The endnote over which I have spent so much time is not as innocuous and harmless as it appears to be. In fact, most readers will not even read it and, even if they do, will accept on faith the definition of maithunananda provided by the Heehs. First-time readers of Sri Aurobindo will automatically conclude that Sri Aurobindo not only approved of sex in his Yoga but gave it an important place. It is only those who are sufficiently familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga who will raise their eyebrows, check for the actual denotation of the term as used by Sri Aurobindo and realise the dangers of the wrong definition. It is precisely this “first layer of falsehood” which prepares the public mind to absorb greater twists in the future until it can make a veritable u-turn and interpret the Integral Yoga in exactly the opposite way to what Sri Aurobindo meant. In fact, it is by basing himself on this definition of maithunananda and a few other statements made by Heehs that the infamous Jeffrey Kripal writes in his book on Esalen that Sri Aurobindo “associated the way of Ananda with the left-handed path of Tantra”. How far can you stray from the Truth on the basis of one wrong definition and a couple of crazy conclusions! [extract]
Embedded deep in the endnotes of Chapter 3 of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs is a highly objectionable definition of a term used by Sri Aurobindo in his spiritual diary entitled Record of Yoga. I am referring to endnote 76 on page 425 in which the term maithunananda has been defined by Heehs as “a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight”. His logic is simple: maithuna in Sanskrit means “coitus” and ananda means “bliss”, therefore maithunananda means the bliss of coitus or erotic delight. So what is wrong about it? Why make such a big fuss about an apparently simple and straightforward conclusion? Because, by this very simplification, truth has been turned into falsehood, for which you can pardon a newcomer to Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga but not someone who has spent 37 years studying it. And if, in spite of so many years of research, this self-styled scholar has come up with this definition, then his credentials should certainly be questioned.
But first about the definitions, or rather the lack of them in the Record of Yoga, and in particular with regard to the sharira Chatusthaya, which makes it so difficult for us to understand Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual diary. Sri Aurobindo wrote the Record for himself and mostly did not bother to explain the terms he used except in the barest outlines. These are often incompletely stated, and even when stated, don’t make much sense to us because we don’t have the corresponding experience. For example, what do we understand by tivrananda, vaidyutananda, vishayananda and raudrananda, which are the four anandas of the body other than maithunananda, according to the classification quoted below? And mind you, even this bare classification is from the scribal version of a disciple and is published in the appendix of the Record of Yoga – the Master himself did not care to list them in his own hand, leave alone elaborate on them:
We do get a notion of these various anandas from the diary notations in the Record, but, beyond a certain point of fascination, one has the strong sense of being outsiders to this unfamiliar realm of spiritual experience. Thus apart from a certain authentication of data for those who are not ready to believe that such spiritual experiences are possible, the Record does not seem to serve any purpose for the seeker who is looking for practical spiritual instructions within his reach. Not that it is not interesting in itself as the diary of a supreme Yogi, not that it should not have been published, nor that it might one day be of interest to us when we are equally spiritually advanced (God knows when!), but because it is always good to remind ourselves of our inherent limitations when we study it. More so when certain minds are too eager to distort the meaning of the terms used by Sri Aurobindo on the basis of the popular dictionary, knowing well that he gave them an entirely different significance.
So what is the exact meaning of the word maithunananda in the Record of Yoga? Sri Aurobindo himself did not define it, and in the absence of such a definition, you would naturally proceed to find one for kamananda of which maithunananda is an intense form, according to the ten occurrences of the term in the Record. The term kamananda occurs around 600 times and the one thing that catches your attention is the slow and victorious consolidation of the siddhi in Sri Aurobindo’s body. But again we don’t have any description of it either, though we do have two short definitions in the scribal version of the Sapta Chatusthaya. Describing the four elements of the Sharira Chatusthaya which are Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya and Ananda, the scribal version provides us the following two definitions under Ananda:
We note that Kamananda is defined here as Physical Ananda, which does not oppose the classification that has been previously quoted from page 1456. But we are a little confused when Sri Aurobindo uses the term a number of times in the sense of being one of the five anandas of the body and not as synonymous to Physical Ananda. I quote one such instance:
Kamananda in this case should be classified with the four other anandas under Physical Ananda, and maithunananda would be a sub-classification of kamananda and not one of the five anandas listed under kamananda as on page 1456! The matter gets more complicated when we note that these five anandas can follow or even develop out of each other. “How can they develop out of each other when they are different?” would cry out our intellects in despair, but this is what happens when we try to mentally understand spiritual experiences without having any real knowledge!
