(Read Part 1 here.)
When I was an undergraduate, a man I looked up to as a teacher and a mentor took me to his studio so I could see some of his recent paintings. There was one that I could not stop staring at: a naked man falling through a fractured landscape of colors, which I remember as different shades of gold, brown, and orange. The canvas seemed to vibrate with the pain my mentor had recently revealed when he told me how deeply unhappy he was in his marriage. He asked what I thought of the piece, and I immediately drew the connection to his life that, to me at least, seemed perfectly obvious. He, however, was surprised. “You really see that here?” he asked, pointing at the painting. Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned to me and spoke out loud a question I didn’t feel I had the right to ask, “You want to know why I don’t divorce my wife, don’t you? It’s because I love her, and by love I mean I still get an erection when I’m near her. It’s like being in prison.”
I thought about that conversation for the first time in decades when I read the hoopoe’s prelude to “The Story of Sheikh Sam’an” in The Conference of the Birds,the book I started to tell you about in my previous “Learning To Love The Questions” post. The hoopoe has just finished giving the birds what is essentially a spiritual pep talk, reassuring them that they do indeed have what it takes to attain enlightenment. When the hoopoe is finished, the birds ask what their next step should be. This is what their guide tells them:
“A lover,” said the hoopoe…,
“Is one in whom all thoughts of Self have died;
Those who renounce the Self deserve that name;
Righteous or sinful, they are all the same!”
For the hoopoe, to be a lover is to be one who desires union with God, who seeks, therefore, the self-immolation that is a prerequisite for that experience. Similarly, though on a more human and mundane scale, the desire for sexual union that my mentor’s erection signified for him required for its fulfillment that he renounce the version of himself that was so unhappy in his marriage that he wanted a divorce. I did not understand why my mentor would conflate love and sexual arousal like that, but his pain was so palpable, and I so young and inexperienced, that it didn’t feel right to point that out. The hoopoe, though, would have told him that his pain came from the fact that what he was calling love was rooted in his body and his sense of self and that the resulting need to remain attached to the material world—his desire for his wife—kept him from experiencing love in its purest, most transcendent form: communion with God.
Since God exists by definition outside the material world, this logic goes, the only way to enter into such communion is to renounce our attachment to that world. Once you achieve this level of renunciation, you’ll find yourself standing before the unknowable blankness of what Kierkegaard called in Fear And Trembling “the absolute,” the line that separates creation from what lies beyond it. Since you were created by God, which means that there is already within you a small part of what lies beyond creation, you will at that point be able to experience “the absolute” as if you were looking in a mirror, much as Attar’s birds discovered at the end of their journey that they themselves were the Simorgh.
The quest for enlightenment, in other words, in these terms at least, can be understood as the quest for a kind of self-love, a way of honoring what it means to say God created us in his image. I can’t help thinking, though, that there is something masturbatory about this quest. I realize that I am taking exception here to what a mystic would likely claim, specifically that because the self is annihilated in mystical transcendence a comparison to masturbation—which requires the presence of a self—is irrelevant, but I mean nothing demeaning or disrespectful in this comparison. Some Daoists understood masturbation—with the goal of controlling ejaculation—as a form of “self-cultivation,” a way of practicing sexual pleasure in order to enable higher levels of consciousness, which might be thought of as analogous though clearly not identical to the enlightenment sought by Attar’s birds. The difference is that within those forms of Daoism this higher level of consciousness generally requires the presence of a partner. It is not something you achieve entirely on your own, which means it cannot be apolitical, at least not as mystical experience is often defined in monotheistic traditions, because it will always require some form of negotiation with another person.
§§§
I know very little about Hinduism, but something I read more than three decades ago in Alain Danielou’s translation of the Kāma Sūtra, which he published as The Complete Kāma Sūtra, planted the seed of the question I am trying to explore in these posts. Inaccurately known in the West as a secular sex manual, the Kāma Sūtra is in fact a religious text, which Danielou made clear by including in his translation commentaries that elucidate the ethical, philosophical, and cosmological beliefs in which the text is rooted—beliefs that would be considered idolatrous within any of the three monotheistic traditions.
Creation, for example, is understood in these commentaries to have occurred not through the will of a singular, omniscient and omnipotent divine entity, but rather through “the copulation of Shiva [pure consciousness] and Shakti [divine energy].”
The idea is that duality precedes the birth of the Word [through which the world was created]…and that duality implies a relation, or copulation, between two principles. Respect, devotion, love, affection, sympathy, friendship, courtship, embraces, kisses are all manifestations of attraction, of relations of an erotic kind.
I’m not going to pretend to know what that statement means in the context of Hindu belief and practice, but after reading it, I began to wonder in a way I hadn’t before about the consequences different cosmologies have for how people understand their place in the world. In the monotheistic traditions, the created world emerged from a single, self-contained and self-sufficient, perfectly unified, divine source; and everything those traditions teach us about how to live in the world follows from the belief in that unity. What would change, I asked myself, if we started instead from the belief that the creative act itself requires the tension inherent in a preceding disunity, in the differences between two forces that need to come together for creation to occur?
As the list of all the different “manifestations of attraction” given by the Kāma Sūtra commentator shows, that tension need not be understood as sexual by definition, though it can of course be that as well. Instead, to me, it feels akin to what Audre Lorde talks about in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:”
[T]he first [way] in which the erotic [functions for me] is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding…and lessens the threat of…difference.
Lorde, of course, was writing out of a Black lesbian feminist sensibility, not the desire to achieve mystical enlightenment. Her essay was specifically about the need for women to reclaim the erotic within themselves over and against patriarchy’s pornographic narrowing of that capacity. Nonetheless, her position has in common with the Hindu thought I quoted above the notion that there is no such thing as a relationship that does not involve the negotiation of power—that all relationships, in other words, whether between people or between humans and the divine, are in that sense political.
I’m not trying to suggest that Lorde’s critique had its roots in Hindu cosmology or that the Hindu commentator was a proto-feminist of some sort; but when I think back to my mentor—how he experienced love as a prison because he experienced the desire his erection signified as making him a prisoner in his own body—I wonder how the framework I am using these two sources to work out for my own purposes might have changed the way he understood the predicament in which he found himself.
I will write more about this next month in Part 3. (Read Part 1 here.)