What is the meaning of the statement “The Origin of sex life in its pure form is Krishna”
From: Ravikant Jagtap:
The Origin of sex life in it’s pure form is Krishna.Does it mean that even In Spiritual there is Physical Intercourse. Plz Clarify
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors. Question from Ravikant Jataprabhu. The origin of sex life in its pure form is in Krishna. Does it mean that even in the spiritual world there is physical intercourse? Please clarify. Answer. The statement that the origin of sex life in its pure form is Krishna, which is a paraphrase of what Sri Prabhupada said at several places, is more in a definitional sense of, the definition of the absolute truth as being the source of everything, and that absolute truth being Krishna. It is not necessarily in a specific sense that everything that is present in the material world has to be present in the spiritual world. So, the basic conception, the basic underlying point over here is that whatever exists in the fundamental foundational sense in the material world, the question comes, where does it come from? So, various religions of the world, they all acknowledge that sex is a great distraction from approaching God, but where does the sex come from? And does it come from Satan? Is it present in God? So, these are questions that are difficult to answer for those religious traditions. And the Bhagavad Gita explains that this world is a reflection of the spiritual world. So, what is pleasant in the reflection has to have some, it comes from the origin, but in the reflection there are many distorted things that are present. So, there may be a mango in the original tree, but when it is reflected, its shape may get distorted, and it may appear very ugly instead of beautiful, say, in the reflection. So, similarly, things in this material world get perverted. So, is there physical intercourse? There is nothing physical in the spiritual world. There is a body which is there, but that body is not made of physical elements. That body is spiritual. But at the same time, there is the madhurya rasa, the conjugal relationship is there, and the male-female forms are there, and whatever bodily characteristics are there of the male-female forms in this world, those are present in the bodily characteristics of the forms in the spiritual world also. Actually, whatever is present in this world is due to what is present in the original spiritual world. And even the deity forms of the Lord have the bodily characteristics related with the male and female forms accordingly. So, specifically speaking, our acharyas do not talk about this, because this is something which can be very easily misunderstood. Because we cannot think of male-female love, especially sexual love, without lust. And we drag our material conceptions in the spiritual relationships. Bhakti Sanskrit Thakur would say that Radharani serves Krishna in private. So the activity is not so much centered on the kind of lust-driven sexuality that is there in this world, but it is primarily devotional service. And because we cannot conceive of, it’s very difficult for us to conceive of devotional service in this way, so our acharyas don’t talk about it so much. But at the same time, the spiritual world is not deficient in any way. So whatever is present in this material world has its pure prototype in the spiritual world. So the Madhurya Nasa is the expression of the conjugal relationship between, of the relationship as male-female between the Lord and the devotee. And that is considered to be the highest expression of love. So till we understand love at the spiritual level, trying to understand the specifics of how that love is expressed can only serve to drag us down to the sensual level, the physical sensual level, where we will fall prey to lust. And that’s why Aishwarya Prabhupada stuck to the principle that whatever is present in the material world has its origin in its pure, pristine form in God. But whether we are qualified to understand the pure and pristine form, the specifics of that, that is something which requires spiritual advancement, purification, nadhikar, that comes by the blessings of the Supreme Lord. That’s why even Aishwarya Prabhupada wanders against reading the Tantric and Tokshila Bhagavatam prematurely and want to speak of the Acharya’s books where there are more esoteric descriptions of the past tense of Radha-Vishnu. So it’s best to understand the principle of the statement and not try to visualize or analyze the specifics of how prema is expressed in conjugal relationship.
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
Question from Bhoopak Prabhu. Can you please explain in detail the origin, manifestation and transformation of sex desire? Let me put the question as below. Where is actually the sex desire located? We understand from scripture the desire to enjoy separate from Krishna, Kama is the root of mortal existence and a sure characteristic of a conditioned soul.
Then it manifests as gross attraction for the body of opposite sex. The confusion is as below. One species is attracted only to one's own species of opposite gender.
So when the soul identifies with a particular species, for example, we had one article about ghosts. They don't have a gross body. Still they think they are male-female humans and may try to fulfill their sex desire.
But actually the ghosts don't have a gross body now. So if that soul which is in a ghost body now is going to get a body of a dog in the next life, then when will that soul start having the desire of a dog? There are some classes of people called asexuals. I don't know if they really exist, but dictionary definition is that these are people who do not have any sexual attraction to either males or females.
So I'm not able to understand if this desire is a manifestation of the root desire to enjoy separate from Krishna, which is a must characteristic of a conditioned soul, how can they be free from it without doing any spiritual practice? So it looks like this has origin in the body, body type, and not in the soul. Please explain how to understand the Shastra statement that this is the disease of every conditioned soul. Answer? It's a thoughtful question.
So firstly, as you rightly pointed out, the desire to enjoy separate from Krishna is the root of sex desire. Now all the religious traditions of the world recognize that lust is a fundamental obstacle on the spiritual path. And they all have some kind of regulations to regulate sex desire.