But let us proceed to the next stage in our quest for definitions. Keeping at abeyance the above confusion between Kamananda as synonymous with Physical Ananda or as one of its five constituents, let us ask the question: What does Physical Ananda mean? Or, as Ananda is the fourth element of the sharira Chatusthaya, what does sharirananda mean? Unfortunately, here also Sri Aurobindo has given us only the barest outline:
The scribal version is not as disappointing:
The explanatory notes throw some light on the first three elements of the sharira Chatusthaya – Arogya, Utthapana and Saundarya – but we are no wiser than before on the fourth element – Ananda. In fact, I have already quoted the last two sentences to define kamananda and, due to a scarcity of definitions, I am forced to repeat the same for sharirananda.
Let us now look up the Synthesis of Yoga which was written around the same time as the Record. Even here, there is only one paragraph on the sharira chatusthaya in the “Elements of Perfection” (Chapter 10 of the Yoga of Self-Perfection). In this chapter, Sri Aurobindo briefly describes the first six chatusthayas before taking them up in greater detail in the chapters following it. As he never finished this task and went up to only the first three chatusthayas before he wound up the Arya in which he was serialising the Synthesis, all that we are left with is the paragraph below on the sharira chatusthaya:
I have marked the sentences in bold which describe the method of the gnostic conversion of the body. Sri Aurobindo says that the change will be effected by “the law of the gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa, and of that into which it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and its members”. This will bring about “a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness” leading eventually to “a divinising of the law of the body”. I quote one more passage to give a better idea of the entire range of Ananda in the being of which Kamananda (or sharirananda) is only one segment. The following passage is from the scribal version of the Siddhi Chatusthaya and comes under its third element “Bhukti”:
Even here, the explanation of Kamananda in the above passage has already been quoted separately. The paucity of definitions thus suggests that Sri Aurobindo hardly cared to provide explanations of his experiences to his disciples.
So I come back to the point from where I began to enquire about the source of Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. I have subjected my reader to this tedious search for definitions precisely to show that the source is not Sri Aurobindo but the popular Sanskrit dictionary, which is rather shocking, because surely the context of the Record of Yoga has to be taken into account for the exact denotation of the word. I quote his definition:
Heehs does make a qualification in the context of the Record of Yoga, but it hardly changes the basic meaning of the dictionary. “Spontaneous” or not and whatever be the “intensity”, maithunananda remains “erotic delight” or more plainly sexual bliss, and it is with regard to this basic sense that I express my strong objection. Not because the dictionary is wrong, but because the term has an entirely different meaning in the Record.
Let me now analyse Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. My first objection to it stems from sheer common sense and not at all from the study of definitions. The first occurrence of this term in the Record is in the diary notation of 15 January 1913. Let us figure out how many years of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had completed at this point of time. If he had begun his Yoga in 1905, he would have spent 8 years from his practice of Pranayama to the two important realisations of Nirvana and the cosmic consciousness up to the “prolonged realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours” [1] in Pondicherry around August 1912. Now it is hard to believe that after so many years of Yoga and so many major spiritual experiences, Sri Aurobindo was still in the process of attaining “spontaneous erotic delight”! I would, personally, fall off my chair and be convulsed with prolonged fits of laughter!
Recovering from my laughter, I would ask Heehs one simple question: “What is the necessity of having ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ when just plain sex would do or bring about the same net result? Or is it that ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ comes after many years of difficult yogic practice in spite of it being perfectly useless for man’s physical health?” The next grand conclusion that you can perhaps expect from him is that it is indeed the highest consummation of Yoga! It is precisely because of this eventuality that I would like to alert readers beforehand that they are being taken for a ride. It is dangerous to commit mistakes of this kind in spirituality because by the time you realise that you have gone astray, you would have ruined your life for good. Traditional wisdom (apart from plain common sense) has been repeating it from hoary times not to mix sex with spirituality and Sri Aurobindo has been uncompromisingly clear on this issue. His Yoga can be practised in spite of sex, but not through sex, and he forbade his disciples from any immixture of it. The sexual energy, however, has to be sublimated and transformed into the “pure divine Ananda in the physical”, of which sexual pleasure is “a coarse and excited degradation”. [2] I quote at length from a letter of Sri Aurobindo:
The above letter should settle this argument and I would refer the reader to the full chapter of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on the subject in his Letters on Yoga, pp 1507-1549. Strangely, references to the same letters have been given by Heehs in this very endnote, which all the more shows his confused state of mind. You don’t have to hunt for references to rebut him, because he himself provides them to his critics. Of course, in this case he provided them with great glee to prove Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” (I take up this issue in Part 2) without realising that those who are going to read them attentively will at once challenge his definition of maithunananda in his endnote.
