or what other people are thinking. I had God like one would have a drug habit.

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Sorry, I missed the subtle difference.

From memory, the BVP contains the most explicit descriptions of Radha-Krishna sex I've ever seen. Plenty of squeezing (very hard), biting, scratching, mad rutting, very animalistic. Funny how the writer of BVP portrays Krishna as a fan of the rough stuff. No donkey-punches though, we have to have standards.

For me, the more abstract it is, the more universal it is, and the more refined it is. Laws of physics, mathematical formulae; they are very general, and it has taken considerable effort in the history of mankind to distill those generalities from the mass of specificity we are daily surrounded by and swamped in. Our minds are so cluttered by the chaos of specificity that we become altogether blind to the logos of all underlying unity and symmetry.

If there is a creator god, those patterns are the language and fingerprints of that god; and the more people worship their man-made symbols as the height of their religion, the more they are missing the underlying point, a direct experience of how the universe exists and revolves, and how you exist integrally in it — which something that is much more immediate than any liturgy would ever unveil, a reality that lurks in the shadows behind the holy cows we portray as the benevolent hub of the universe.

When you go forward to more and more specific, you end up with abstract subatomic particles. When you go backward to more and more general, you end up with abstract universal conceptual patterns. Somewhere half-way there is the happy human middle-ground or "medium-blurred zoom" that we are often so hell-bent on escaping, and it's somewhat in a conflict with these two extremes of reality as well.

And then we take this half-way-blurred human angle, creating a god with his wanton sports in our own design? It isn't supreme specificity or refinement of conception, it's an artificial superimposition put in place to give people some sort of a starting point before they can begin to delve deeper into the universality in the nature of all existence. The fact that it may be a later evolution certainly doesn't mean it's a further evolution.

Don't worry. I spend hours writing replies to Ananda that I never post. Soon maybe I will find my voice. I have almost stopped forgetting it is not Jagat I am writing to.

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All very good points, of course. I can appreciate that the existence of such literatures provided a form of escapism for a strait-jacketed environment. It is not only Radha-Krishna stories that fulfill this function, but there are several Romeo-and-Juliet types of literatures in classical Indian literature, among the more memorable ones would be the tales of Laila and Majnu, Heer and Ranjha, Shireen and Farhaad, etc. (Strictly speaking, these are either of Islamic origin or have strong Islamic influence, but they have captured the imagination of Indian writers and poets for generations.)

On the subject of "deeper meanings" and the like, I confess to being extremely sceptical. Personally I'm not too keen on them.

Well, you seem to be on a completely different scale of reality than I am. You go from subatomic particles to universal patterns in a seemingly 3-D concept. I, on the other hand am a religious person so if I could delve deep into matter I would end up, in my belief I admit, with deva's and other beings. When I go to the other end of the scale I would also end up with deva's or gods or angels.

And in the middle would be the human being thinking in abstract concepts.



But suppose I would stay at the material side of the matter and I would delve deep into the sub-atomic matter I would discover there is actually nothing there, if you remove all the space between all the sub-atomic particles in all the universes there would not be more than one pinhead of matter which is to me just another way of saying "maya".

So I don't think there is one single spectrum to place this conceptual thinking on.

To bridge the two scales together, if you thought of god as the totality of existence and his will as the natural ebb and flow of the universe, and if you thought of gods as the smaller self-contained vortexes within the grand flow, I believe that'd do it. I also believe that the more we try to apply human faces and characteristics to transhuman "entities" or "continuums of nature", the farther away we are from directly meeting and touching upon them.

Rather than break free and extend our human frame of reference, we often seek to superimpose our very limitations to realities grander than humanity, in order to make them more manageable. This is incidentally why manyu common patterns and forces evolve into deified beings portraying certain archetypes of existence; the way we humans paint them in our culture, they are literally caricatures of something greater than fits the limited human focus.



I find that human beings think far too little in abstract concepts. We are so immersed in and overwhelmed by detail that stress, very literally caused by excessive mental preoccupation with details, is one of the grand and growing problems of human society. A little bit of extra abstraction would go a long way to smooth it out, and make the big picture more manageable as well.



I suppose my holy grail here would be in working towards a single universal symmetric spectrum, in which all subjective spectra of experience reside. To find the farthest harmonic container or root pattern for all of existence. I suppose the way all this was discussed in Indic thought of yore is one of the big factors that kept me in there for as long as it did.

Ananda is not a personalist. But didn't he want to be? Did he not try hard to not be the way he is? As many of us have, tried to remove this whole way of thinking from his brain the way one might try to burn off a wart? Extreme chanting and forced marches around Radha Kund. Kund. Radha Kund. God you know what that sounds like? Such a beautiful name. I don't even know how you pronounce it, kund or kund. Either way it really does sound like it means it doesn't it? Maybe it actually does. And Ananda will now come on here and tell me. And he is right again.

