A re-affirmation of the love of God
As we met this evening and Zaid made some rather revealing comments while reading tarot cards for me, a question that inevitably arose was on my rather elusive carnal life…it is a pity that Zaid, and less surely, Swastika raised some interesting questions but could not find the answers to. Neither did I have the time to answer them fully and clearly. Here then is a reply addressed to them.
Do I feel carnal attraction? Yes. To whom? To God, and in a particular way. Why?
We feel, I think, carnal attraction when someone sends us certain signals, and we are aroused by them, and respond to a certain way. The question next arises as to why, consciously or unconsciously, we get aroused.
One major unconscious reason is of course reproductive. Evolution dictates that such genes shall survive and be able to propagate themselves as ensure attraction to reproductively compatible beings, females for males, and males for females. The large majority of the gene-pool therefore dictates us to be attracted to human beings of the opposite sex. As women with a certain hourglass shaped waist hip ratio, and milk-giving large breasts, and tall and muscular men who could hunt the best would be most able to ensure the survival of their offspring, therefore evolution again dictated that those genes would survive which ensure our attraction to women or men of these body structures. Other evolution-dependent factors such as facial and bodily symmetry, estrogen or testosterone induced secondary sexual characteristics are also important factors in inducing carnal attraction.
Genes are obviously not the only determinants. Cultural factors (which are as socially produced as the biological ones) have produced their own influence. Fair skin is prized, for example, in both an Aryan-dominated and later colonial-dominated society. A liking for some talent like music or a social characteristic like wildness or rebelliousness or power might all be attractive, not necessarily for merely reproductive reasons, but for the other desires too that we feel.
What I mean to say by this is that carnal desire is nothing spontaneous or natural or some such thing but produced because we desire something and someone makes us feel that they have that something.
The question next arises as to what do I desire.
I desire love.
Perfect love.
I desire safety, security, comfort, redemption, climax, perpetual unending pleasure and everything else that love implies.
Who arouses me and sends me signals that I will get this from that person?
Not human beings. I love my parents, I love my grandparents, I love a very few friends, but not in the carnal way because when I love them I do not put my desire at the forefront of relationship with them. I can’t say I leave my ego completely behind when I deal with them, it would be too saintly, but the desires of the ego, its tensions, angsts, madnesses, passions, crazinesses, everything that one associates not with love, but with one specific form of love, carnal attraction.
With the rest of the world, there are (as for everyone else) fluid hierarchies of affection moving on from liking to dislike, and in a few cases of people who hurt me a lot, hatred.
But I do not feel attracted to them either because I do not think they can give me what I desire.
In short, what I desire is not satisfied by human beings I know. Therefore I do not desire human beings.
Perhaps there is also an element of semi-conscious power involved in this also. The body is very important to me. I like to maintain it as an inviolable sanctuary. All the people who have hurt me have, maximum, hurt me mentally through abusing, jealousy etc. my mind may have been bruised and hurt but never my body. I hate losing control of my body, so I don’t get alcoholic or drunk or engage in sex I don’t desire. My body is a room into which I can always retire into, withdraw into, safe from hurts, safe from the world, the one place where I am sovereign. Hence perhaps there is an element of semi-conscious policy in never being carnally infatuated with anyone because that would mean losing control of my senses, i.e., my flesh to someone else, of surrendering to someone, of becoming someone’s servant, if only from the point of view of the senses. It would mean defeat if that other person did not equally desire me.
Also, with respect to human beings, I am always a top or an equal. I hate to be a bottom, to be passive, to surrender, to lose control to the point that the other person willingly or unwillingly may hurt me. Maybe it is because of the hurt people have caused me, in school, college and university, maybe it has got to do with my ego, possibly with both. Zaid invokes society’s patriarchal power equation to suggest that masculinity lies in being top, active, penetrator. In society’s language then, I am a man with respect to human beings.
Why do I flirt?
With the people I love or care for a lot, and I am excepting my relatives eeeeeeeeeks, flirting is like poetry, a way of reveling in intimacy, of affirming non-physically the bonds we share, the places where our souls cares each other, linger …… you don’t do it in a utilitarian way to attract someone to you, that would be crass and materialistic…..its like how monkeys often scratch each other’s fur or women braid each other’s hair….