But they don't have a clear philosophical explanation of how sex desire originates. So in the Vedic wisdom tradition, especially in the Gaudiya Vaishnavism tradition, the understanding is quite clear. When we say that the soul wants to imitate Krishna, soul doesn't want just to enjoy separate from Krishna, but wants to enjoy like Krishna independent of him.
Soul wants to imitate Krishna. So the male-female duality that is there in this world is originally present in the spiritual world. And that male-female duality is the duality of the divine couple Radha-Krishna, Lakshmi-Narayan, or Sita-Ram.
Now that relationship is similar to as well as different from the relationship in this world. Or to put it more precisely from a philosopher's perspective, this relationship that we have of the male-female in the world is a distorted reflection of that original relationship. So this is the understanding based on 15.1 in the Bhagavad Gita, Urdhva-moola-vada-shakham.
This world is like a upside down banyan tree, which indicates that it is a reflection of the original world. So when the soul wants to imitate Krishna, then the soul wants to develop relationships similar to the relationships that are there in the spiritual world between Krishna and Radha-Rani, or Krishna and the gopis in general. And that is the root cause of the sexual attraction in this world.
Now it is not only that the souls who are male bodies want to imitate Krishna, souls in female bodies also want to imitate Krishna, because the essential mood is they wanted this center of attraction, they want the center of affection, and they want to be the number one. So a male wants to enjoy the female body from outside, a soul in the female body wants to enjoy the female body from inside the body, that means wants to be the center of attention and wants to be the enjoyer. So either way, the principle is the same.
Now, the desire to enjoy separate from Krishna expresses itself in various ways. As we know, Krishna talks that there are three gates to hell, lust, anger and greed. And in general, the Vedic tradition talks about the six enemies, lust, anger, greed, envy, pride and illusion.
So all these are distorted expressions of that original love for Krishna, which has now become distorted because of wanting to enjoy separate from Krishna and want to enjoy imitating Krishna. So lust is the most prominent and dominant expression of this desire to imitate Krishna, but it is not the only expression. And that is why there can be situations and even a person without spiritual practice does not necessarily have lust.
The principle is that the soul will want to enjoy some form of matter and to be the controller and to be the enjoyer. So there may be people whose pride of learning may be so great that they may feel that there is no need for sensual desire for me. Similarly, there may be other people who may be so determined to earn money that just for the sake of earning money, they can, because of their greed, they can temporarily just put aside the lust.
So the point is the soul wants to enjoy matter. And just as Krishna is the controller, Krishna is the enjoyer, soul wants to be the controller and enjoyer. So lust is a prominent and dominant expression.
Prominent means it is very visible to people in people's lives. And dominant means that is the primary form of expression. But it is not all the exclusive form of expression of the perversion of the original desire to serve Krishna.
That's why in some situations that desire may not always be expressed as lust. So now your specific question is, where is lust situated? Lust is situated in the subtle body. So the power of desiring is situated in the soul.
Because the soul is a source of consciousness and consciousness is essential for desire. But what the soul will desire, that means how that power will be executed, that will be dependent on the kind of desires that are stored in the mind, which prompt the soul, which offer various options for enjoyment for the soul. So just like a person may have the capacity to lift weight, but depending on what is available, he may exhibit his weight lifting propensity accordingly.
Dumbbells are available, that person may lift dumbbells, otherwise the person may lift bags or a person may try to lift some other pile of books or whatever. So like that, the soul has the power to desire, but how that desire is expressed varies depending on what options are available within the mind. First is within the mind and then beyond that is the body.
So there may be certain desires in the mind and these also require the right bodily situation for expression. So now we know that small children, before they attain puberty or at least pre-puberty, they do not exhibit any lust. Now if the soul is itself lusty, then why is it, if the soul itself has the power of desiring and lust is stored in the mind, then why is that not expressed? Because the bodily apparatus is not there.
Because the bodily apparatus is not available, is not suitable right now, so therefore lust is not expressed. But as soon as puberty comes, it's like a sudden wave of passion sweeps over them and they just don't know what struck them and they start becoming lusty. Similarly, we may see that animals exhibit lust only in particular seasons.
It's not that they are self-controlled or renunciate at other times, but it's a biological drive that is triggered by seasonal stimuli. So again the point remains that the lust that is there in the soul, or rather that is there in the mind, is expressed through the body depending on the right biological age and the right environment. So at other time, lust is there but it is dormant.
Now in the case of ghosts, although the ghosts don't have a gross body, they still have a subtle body and lust and in fact all the anarthas are stored in the subtle body and that's why the ghosts do have desires for lust or desires for greed, say eating a particular kind of food or whatever, like that. Now another feature of the ghosts is that although they have left the previous gross body, they have not generally lost the memory of their previous gross body. And because they do not have a next body till now, so therefore the subtle body still has the memories of the previous body and does not have any connection with the new body.