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It's definitely kund, though people with Boston accents usually say kund! I really love how Northern Europeans say kund though, with that emphasis on kund. I once had a Bengali friend say राधाकुण्ड, but no one knew what the hell he was talking about till he said kund, which of course had to be further corrected ... with the proper English pronunciation ... to ... kund.

Unless I stand to be corrected?

Perhaps the trick is in the fact that I stopped wanting to be a personalist or an impersonalist, and have since tried to let things be as personal or as impersonal as they are, or as I see them, or as what the hell ever they are, without trying to warp them into something else over concerns of conformance to utopian ideologies.

Darwin I fully understand why the word "kund" might hold a mystic appeal to you, and be something you feel a life-long longing for. In Czech they try to spell and say "kund" as "kunt" instead, because in their language kund means cunt, or so I was told, and to go around boldly preaching how the transcendental autocrat revels in Radha's holy kund all day long would be a bit much for the faithless to digest.

Properly, the word kuNDa means "a bowlshaped vessel , basin , bowl , pitcher , pot , water-pot , a round hole in the ground , pit , well , spring or basin of water (especially consecrated to some holy purpose or person) , an adulterine , son of a woman by another man than her husband while the husband is alive , mutilation" etc. so I'm sure there's enough in there for you to understand it according to your favorite freudian twist.



Of course it's confusing to see Bengali spoken in Devanagari alphabet --- what do you expect...

However I don't think the word "kund" is the problem inasmuch as it is the word "radha" preceding it, it just doesn't sound right when you englishize it and rape the two clear long A's in the process; it shouldn't sound like "rad" in "radish", and the R shouldn't sound like you're starting the engine. The K of the kund also becomes more harsh and sounds rather like a C, like in /kʌnt/ or so.

English is so ill-suited for pronouncing languages with clear long vowels and uniform hardness of consonants. This is also why you Americanos have such a hard time keeping your dipthongs clear and in due order, and that's incidentally why you have a hard time harvesting the fruits of your sublimated Vedic mantras.

It's a pity that I can't find a relevant book about Krishna in my collection, that had an extra-long chapter about his love-lilas and less about his later politicking. Hopefully I'll find it soon and will be able to contribute interesting factoids to this discussion.

The love-lilas of the SPoG have always inspired the commentators to walk that extra mile.
I wonder whether this obsession with love is something typically human? Perhaps one of nature's tricks to get the girls pregnant. The show must go on.

They dream always of effing the ineffable.

And they tell us he is effable when it suits them, ineffable when it does not.

Well, westerrn neo-GV got it all wrong. There is nothing wrong or sinful with sex. The celibacy comes from that a GV, who identify as a gopi, ONLY have interest in romantic (or erotic) affairs with Krishna. Those who identifiy as manjaris or gopas are pre-puberty and thereefore naturally have no sexual interest in anyone.

Now, those who want to play gopis or manjaris have a big problem there, in that their erotic desires are both developed and is not oriented towards Krishna.

In the Indian society, it is the duty of persons to marry and have children, so therefore even GV form families, have sex and get children. But that is duty, not lusty desires.
Nothing says that duty cannot involve bodily pleasure.

Of course, anyone coming from ISKCON have a hard time believing any of that.
Too bad for them.

Question answered...

I recently found this article by an otherwise very decent Catholic scholar:

Is There Sex in Heaven?:


A Heavenly Reading of the Earthly Riddle of Sex

This spiritual intercourse with God is the ecstasy hinted at in all earthly intercourse, physical or spiritual. It is the ultimate reason why sexual passion is so strong, so different from other passions, so heavy with suggestions of profound meanings that just elude our grasp. No mere practical needs account for it. No mere animal drive explains it. No animal falls in love, writes profound romantic poetry, or sees sex as a symbol of the ultimate meaning of life because no animal is made in the image of God. Human sexuality is that image, and human sexuality is a foretaste of that self-giving, that losing and finding the self, that oneness-in-manyness that is the heart of the life and joy of the Trinity. That is what we long for; that is why we tremble to stand outside ourselves in the other, to give our whole selves, body and soul: because we are images of God the sexual being. We love the other sex because God loves God.

And this earthly love is so passionate because Heaven is full of passion, of energy and dynamism. We correctly deny that God has passions in the passive sense, being moved, driven, or conditioned by them, as we are. But to think of the love that made the worlds, the love that became human, suffered alienation from itself and died to save us rebels, the love that gleams through the fanatic joy of Jesus' obedience to the will of His Father and that shines in the eyes and lives of the saints—to think of this love as any less passionate than our temporary and conditioned passions "is a most disastrous fantasy". And that consuming fire of love is our destined Husband, according to His own promise. Sex in Heaven? Indeed, and no pale, abstract, merely mental shadow of it either. Earthly sex is the shadow, and our lives are a process of thickening so that we can share in the substance, becoming Heavenly fire so that we can endure and rejoice in the Heavenly fire.


Quite challenging, isn't it? And Mahaprabhu's contribution doesn't seem so unique anymore either.

Well maybe unique according to when it was first heard about.

So who was first?