But the argument is not over and I anticipate a few more objections from his side. “Why did Sri Aurobindo use the word maithunananda if not to indicate its relation to sexual bliss?” would be the next short-sighted question. Yes, relation there is, but the relation of the higher to the lower, in which case you interpret the lower in terms of the higher and not the reverse, that is, misinterpret the higher in terms of the lower as Heehs has done. What difference does it make? It makes a world of difference! It is the difference between “spontaneous erotic delight” and “pure divine Ananda”: erotic delight or sexual bliss is a coarse degradation of that pure divine Ananda and not its consummation. It is the difference between brahmacharya which turns retas into ojas, for which many lives of yoga are necessary, and plain simple bhoga, which requires none at all. In short, it is the difference between man and the next stage of evolution and it will result in either spiritual progress or an evolutionary regress to a stage below the present mental man. Sri Aurobindo may well have used the word maithunananda because of the unavailability of terms to describe the higher Ananda ─ a frequent problem with spiritual experience ─ and not in the sense of the definition in the popular dictionary. The same problem occurs with Sri Aurobindo’s usage of the term “superman”, which is likely to be misunderstood as “a highly developed mental man”. According to him, the difference between man and superman is not merely in degree but in the very nature and substance of the consciousness embodying them, and the difference is more than that between man and the animal. So is the word “psychic” and a number of other terms to which Sri Aurobindo has assigned significances which do not match with those given in the dictionary.
“Why does Sri Aurobindo then refer to sexual ‘emission’ or ‘effusion’ when he speaks of maithunananda?” is perhaps the final defence of this sort of mind bent upon finding some textual support for the satisfaction of its desires. I quote the two instances of this term where this confusion can occur:
Sri Aurobindo does not speak here of emission as a positive effect of the divine Ananda that he was experiencing in the body, but as a negative mechanical response of it due to its inability to “to bear the high intensity of maithunananda”. He surely did not mean that maithunananda ends in emission or that it consummates in “spontaneous erotic delight” without emission. I quote a portion from the Evening Talks which supports my theory, even though the term being discussed is kamananda. Recall that Sri Aurobindo’s usage of the word maithunananda in the Record indicates that it is an intense form of kamananda, in which case the remarks below should apply to it.
Now that all textual arguments have been answered, I suppose our scholar will resort to diversionary tactics by shouting at us, “Why do you make such a big fuss about sex as if you are above it? All of us have to go through it. So why be so prudish? In any case, I am free to draw my own conclusions!” I won’t respond to the issue of freedom of speech because it has been already answered at length by my colleague, Alok Pandey. As for being above sex, no, none of us have made such tall claims. All that we insist upon is that Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga be not misinterpreted under the guise of academic research. Neither are we forcing our interpretation on the others because Sri Aurobindo has amply expounded his Yoga. As for being a prude, it is not a question of moral restraint as much as accepting a yogic discipline once you are serious about it. Nobody compels you to take it up; it is your own choice. And if you fall on the way, you simply pick yourself up, change your life style or carry on quietly instead of reading your own limitations into the Master’s works in order to justify your failures!
I would like to make one more observation. The endnote over which I have spent so much time is not as innocuous and harmless as it appears to be. In fact, most readers will not even read it and, even if they do, will accept on faith the definition of maithunananda provided by the Heehs. First-time readers of Sri Aurobindo will automatically conclude that Sri Aurobindo not only approved of sex in his Yoga but gave it an important place. It is only those who are sufficiently familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga who will raise their eyebrows, check for the actual denotation of the term as used by Sri Aurobindo and realise the dangers of the wrong definition. It is precisely this “first layer of falsehood” which prepares the public mind to absorb greater twists in the future until it can make a veritable u-turn and interpret the Integral Yoga in exactly the opposite way to what Sri Aurobindo meant. In fact, it is by basing himself on this definition of maithunananda and a few other statements made by Heehs that the infamous Jeffrey Kripal writes in his book on Esalen that Sri Aurobindo “associated the way of Ananda with the left-handed path of Tantra”. [4] How far can you stray from the Truth on the basis of one wrong definition and a couple of crazy conclusions!
It is true that Sri Aurobindo integrated in his Integral Yoga some of the elements of the Tantric tradition such as the worship of the divine Shakti or the ascent of the consciousness through the various centres of the subtle body, but there is not a single iota of evidence to show that he ever associated himself with the sex-rituals of the left-handed path of Tantra. He spoke of Tantric kriyas in his letters to Motilal Roy, but there is no mention of what sort of kriyas they were. If it be concluded on the basis of such (lack of) evidence that they were indeed sexual kriyas, and that they were not mentioned because of social compunctions as Kripal suggests, then no logic on earth can convince such a perverted mind! Moreover, why would Sri Aurobindo hide facts from others when he was writing his private spiritual diary (Record of Yoga) if he had found these sex rituals useful to his Yoga? In the Record, the term “Tantric kriyas” is used only twice in the sense of “mechanical means” or “special processes” by which you employ siddhis such as Aishwarya, Ishita and Vashita.
