Spirit-Primal Fusion

11. O Brave New Age

There’s no doubt that Madhurya Bhava was originally overtly erotic, and even hardcore among tantrists ~ i.e., the most advanced form of the praxis was actual intercourse, with the lusciously long delay before climax during which the couple would climb to the heights of dyadic spiritual experience. It should also be noted that a man who had mastered the supreme degrees of the art could have a total orgasm without spilling a drop of seed into his lover’s yoni.

This sexual alchemy spread to China where it developed under a Taoist rubric. The explicit inner secrets were never divulged out of school, but an exoteric rendering survived in The Secret of the Golden Flower. It also made an impact on Buddhism, as evidenced by mandalas full of Buddhas in tantric embrace with their Shaktis.

The Muslim invasion put a big crimp in the action in its Indian homeland, where stone idols of the Shiva Lingam were smashed and the real one probably went limp. Madhurya Bhava and related practices indeed became flaccid, as pandits wrote commentaries on the classic texts insisting that it was all strictly symbolic. They said that the bhakta should make love with Krishna only in her heart; if her yoni tingled too, it was a sure sign that she had stepped off the path and should renew her vow of chastity. This stringent trend with its repressed underbelly also spread inexorably to the eastward religions, until the situation matched up pretty well with the Christian dispensation at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass, as well as with everything in between.

Change finally swept over this whole ecumene starting from the West in the modern age. The British displaced the Muslims as rulers of India, which facilitated an epochal interchange of religious knowledge. In the latter part of the 19^th century there began a large-scale diffusion of Eastern religions to the West, especially Hinduism. It was limited to the sophisticated classes until the mass opening of the doors of perception in the 1960s, which gave rise to the heterodox spirituality of the New Age. It all became thoroughly mainstream as the postmodern era passed into the Third Millennium, and no one is surprised anymore by the many forms of sacred strangeness to which people of any past culture would have said: “What in the name of God?!?”

As noted in the Prelude, these developments have taken place in the matrix of the Kali Yuga, where the culture of female domination encourages the sexual freefall into promiscuity. In Eros Upshift it was said that the degenerate postmodern forms of tantra have lost sight of its true aim, which is for men and women to sacralize themselves in the most passionate acts of love, thereby forming a deep heart-bond. Our aim in this writing is sexual regeneration, an upshift of the relationship between the sexes to a new evolutionary plateau, which we call Überlove. The formula for an evolutionary leap is given in Genetic Reuptake: in the artificially protected environment of an advanced civilization, new forms arise in all fields of human endeavor ~ creative and idiosyncratic, refined and overbred, novel and perverse. The collapse inevitably comes, and of the millions of individuals who have developed these rarefied qualities, an elect few prove themselves fit for survival in a state of nature, where their gifts can fully flower in a Golden Age.

So now we may ask if anything has arisen from the fertile (if not fetid) decay of postmodern sexuality that bears such high promise. The answer lies in the resurrection of Madhurya Bhava, attested by first-person reports that rival the miracles and wonder of the mythic original.

12. Conjugal Union: Body, Soul, and God