Our contemporary culture constantly glamorizes sex through gaudy images permeated with sexual undertones and overtones. Due to this incessant glamorization of sex, most people live perpetually in a state of artificial sexual stimulation; sex tends to be a perennial top-ranker in their wish list.
Paradoxically, the more people glamorize sex in their imagination, the more they devalue it in real life. This devaluation takes two forms:
1. An increasingly utilitarian approach to sex: Many people, often unmarried, indulge in sex casually just for getting a temporary high or, more frequently, just for temporarily getting rid of a tormenting urge.
2. An increasing feeling of emptiness in the experience of sex: Many people find the actual sexual experience disappointing and even boring because the experienced pleasure always turns out to be pale and stale when contrasted with the fantasized pleasure.
Gita wisdom offers a fascinating insight on sex. The Bhagavad-gita (07.11) states that sex, when performed in harmony with natural spiritual principles, is an opportunity to experience the divine. Sex offers humans the divine pleasure of assisting God in bringing new life into the world.
However, humans are the only species in nature that unnaturally divorces copulation from procreation by artificial means like contraception. This unnatural divorce divests sex of its divine aspect, thereby reducing it to a primarily physical activity. The pleasure in it usually gets reduced to the secretion, ejection and reception of chemicals. This, according to Gita wisdom, is a disastrous devaluation of sex that distracts us from the purpose of sex and the purpose of life itself.
To help us restore sex to its proper dignified place in our life, Gita wisdom gently urges us to redirect our quest for happiness to the spiritual level and harmonize sex with that quest.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 07 Text 11
“I am the strength of the strong, devoid of passion and desire. I am sex life which is not contrary to religious principles, O lord of the Bharatas [Arjuna].”
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