The fact that Sri Aurobindo smoked cigars and partook of meat and wine during the pre-1926 period of his life in Pondicherry has also led to some fanciful speculation about his attitude towards sex and sadhana. The injunction against sex always remained firm both for himself and his disciples once he started practising Yoga. This is what he said in September 1926 in one of his evening talks:
Raman Reddy
24 February 2010
Endnotes:
[1] Autobiographical Notes, p 177
[2] Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, (1983), p 795
[3] A.B. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo (2007), 18 December 1938, p 567
[4] Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen (2007), p 64.
[5] A.B. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo (2007), On Sadhana, 9 September 1926, p 354.
Part One – A Harmless Endnote ?
Embedded deep in the endnotes of Chapter 3 of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs is a highly objectionable definition of a term used by Sri Aurobindo in his spiritual diary entitled Record of Yoga. I am referring to endnote 76 on page 425 in which the term maithunananda has been defined by Heehs as “a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight”. His logic is simple: maithuna in Sanskrit means “coitus” and ananda means “bliss”, therefore maithunananda means the bliss of coitus or erotic delight. So what is wrong about it? Why make such a big fuss about an apparently simple and straightforward conclusion? Because, by this very simplification, truth has been turned into falsehood, for which you can pardon a newcomer to Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga but not someone who has spent 37 years studying it. And if, in spite of so many years of research, this self-styled scholar has come up with this definition, then his credentials should certainly be questioned.
But first about the definitions, or rather the lack of them in the Record of Yoga, and in particular with regard to the sharira Chatusthaya, which makes it so difficult for us to understand Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual diary. Sri Aurobindo wrote the Record for himself and mostly did not bother to explain the terms he used except in the barest outlines. These are often incompletely stated, and even when stated, don’t make much sense to us because we don’t have the corresponding experience. For example, what do we understand by tivrananda, vaidyutananda, vishayananda and raudrananda, which are the four anandas of the body other than maithunananda, according to the classification quoted below? And mind you, even this bare classification is from the scribal version of a disciple and is published in the appendix of the Record of Yoga – the Master himself did not care to list them in his own hand, leave alone elaborate on them:
Kamananda:
1. Maithunananda
2. Vishayananda Sense-objects
3. Tivrananda Thrill
4. Raudrananda Pain
5. Vaidyutananda Electric
(Record of Yoga, 1456)
We do get a notion of these various anandas from the diary notations in the Record, but, beyond a certain point of fascination, one has the strong sense of being outsiders to this unfamiliar realm of spiritual experience. Thus apart from a certain authentication of data for those who are not ready to believe that such spiritual experiences are possible, the Record does not seem to serve any purpose for the seeker who is looking for practical spiritual instructions within his reach. Not that it is not interesting in itself as the diary of a supreme Yogi, not that it should not have been published, nor that it might one day be of interest to us when we are equally spiritually advanced (God knows when!), but because it is always good to remind ourselves of our inherent limitations when we study it. More so when certain minds are too eager to distort the meaning of the terms used by Sri Aurobindo on the basis of the popular dictionary, knowing well that he gave them an entirely different significance.
So what is the exact meaning of the word maithunananda in the Record of Yoga? Sri Aurobindo himself did not define it, and in the absence of such a definition, you would naturally proceed to find one for kamananda of which maithunananda is an intense form, according to the ten occurrences of the term in the Record. The term kamananda occurs around 600 times and the one thing that catches your attention is the slow and victorious consolidation of the siddhi in Sri Aurobindo’s body. But again we don’t have any description of it either, though we do have two short definitions in the scribal version of the Sapta Chatusthaya. Describing the four elements of the Sharira Chatusthaya which are Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya and Ananda, the scribal version provides us the following two definitions under Ananda:
Ananda referred to here is Physical Ananda or Kamananda. This is of various kinds, sensuous, sensual etc. (Record of Yoga, p 1477)
Kamananda – Physical Ananda, [e.g.] Vishayananda, i.e. sensuous pleasure. (Record of Yoga, 1481)
We note that Kamananda is defined here as Physical Ananda, which does not oppose the classification that has been previously quoted from page 1456. But we are a little confused when Sri Aurobindo uses the term a number of times in the sense of being one of the five anandas of the body and not as synonymous to Physical Ananda. I quote one such instance:
Motions of contact are now commencing in which, starting with the vishaya and the tivra, all the five physical anandas manifest together raudra, vaidyuta and kama following each other or rather developing out of each other.
(Record of Yoga, p 65; see also pp 356; 362-363; 636; 755; 1118)
Kamananda in this case should be classified with the four other anandas under Physical Ananda, and maithunananda would be a sub-classification of kamananda and not one of the five anandas listed under kamananda as on page 1456! The matter gets more complicated when we note that these five anandas can follow or even develop out of each other. “How can they develop out of each other when they are different?” would cry out our intellects in despair, but this is what happens when we try to mentally understand spiritual experiences without having any real knowledge!