It acts in a sort of time warp. Time warp means the subtle body acts as if there is still that gross body or there is still the possibility to enjoy through a similar gross body if the soul can occupy it. So in general, for the soul to go to a new body and to get adapted to the new body, a process of transition and transformation of consciousness is involved, especially the next species, a different species.
Now when the next species is a human species, the level of transformation may be less. It is primarily the memory wipeout that happens during the process of birth primarily as well as throughout the whole process of transmigration in the previous body to the next body. But in the case of disembodied souls or ghosts, because their past body was the only body that they have in their mind, at least from the recent memory, and they still have the memory of how they enjoyed or could have enjoyed through that body.
And because they do not have any facility to enjoy through a future body, that's why they still keep scheming for enjoying with the previous body. So these memories come up because they are stored in the mind. Now regarding asexuals, surely there can be people like this.
Asexuality can be biological, it can be psychological, whichever way, depending on whether there is some bodily basis disorder or bodily dysfunctionality that causes this, or it's just psychological, as the way they feel themselves to be. Now the lust or the desire to enjoy separate from Krishna is there always. But again, based on the kind of karma that a person has done, the soul gets to express the desire in different ways.
And in some cases, the soul doesn't get to express the desire. So for example, when a soul goes into the body of a tree. Now, Shrila Prabhupada writes in the purport of 3.38, so in this verse in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna is talking about three layers of covering on the soul.
And he says all these three layers of covering are due to lust and they are of varying degrees of thickness. The thickest is for trees. And he compares them to a child in the womb.
So he says a child in the womb cannot express itself by heart naturally and behave like a child till it comes out of the womb. So till that period of gestation in the womb, it just has to exist in the womb almost helplessly. So similarly, the soul that goes into a tree body, its consciousness is so covered that it is practically in a state of helplessness.
It can't move about. And for example, the soul is in the body of a grass. Its only conception of success is to grow and grow also in one direction.
And that also it can grow only for a few millimeters. It can maximize just a few inches, generally speaking, for most grasses. So that is the only thing that the soul is living for.
That same soul might earlier have been an elephant in an elephant body where it is charging around the forest and causing everyone to run away in fear. So that is how the, that is the extent to which the body expression of the soul's power of desire can be changed depending on the kind of karma that the soul does. So now if we see the kind, as compared to the kind of mania that is surrounded around sex desire in human beings, people are constantly fascinated about it, talking about it, seeing it in movies and websites and things like that.
And always, almost always fantasizing about it. As compared to the mania that is there in human species, the soul in a tree's body doesn't have anything of that sort. Actually, if we see how reproduction takes place, there is practically very little contact and any kind of sense of controlling and enjoying any other body.
It's not that a tree goes and brushes against another tree and has some bodily contact and dominates the other tree and attracts the other tree and then gets some enjoyment. It's just the pollen grains flow, flow generally by the power of air or through butterflies or something like that. And then they fall in contact with flowers, the corresponding reproductive organs that are there, or rather it's reproductive parts that are there.
And then reproduction takes place. So there is, according to the consciousness of the soul, there is some level of pleasure over there also. But as compared to the mania and the huge passion that is there in human species, and that is also there in animal species to a large extent, it's almost absent in the tree species.
So why is it like that? Because, actually Prabhupada writes in his Purport of 2.38, that due to an excessive exhibition of lust in a very inordinate or simple way, when the soul abuses the propensity for sexual enjoyment, then the soul is put in a body where it has capacity for sexual enjoyment. So that becomes like a reformatory phase for the soul to decrease its infatuation with lust. So in this way, just as in the tree the sexual propensity is reduced, that doesn't mean the soul has become pure devotee and has no desire to enjoy separate from Krishna.
It's just that although that desire may be there, there is no suitable body mechanism for expressing it. So just as this can happen in the tree species, according to the particular karma of some people, it can happen in human species also. That means some people, because of some peculiar karma, may not have that sexual desire.
That doesn't mean that they are pure souls. It just means that the impure desire to enjoy separate from Krishna is not expressed through lust. They may have their own idiosyncrasies.
They may have their own attractions and conceptions of how to enjoy matter by manipulating in particular ways. And some of them may be voracious eaters, some of them may be whatever else. They will all have some ways in which they are trying to enjoy matter.
The essential disease of the soul is that instead of getting happiness by reciprocating love with Krishna, the soul imagines that it can enjoy by dominating matter. Now the most prominent way in which matter can be dominated is by dominating or controlling or enjoying the material form of the opposite sex. But apart from that, there are other ways, sometimes more subtle, sometimes more gross, in which the soul can also enjoy matter.
So essentially, when Prabhupada says bhava roga, Bhagavatam also uses this word, that the disease of material existence, which is the disease of the conditioned soul, that is the desire to enjoy matter instead of the desire to enjoy by serving Krishna. Generally, this will be expressed as lust. But at other times, it may be expressed in some other ways also.
Thank you.