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Books: Your Perspective determines Your Destiny Making God "Real" in Your Life |
Sharmaji
Wisdom Touch Without Desire
Introduction
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Communion between woman and man is a physical and also a spiritual phenomenon of unimaginable magnitude. It should be looked upon with great respect. If we have respect and love for another person, then our touch is magical, our words are mantras, and our thoughts are spells. The process of physical union has three ingredients: respect, love, and sex. And the most important condition for a proper alchemical fusion is that these ingredients should come in the given order. If we have respect in our hearts, love may follow; and if it does, it is certainly healthy love. If we have love in our hearts, sex may follow; and if it does, it is certainly healthy sex. That is the only way to become one with someone physically or emotionally. It cannot be the other way around. If we start with the body, the possibility is, we will end up with it. That is what man has done. He has ended up with only the body of woman. How can he give respect to a mere piece of flesh? So he treats the body of woman as something non-divine, and in this process pretends to be non-divine himself. Both end up as unreal. When these priorities are thus turned upside down, the first to invade the act of union is Sin. There is no sin in sex except when it occurs without respect or love. And this is precisely what happened to prehistoric man. Obsessed with passion, he invaded the body of woman with no respect for her. When man first helped himself to the feast of woman's body without seeking her permission, his passion stifled his conscience. Later, when understanding dawned in him, his conscience pricked him and he called sex an act of sin. Certainly it was “his” act of sin. In order to get away with the sin, man denigrated woman as an object of sin, the cause of sin. The whole responsibility of the Fall of Man fell on the frail shoulders of woman. If we touch a body without first having love for it, it is so hard for us to respect it later for we have already polluted it. Not having love or respect for the partner, we turn sex into a barter of flesh. In order to consciously live in our divinity, which is our destiny, we have to start from above, i.e. respect, and not from below, i.e. the body. The body is a mere projection of our earthly existence, but divinity is our very identity, the core of our being. The act of sex is an art. The fact is, our genes, our unconscious memory, our sanctimonious guides and countless teachers have failed to rouse us to the reality of sex. So let us kick ourselves out of this prejudice and morass of conceptual stagnation and enter the realm of light and love. Art grows from within, but it has to be understood and learned with an open and unbiased mind. When we enter the house of love, we have to leave the tattered cocoon of our concepts outside. It is never a mere man or mere woman touching another mere woman or mere man. They are two mighty black holes sucking into one another. Even if we are not conscious of it, the magnitude of the ghastly fallout resulting from indiscreet crashing of bodies into other bodies is immense. Today, society is sick from excessive touch, mostly indiscriminate and polluted by gross desires. In the war of the sexes, woman has lost more battles than man, for man invariably chooses to fight with her on the physical plane—the only plane where man has an advantage over her. Therefore the only way woman can survive in a respectable way is not to accept the game plan set up by him. If, as a reaction to man's exploitation, she raises the banner of hatred, she will not lack audience and applause, but she can't win, because who can win when one is in love with hatred? Nor can she gain much by shouting hollow slogans of freedom from man while bearing his children and producing a rabid human crop conceived in hatred! She cannot, finally, beat man in a physical bout, either, by developing and flexing her muscles. She will only lose the enchanting charms of her own body in the process. These are all angry reactions of a frustrated mind. Making any efforts in these directions might boost her ego temporarily, but finally she will find out, to her dismay, that she is running on man's track and all the referees are men. Woman can win only one battle—the final, decisive battle—the battle of love! Woman's glory is not flesh but love and woman refuses to recognize it. By meeting with man only in the realm of pure love, she will give him a chance to re-organize himself and learn to deal with her more respectfully. Man has survived as a giant in the philosophical and spiritual world because he has kept woman out of it and relegated her to other less risky jobs like housekeeping, office work, and childbearing. If woman is to come into her own, she must gain her right place in the world of spirit, in the world of purity, in the world of wisdom. By continuing to hurl abuses at man for all his excesses and limitations, she will unwittingly subject herself to the morbid ranting of a victim. Above all, she must avoid professed and overt competition with man because, again, she would be looking to what she has to win and whom she has to subdue—the patent psychological traits of sick, jealous man whose vocation all along has been hunting. She will continue to be a prey to man if she does not stop counting the number of times man has taken a shot at her. In order to be her own, she has to grow up to the task of co-operating with man, this time, on “her” terms. She is complementary to man—to complete what man has started and made a mess of—politics, business, and professions. These are the realms man thinks belong to him, and they are cesspools of intrigue, hatred, prejudice, selfishness, envy, and discrimination. Woman is needed to set the house in order—not only the home, this time. Woman has to banish from her heart and mind what injustice and unfairness she has been subjected to. She has to heal her wounds, erase her scars, before she can claim her rightful place. She need not act supercilious by forgiving man, nor unreal by trying to forget his insolent and violent history. She has to ignore him, and then transcend him. Countless times she has passed through a furnace. Sometimes she is pushed into it and many times she has herself chosen to wear the crown of flames. She did it in a masochistic endeavor to fulfill man's expectations, too. The dignity of motherhood was seemingly a generous offer, but it had a hidden trap that finally left woman a self-sacrificing mother, wife and obedient daughter. Woman has lasted through all this and much more. She has an unbelievable spirit for survival. She turns into ashes and rises out of them like a Phoenix! Woman's glory is spirit and not flesh! She has to come out of this cage of flesh assigned to her by man. If man hopes to find woman without first finding himself, it is futile. The same is true for woman. She has lost herself. She has to find herself. We can all help if we choose to, but we generally choose not to choose. Woman is alone in looking for herself. There is a shelf in the recesses of the human heart where woman sits waiting to be found. This book is a very humble attempt to explore this possibility. Even if it makes only a tiny dent in the existing social attitude toward women and adds some joy to the lives of both women and men, the author will look upon his attempt as worthwhile.
COPYRIGHT© 2003
J.M. Sharma, U.S.A. All rights reserved.
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