But let us proceed to the next stage in our quest for definitions. Keeping at abeyance the above confusion between Kamananda as synonymous with Physical Ananda or as one of its five constituents, let us ask the question: What does Physical Ananda mean? Or, as Ananda is the fourth element of the sharira Chatusthaya, what does sharirananda mean? Unfortunately, here also Sri Aurobindo has given us only the barest outline:
The sharirachatusthaya, likewise, need not be at present explained. Its four constituents are named below.
Arogyam, utthapana, saundaryam, vividhananda iti sharirachatushtayam.
(Record of Yoga, p 23)
The scribal version is not as disappointing:
IV. Sharira Chatusthaya
Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya, Ananda
Arogya is the state of being healthy. There are three stages:
(1) When the system is normally healthy and only gets disturbed by exceptional causes or very strong strain, such as continual exposure to cold, overstrain of any kind.
(2) When even exceptional causes or great overstrain cannot disturb the system; this shows that there is full Arogya Shakti.
(3) Immortality in the body.
Utthapana is the state of not being subject to the pressure of physical forces.
There are also three stages here:
(1) When there is a great force, lightness and strength in the body (full of vital energy); this shows that the body is full of Prana Shakti.
(2) When there is no physical weariness, no exhaustion of the brain or nervous centres.
(3) When one is not necessarily subject to the law of gravitation or other physical laws.
Saundarya is the state of being beautiful. There are also three stages here:
(1) When there is brightness in the body combined with sweetness of voice and charm of expression etc.
(2) Continual youth.
(3) When the features and figure can be changed to a form of perfect beauty.
Ananda referred to here is Physical Ananda or Kamananda. This is of various kinds, sensuous, sensual etc.
(Record of Yoga, p 1477)
The explanatory notes throw some light on the first three elements of the sharira Chatusthaya – Arogya, Utthapana and Saundarya – but we are no wiser than before on the fourth element – Ananda. In fact, I have already quoted the last two sentences to define kamananda and, due to a scarcity of definitions, I am forced to repeat the same for sharirananda.
Let us now look up the Synthesis of Yoga which was written around the same time as the Record. Even here, there is only one paragraph on the sharira chatusthaya in the “Elements of Perfection” (Chapter 10 of the Yoga of Self-Perfection). In this chapter, Sri Aurobindo briefly describes the first six chatusthayas before taking them up in greater detail in the chapters following it. As he never finished this task and went up to only the first three chatusthayas before he wound up the Arya in which he was serialising the Synthesis, all that we are left with is the paragraph below on the sharira chatusthaya:
The gnostic perfection, spiritual in its nature, is to be accomplished here in the body and takes life in the physical world as one of its fields, even though the gnosis opens to us possession of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratistha, which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic conversion. The change will be effected by bringing in the law of the gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa, and of that into which it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and its members. Pushed to its highest conclusion this movement brings in a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body. For behind the gross physical sheath of this materially visible and sensible frame there is subliminally supporting it and discoverable by a finer subtle consciousness a subtle body of the mental being and a spiritual or causal body of the gnostic and bliss soul in which all the perfection of a spiritual embodiment is to be found, a yet unmanifested divine law of the body. Most of the physical siddhis acquired by certain Yogins are brought about by some opening up of the law of the subtle or a calling down of something of the law of the spiritual body. The ordinary method is the opening up of the cakras by the physical processes of Hathayoga (of which something is also included in the Rajayoga) or by the methods of the Tantric discipline. But while these may be optionally used at certain stages by the integral Yoga, they are not indispensable; for here the reliance is on the power of the higher being to change the lower existence, a working is chosen mainly from above downward and not the opposite way, and therefore the development of the superior power of the gnosis will be awaited as the instrumentative change in this part of the Yoga.
(The Synthesis of Yoga, Elements of Perfection, p 695)
I have marked the sentences in bold which describe the method of the gnostic conversion of the body. Sri Aurobindo says that the change will be effected by “the law of the gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa, and of that into which it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and its members”. This will bring about “a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness” leading eventually to “a divinising of the law of the body”. I quote one more passage to give a better idea of the entire range of Ananda in the being of which Kamananda (or sharirananda) is only one segment. The following passage is from the scribal version of the Siddhi Chatusthaya and comes under its third element “Bhukti”:
Bhukti is the Delight of existence in itself, independent of every experience and extending itself to all experiences. [It has three forms:]
(1) Rasagrahanam or taking the Rasa in the mind: (a) bodily sensations, (b) food, (c) events, (d) feelings, (e) thoughts.
(2) Bhoga in the Prana, i.e. Bhoga without Kama or enjoyment without desire.
(3) Ananda throughout the system.
