Sex & Ayurveda
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 What
is the relationship of sex and spirituality? A strange
combination it seems but one that evokes huge responses. Is
there something called Sacred sex! Or is celibacy the only
path for the true seeker.
It is ultimately a personal choice that people must make, not
forgetting that the spiritual practice of celibacy was and is
considered to be a profound even crucial aspect of spiritual
life by the Christians, Buddhist and Hindus alike.
For it is foolish to underestimate the overwhelming power that
the sexual instinct possesses to create complex delusions and
illusions! Understand and be aware of this power fully before
accepting or rejecting it
Historically, sex and spirituality have been uneasy bedfellows
-- while some ancient religions did include sexuality in their
rites, others sought to control sexuality, either by
suppressing it or by severely limiting its expression. Most of
the dominant religions in the world today are sex-negative,
preaching the suppression of the sexual urge or the channeling
of that urge into socially-acceptable forms (marriage as
reproductive arrangements). |
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Which ancient traditions chose to include
sexuality as a spiritual act?
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The Sumerians performed the Sacred
Marriage, a union between a priestess of their goddess,
Inanna, with a priest-king, as a means of obtaining the
favor of this goddess for their cities. In Greece, this type
of ritual sex was referred to as the Hieros Gamos; and
evidence indicates that it was also practiced by the
Egyptians in the cult of Isis up until the Roman era. Hints
from various ancient sources indicate that a Hieros Gamos
may have been part of the Eleusinian mysteries.
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Sacred prostitution, a means by which men
could visit temples and have sex with temple prostitutes in
order to commune with a particular goddess, was practiced in
numerous ancient Middle Eastern cultures, and in India up
until the 1950s.
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In India, the Tantric tradition, overseen
by the god Shiva and his consort Kali/Parvati, continue for
hundreds (possibly thousands) of years before being
incorporated into Buddhism. Practitioners of Tantra seek
enlightenment and union with the Divine through sexual rites
and other forms of meditation and ritual.
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After Tantra was brought to China by
traveling monks, it was combined with Taoist philosophy and
Chinese medical theory, and was used by those who sought to
increase health and (in some cases) achieve physical
immortality (through sexual techniques thought to prolong
the vitality of the practitioner).
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Some sects of early Christianity
incorporated sexual rites into their religious practices;
all of these sects were persecuted into extinction by the
Roman Catholic Church once it was able to successfully
consolidate its political standing as the sole religious
institution of Europe.
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