Valson Thampu

ShivamurthyMuruga, the Lingayat Seer in Karnataka stands accused of sexually exploiting two girls under his charge. We do not know the truth of the matter as yet. All we know is that the Seer is under investigation. We also know that the alleged event has assumed extreme significance in the state and, further, that the society is polarised on how this situation is to be handled. This polarisation results not only from the contrary pulls of law and political compulsions, but also from the human sentiments that lurk within the human psyche.

All the same, spirituality implies a heightening of sexuality. The ascetic vocation implies sacrificing sexuality. The sexuality thus sacrificed is not destroyed. It is heightened, instead. The ascetic renunciation of sexuality is different from the destruction of the capacity for sex through surgical and pharmacological means.

A true ascetic is one who loves God to the utmost. But what is often overlooked is that there is a continuity between loving God and loving fellow human beings. Loving God activates and intensifies the individual’s need to love and to be loved. That is the truth, even if this is the truth that is either feared or discounted in the religious context. Human sexuality is scarified not to God, but to the unsustainable assumption that God-love can exclude human love. For a man, if he is honest with himself, the need to love God is inseparable from the need to love a woman in truth as Thomas Merton realized for himself. Not surprisingly, the human fervour for God is expressed best in terms of man-woman love.

God’s love for human beings is expressed best universally in terms of the idealised love a man to a woman. Both are associated with depth. That is where sexuality is posited. Sexuality is the entry-point into the depth of love. A human being is penetrated by his or her love of God, much like a woman being penetrated in the sexual consummation of love. In the spiritual view, life exists at the point of intersection between these two loves. Love craves expression, for it is an outpouring of the self. The out-pouring needs a receptacle. To pour out the self without a receptacle is to waste oneself. Surely, no human sense, much less spiritual merit, can be attributed to it.

Swami Vivekananda believed that sexual energy and spiritual energy are inter-convertible. Sexual energy can be converted to spiritual energy; and spiritual energy to sexual energy. This explains, at least in part, the special attraction that women feel towards ascetics. Likewise a man feels specially fascinated by a woman who is spiritually impeccable, whereas he merely uses a woman, who is spiritually un-awakened. If this truth is not as evident enough it is because of the institution of marriage, which purports to hold back spouses from using and discarding each other casually.

The sexual element lurks in the fascination the sacred holds. It is a theme that Tolstoy deals with in Fr. Sergius; in particular, in the attempt of the rich widow to seduce and sexually ‘conquer’ the ascetic monk. Though he holds on to his precarious grounds of sexual continence, Tolstoy infuses powerful apprehensions regarding its sustainability in the extreme rigour it takes Fr. Sergius to maintain his self-control. He chops off his index finger in a bid to neutralise the the temptation with extreme physical pain. What is implied here is that spiritual powers are insufficient to master the sexual urge even in the cases of those who have, like Fr. Sergius, perfected spiritual asceticism. Tolstoy’s realism makes him affirm, as the story ends, that it is dangerous for men of the spiritual vocation to under-estimate the power of sexuality at any point in their life. Fr. Sergius in Tolstoy’s story ends up overpowered and wrecked, at the zenith of his spiritual vocation, by the sexual impulse, on which he thought he had assumed to have attained complete mastery.

No matter which way you look at the human condition you cannot escape the fact that the power of sexuality remains menacingly potent for the better part of the life of a human being, including those of the ascetic vocation. So, seers and saints too live under relentless pressures of sexual urges and turbulences. Let’s put this truth in the form of the pattern familiar to everyone. Let us say that the sexual urge pulls the individual in one direction. When that happens, his need to maintain his equilibrium becomes acute. If this equilibrium is lost, he will fall in the direction of the pull. How can this be avoided? There is only one way: there must be a pull of comparable potency in the opposite direction. The all-important question is: what could be this equilibrium-maintaining-pull? Also, how can this be sustained, given how powerful the sexual urge is? Obviously, an individual who embraces the ascetic rule of life feels the saving grace of that counter-balancing pull in the early years of his vocation which is marked by spiritual zeal. Sadly, it dissipates over a period of time; perhaps sooner than is reckoned.

This is due, in part, to the spiritual decay of the religious institution to which the ascetic individual belongs. This leaves the spiritual energies of the so-called ascetic unutilized. So, the need to convert his sexual energy into spiritual energy does not arise. The individual ascetic is, in that case, embedded in a way of life comprising the daily performances of religious routines, which engage only a small part of his energies. The ascetic Individual remains burdened, and his existential equilibrium perilously poised, in such a context, imperilled by his unexpended, un-sublimated sexual energies. As per the law of nature it is necessary that the loss of equilibrium results in a fall.