Kamananda – Physical Ananda, [e.g.] Vishayananda, i.e. sensuous pleasure
Premananda – Getting delight by positive feeling of Love (Chitta)
Ahaitukananda – Delight without any cause (Manas)
Chidghanananda Ananda – of the Chit in the object full of the gunas (Vijnana)
Shuddhananda Ananda – of the Beauty of everything (Ananda)
Chidananda Ananda – of pure consciousness without the gunas (Chit-tapas)
Sadananda Ananda – of pure existence apart from all objects and experiences (Sat)
(Record of Yoga, p 1481)
Even here, the explanation of Kamananda in the above passage has already been quoted separately. The paucity of definitions thus suggests that Sri Aurobindo hardly cared to provide explanations of his experiences to his disciples.
So I come back to the point from where I began to enquire about the source of Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. I have subjected my reader to this tedious search for definitions precisely to show that the source is not Sri Aurobindo but the popular Sanskrit dictionary, which is rather shocking, because surely the context of the Record of Yoga has to be taken into account for the exact denotation of the word. I quote his definition:
Maithunananda means literally the bliss, ananda, of coitus, maithuna. In the Record it refers to a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight.
(Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p 425)
Heehs does make a qualification in the context of the Record of Yoga, but it hardly changes the basic meaning of the dictionary. “Spontaneous” or not and whatever be the “intensity”, maithunananda remains “erotic delight” or more plainly sexual bliss, and it is with regard to this basic sense that I express my strong objection. Not because the dictionary is wrong, but because the term has an entirely different meaning in the Record.
Let me now analyse Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. My first objection to it stems from sheer common sense and not at all from the study of definitions. The first occurrence of this term in the Record is in the diary notation of 15 January 1913. Let us figure out how many years of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had completed at this point of time. If he had begun his Yoga in 1905, he would have spent 8 years from his practice of Pranayama to the two important realisations of Nirvana and the cosmic consciousness up to the “prolonged realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours” [1] in Pondicherry around August 1912. Now it is hard to believe that after so many years of Yoga and so many major spiritual experiences, Sri Aurobindo was still in the process of attaining “spontaneous erotic delight”! I would, personally, fall off my chair and be convulsed with prolonged fits of laughter!
Recovering from my laughter, I would ask Heehs one simple question: “What is the necessity of having ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ when just plain sex would do or bring about the same net result? Or is it that ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ comes after many years of difficult yogic practice in spite of it being perfectly useless for man’s physical health?” The next grand conclusion that you can perhaps expect from him is that it is indeed the highest consummation of Yoga! It is precisely because of this eventuality that I would like to alert readers beforehand that they are being taken for a ride. It is dangerous to commit mistakes of this kind in spirituality because by the time you realise that you have gone astray, you would have ruined your life for good. Traditional wisdom (apart from plain common sense) has been repeating it from hoary times not to mix sex with spirituality and Sri Aurobindo has been uncompromisingly clear on this issue. His Yoga can be practised in spite of sex, but not through sex, and he forbade his disciples from any immixture of it. The sexual energy, however, has to be sublimated and transformed into the “pure divine Ananda in the physical”, of which sexual pleasure is “a coarse and excited degradation”. [2] I quote at length from a letter of Sri Aurobindo:
The whole principle of this yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother-Power all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine. In this yoga, therefore, there can be no place for vital relations or interchanges with others; any such relation or interchange immediately ties down the soul to the lower consciousness and its lower nature, prevents the true and full union with the Divine and hampers both the ascent to the supramental Truth-consciousness and the descent of the supramental Ishwari Shakti. Still worse would it be if this interchange took the form of a sexual relation or a sexual enjoyment, even if kept free from any outward act; therefore these things are absolutely forbidden in the sadhana. It goes without saying that any physical act of the kind is not allowed; but also any subtler form is ruled out. It is only after becoming one with the supramental Divine that we can find our true spiritual relations with others in the Divine; in that higher unity this kind of gross lower vital movement can have no place.
To master the sex-impulse, − to become so much master of the sex-centre that the sexual energy would be drawn upwards, not thrown outwards and wasted − it is so indeed that the force in the seed can be turned into a primal physical energy supporting all the others, retas into ojas. But no error can be more perilous than to accept the immixture of the sexual desire and some kind of subtle satisfaction of it and look on this as a part of the sadhana. It would be the most effective way to head straight towards spiritual downfall and throw into the atmosphere forces that would block the supramental descent, bringing instead the descent of adverse vital powers to disseminate disturbance and disaster. This deviation must be absolutely thrown away, should it try to occur and expunged from the consciousness, if the Truth is to be brought down and the work is to be done.
It is an error too to imagine that, although the physical sexual action is to be abandoned, yet some inward reproduction of it is part of the transformation of the sex-centre. The action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for a particular purpose in the economy of the material creation in the Ignorance. But the vital excitement that accompanies it makes the most favourable opportunity and vibration in the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces and beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent of the supramental Light. The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda. The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error.