With the people I do not care for so much, I flirt to get attention, to make people desire me…..i hate to be ignored, I want to attract others not because I want to engage in any carnal relation with these people, but because I desire their friendship, decrease my loneliness, and because flirting is one way I feel will make them intimate enough to me to the extent that they will not hurt me as the people did to me earlier. It’s a mixture of friendship, of desperate solitude and the depression engendered by it and a natural defence-mechanism…….but it is not, it is never, carnal…
Who am I attracted to then? To the one who gives me what I desire. God. Or the idea of God, if God does not exist.
Why?
I imagine God to be a rock, a saviour, someone who has always been with me, protected me, shielded me, anointed me, and will finally come to me, fold me in the divine arms, and give me peace and rest. God is what I hope for, what I carnally love, the one I think of as the source of every pleasure, every meaning, the source of strength and the remover of loneliness, the meaning behind all metaphors, the beauty behind all beauty, the rewarder and the punisher, even whose punishments give pain only to chastise us and take us to good, to be one with the Good, which is ultimate pleasure. I imagine salvation to be an unending sexual act, an unending love, the way indeed in which our religions generally describe it, Hinduism and Buddhism directly, and Christianity more indirectly.
Adopting the language of a patriarchal society, my seeking for God is in some senses akin to a woman’s seeking a man. Is this abnormal? Yes, from the point of view of secular atheistic or agnostic modernity, no, from the point of view of eternity. Tagore, chaitanya and the vaishnava poets, tantra, the song of songs in the bible and the psalms, bhakti and sufi songs, the Upanishads, the Christian mystics, all speak often of the devotee as a female longing for God the male. Here man and woman are metaphors for the beloved and the lover, the strong and the weak. Chaitanya speaks of feeling Radha-bhav in him, the feeling of being Radha. But gender here is only a metaphor. And it is an unstable metaphor. In vajrayana Buddhism, God is imagined as at rest, as a woman, while the restless devotee is male and seeking union. in Hinduism, it is the female Shakti that is seen as active, and the male Shiva as passive. In medieval troubadour songs, the strong is the woman lady while the weak is the male knight lover. Therefore one cannot on the basis of a narrow 21st c. experience claim that to desire to be passive is to be feminine. In Bengali hindu poems, Shiva is the repeatedly seen as passive, while the active Kali is the one standing on top. It is a poor colonial hangover that makes us ignore these crucial issues.
I desire God. But do I love God? I do not know. My desire for God is in some ways egotistic, I desire God because god has and will save me, protect me etc. this obsession with God is narcissistic then. But that is not the only thing. When I love people or try to do good to them, it is only then that I truly love God for God’s only commandment to us is to love the Other as my Self. I love God when I help my fellow beings.
Why do I help and try in my own small ways to help my fellow beings? I love loving people and being loved in return. Also, I genuinely try to be good to others coz I feel that in those moments God is closest to me, I can feel God………. I feel alive when I am good….i feel rewarded too…..like that night when I was emotionally climaxing while the wind caressed my thighs and I felt one with the universe, alive, alive….
I don’t want to bring desire into the picture with people I love coz desire starts games of power, of seeking attention and so on that often ruins relationships….i have messed up a lot of relationships coz I wanted ppl to not only desire me but give me the love that is fulfilling
Desire and ego and hence carnality are things that for me are directed to God who alone can satisfy them….i try to love God too……perhaps because I want god to protect me in return, to reward me, but that is only partly….i do love, not perfectly of course, but I love…..a few human beings, and God
So why should it wrong that I do not carnally pursue any human being? Why should it be abnormal?
I have had and have some extremely intimate and enriching relationships that by God’s grace I think has allowed me to become in some small ways a better person. Is that not true love? Why should love always be about carnality and desire? Why can’t it be about friendship? Of living everyday? Of feeling the breeze between one’s thighs? Of having some indescribable moments when you feel you have reached the stars? I have had all this..and you still mean to tell me, that I have not loved and been loved in return?
Scio Amo
Sunday, August 17, 2008
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