The transformation of the sex-centre and its energy is needed for the physical siddhi; for this is the support in the body of all the mental, vital and physical forces of the nature. It has to be changed into a mass and a movement of intimate Light, creative Power, pure divine Ananda. It is only the bringing down of the supramental Light, Power and Bliss into the centre that can change it. As to the working afterwards, it is the supramental Truth and the creative vision and will of the Divine Mother that will determine it. But it will be a working of the conscious Truth, not of the Darkness and Ignorance to which sexual desire and enjoyment belong; it will be a power of preservation and free desireless radiation of the life-forces and not of their throwing out and waste. Avoid the imagination that the supramental life will be only a heightened satisfaction of the desires of the vital and the body; nothing can be a greater obstacle to the Truth in its descent than this hope of glorification of the animal in the human nature. Mind wants the supramental state to be a confirmation of its own cherished ideas and preconceptions; the vital wants it to be a glorification of its own desires; the physical wants it to be a rich prolongation of its own comforts and pleasures and habits. If it were to be that, it would be only an exaggerated and highly magnified consummation of the animal and the human nature, not a transition from the human into the Divine.
(SABCL, Vol. 24, Letters on Yoga, p 1508)
The above letter should settle this argument and I would refer the reader to the full chapter of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on the subject in his Letters on Yoga, pp 1507-1549. Strangely, references to the same letters have been given by Heehs in this very endnote, which all the more shows his confused state of mind. You don’t have to hunt for references to rebut him, because he himself provides them to his critics. Of course, in this case he provided them with great glee to prove Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” (I take up this issue in Part 2) without realising that those who are going to read them attentively will at once challenge his definition of maithunananda in his endnote.
But the argument is not over and I anticipate a few more objections from his side. “Why did Sri Aurobindo use the word maithunananda if not to indicate its relation to sexual bliss?” would be the next short-sighted question. Yes, relation there is, but the relation of the higher to the lower, in which case you interpret the lower in terms of the higher and not the reverse, that is, misinterpret the higher in terms of the lower as Heehs has done. What difference does it make? It makes a world of difference! It is the difference between “spontaneous erotic delight” and “pure divine Ananda”: erotic delight or sexual bliss is a coarse degradation of that pure divine Ananda and not its consummation. It is the difference between brahmacharya which turns retas into ojas, for which many lives of yoga are necessary, and plain simple bhoga, which requires none at all. In short, it is the difference between man and the next stage of evolution and it will result in either spiritual progress or an evolutionary regress to a stage below the present mental man. Sri Aurobindo may well have used the word maithunananda because of the unavailability of terms to describe the higher Ananda ─ a frequent problem with spiritual experience ─ and not in the sense of the definition in the popular dictionary. The same problem occurs with Sri Aurobindo’s usage of the term “superman”, which is likely to be misunderstood as “a highly developed mental man”. According to him, the difference between man and superman is not merely in degree but in the very nature and substance of the consciousness embodying them, and the difference is more than that between man and the animal. So is the word “psychic” and a number of other terms to which Sri Aurobindo has assigned significances which do not match with those given in the dictionary.
“Why does Sri Aurobindo then refer to sexual ‘emission’ or ‘effusion’ when he speaks of maithunananda?” is perhaps the final defence of this sort of mind bent upon finding some textual support for the satisfaction of its desires. I quote the two instances of this term where this confusion can occur:
Kamananda, usually intense only in isolated touches more or less rapidly repeated, became yesterday intense to the point of maithunananda with continuously repeated touches, but owing to the fear of effusion, it was stayed before it could develop. Nevertheless the habitual intensity is now much greater & keener than formerly, but varies in continuity.
(Record of Yoga, p 300)
In the fourth, it is now evident that what is being prepared by the apparent reaction towards asiddhi of continuity in the kamananda, is the ability of the body to bear the high intensity of maithunananda without emission and its distribution as ananda throughout the body.
(Record of Yoga, 302)
Sri Aurobindo does not speak here of emission as a positive effect of the divine Ananda that he was experiencing in the body, but as a negative mechanical response of it due to its inability to “to bear the high intensity of maithunananda”. He surely did not mean that maithunananda ends in emission or that it consummates in “spontaneous erotic delight” without emission. I quote a portion from the Evening Talks which supports my theory, even though the term being discussed is kamananda. Recall that Sri Aurobindo’s usage of the word maithunananda in the Record indicates that it is an intense form of kamananda, in which case the remarks below should apply to it.
Disciple : Barin, I heard, had a lot of experiences.
Sri Aurobindo : They were mere mental and he gathered some knowledge, much information or understanding out of them. I heard that when he had begun yoga he had an experience of kamananda. Lele was surprised to hear about it. For he said that experience comes usually at the end. It is a descent like any other experience but unless one's sex centre is sufficiently controlled it may produce bad results etc. emission and other disturbances. [3]
Now that all textual arguments have been answered, I suppose our scholar will resort to diversionary tactics by shouting at us, “Why do you make such a big fuss about sex as if you are above it? All of us have to go through it. So why be so prudish? In any case, I am free to draw my own conclusions!” I won’t respond to the issue of freedom of speech because it has been already answered at length by my colleague, Alok Pandey. As for being above sex, no, none of us have made such tall claims. All that we insist upon is that Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga be not misinterpreted under the guise of academic research. Neither are we forcing our interpretation on the others because Sri Aurobindo has amply expounded his Yoga. As for being a prude, it is not a question of moral restraint as much as accepting a yogic discipline once you are serious about it. Nobody compels you to take it up; it is your own choice. And if you fall on the way, you simply pick yourself up, change your life style or carry on quietly instead of reading your own limitations into the Master’s works in order to justify your failures!
I would like to make one more observation. The endnote over which I have spent so much time is not as innocuous and harmless as it appears to be. In fact, most readers will not even read it and, even if they do, will accept on faith the definition of maithunananda provided by the Heehs. First-time readers of Sri Aurobindo will automatically conclude that Sri Aurobindo not only approved of sex in his Yoga but gave it an important place. It is only those who are sufficiently familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga who will raise their eyebrows, check for the actual denotation of the term as used by Sri Aurobindo and realise the dangers of the wrong definition. It is precisely this “first layer of falsehood” which prepares the public mind to absorb greater twists in the future until it can make a veritable u-turn and interpret the Integral Yoga in exactly the opposite way to what Sri Aurobindo meant. In fact, it is by basing himself on this definition of maithunananda and a few other statements made by Heehs that the infamous Jeffrey Kripal writes in his book on Esalen that Sri Aurobindo “associated the way of Ananda with the left-handed path of Tantra”. [4] How far can you stray from the Truth on the basis of one wrong definition and a couple of crazy conclusions!
It is true that Sri Aurobindo integrated in his Integral Yoga some of the elements of the Tantric tradition such as the worship of the divine Shakti or the ascent of the consciousness through the various centres of the subtle body, but there is not a single iota of evidence to show that he ever associated himself with the sex-rituals of the left-handed path of Tantra. He spoke of Tantric kriyas in his letters to Motilal Roy, but there is no mention of what sort of kriyas they were. If it be concluded on the basis of such (lack of) evidence that they were indeed sexual kriyas, and that they were not mentioned because of social compunctions as Kripal suggests, then no logic on earth can convince such a perverted mind! Moreover, why would Sri Aurobindo hide facts from others when he was writing his private spiritual diary (Record of Yoga) if he had found these sex rituals useful to his Yoga? In the Record, the term “Tantric kriyas” is used only twice in the sense of “mechanical means” or “special processes” by which you employ siddhis such as Aishwarya, Ishita and Vashita.
The fact that Sri Aurobindo smoked cigars and partook of meat and wine during the pre-1926 period of his life in Pondicherry has also led to some fanciful speculation about his attitude towards sex and sadhana. The injunction against sex always remained firm both for himself and his disciples once he started practising Yoga. This is what he said in September 1926 in one of his evening talks:
Disciple: In our yoga we have to discontinue the lower movement of nature as being an obstacle to Sadhana, but the Tantrics – specially the Vira Sadhakas – turn these obstacles to account and, taking help from these, they build up spiritual life.
Sri Aurobindo: How?
Disciple: That is my question.
Sri Aurobindo: I have no objection to taking fish and even you can take wine, if it suits you, but how can the sexual act be made to help in spiritual life? In itself the sexual act is not bad as the moralists believe. It is a movement of nature which has its purpose and is neither good nor bad. But, from the yogic point of view, the sexual force is the greatest force in the world and if properly used helps to recreate and regenerate the being. But, if it is indulged in the ordinary way, it is a great obstacle for two reasons. First, the sexual act involves a great loss of vital force, it is a movement towards death, though this is compensated by creation of new life. That it is a movement towards death is proved by the exhaustion felt after it; many people feel even a disgust.[5]
Raman Reddy
24 February 2010
Endnotes:
[1] Autobiographical Notes, p 177
[2] Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, (1983), p 795
[3] A.B. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo (2007), 18 December 1938, p 567
[4] Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen (2007), p 64.
[5] A.B. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo (2007), On Sadhana, 9 September 1926, p 354.
Maithunananda means literally the bliss, ananda, of coitus, maithuna. In the Record it refers to a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight.
ReplyDelete(Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p 425)
What intellgence Peter has? If erotic Ananda were possible with Yoga or is related to yoga then people of the world will stop looking for women and do yoga because it saves lot of time and energy.
Peter you do not have the right to interpret Sri Aurobindo for us. We as children of the Mother take away this right from you and hence forth do not speak anything about Sri Aurobindo.
Peter, I can see that you cannot even understand the words of traditional yoga, then how can you interpret Sri Aurobindo. You have taken inspiration from evil sources and founts of darkness.
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