12
Sringara Rasa
Warning: Highly susceptible to scientia reductionism, these explorations can release cosmic bonding power too great to share with anyone except harmonious “till death do us part” ars erotically matured partners.
First slowly with kisses everywhere,
the dripping ahead hours lost in time
this way then that, passage-ways opening
flooding unfurling wrists held down and released
this that um yes and yes
and suddenly you on top at two a.m. there it is,
the frenzy, the shameless unabashed selfish freedom of it all comes out
wild almost hideous the truth of yes wanting mmmmmore,
whispering head turned this way more, then that way more,
even after the third hour, more more and yes of course,
the more you take the better it is,
for here in this endless place, more is all there is.
Devouring each other upward,
ascending the spinal tree of knowledge, of life—elan vital itself,
becomes the (secret) maturational pathway
for the evermore incarnating spirit—
all the way up from lingam and yoni
to the crown, the radiant jewel,
the conduit: a river of concentration
surging inward vibrating serpentine Kundalini-shakti
Source-turned surging through the violet-tinged perineum trikonam
(“triangular city of fire, flashing forth like lightning bolts
and resembling molten gold” Goraksha Paddhati 1.20)
and up the milky-white spinal cord
into the cranial heaven-realms of erogenous mind
vaginal-satiny brain flesh
seething sulci thousand-petaled orgasms
beyond the covered in shame garbled tales of Genesis
all the way up to drink the pineal soma-rasa
nectar of the gods alchemical elixir, heady froth
I recall the kisses, so deliberate
slowly focusing our lips upon one another
watching your lips like petals falling as if
they were fainting into themselves
into another place far far away—
Those lips, wanting more, awaiting more,
this way then that, tongue flicks here and there
then opening into the warm moist cathedral of joined mouths
licking slowly the inside your cheeks,
beneath your tongue
drinking each other delicately and then thirstily,
years, decades of thirst coming out.
Pausing, returning, looking hands grazing your breasts
as you leaning leaned further toward me
the tunnel of your deep neckline suddenly dropping down
opening that chasm, the darkness in the center,
your breasts revealed indirectly as you crawled toward me
closing the distance fully desiring whether you knew it or not
for me to see, look, take, please,
reach into me as I reach into you.
Then came the cumming of mouths pulsing profusely into each other
drinking madly mysterious and rare
liquid lilacs intoxicating delirious
madhu mead the honey-wine amrita nectar of the gods
saturating into each other’s slaked thirst.
The more the drinking in, the thirstier we became
You drinking my drinking of your drinking of my drinking
getting to the last hidden dram
of floral sweetness lurking deep inside the funneled blossom
stamen pistils gold-pollen-flecked anthers,
xylem tubules and micro-tubules patiently conducting
the earthy-dew into itself and phloem nourishing back downward
into the roots, root-hairs, in dark twining intercourse with soil muck
feeling up the crystalline sand grains
nubile vibrating constantly hard wet and quivering
then back up xylem, the ruddy menstrual wine, ferric,
the sweat of us, saline licked and re-licked tenderly,
other nectars of you of me, I want them all forever.
SUGGESTIVE AMBIGUITIES OF TWILIGHT TEACHINGS REVEAL, CONCEAL, AND PROTECT THE INTIMUS
Sringara Rasa, “Ars Erotica Heaven Realm,” points to a long-term state shared by a couple, a whole community, or even a whole “world and era” of urdhvaretically maturing and matured persons. References to Sringara Rasa are found in certain multilayered bhakti and tantric twilight teachings, where twilight refers to teachings half hidden in metaphors that puzzle scholars as to their “reality.”*30 For example, are the depictions in Tibetan tangka (sacred paintings) of male-female Yab-Yum unions, surrounded by flames, with the partners’ eyes ablaze in all-chakra love, meant to represent actual human couples, or do they represent deities only, or are they esoteric symbols pertaining to human-deity meditative spirit-unions, or (merely) inner marriage meditative states? Or are the famed Khajuraho Temple carvings of couples and groups engaged in ars erotica worship merely “sex education” for monks returning to worldly life, as noted at the website for Khajuraho tourism, or is this a bowdlerized public relations spin that conceals ars erotica, whole-community mysteries once led by powerful tantric gurus under the guise of the inapplicable, tourist-directed term, “sex education”?*31
Or more wisely, if not cunningly, have the ancients resorted to half-revealed, half-concealed twilight conveyance of these Sringara and pariyanga teachings to protect them from age-old-to-present snickering misperceptions, narrow-minded pruderies, and merely lascivious or immature corruptions, while also beneficently leaving traces behind intelligible only to those whose urdhvaretic maturity can make sense of them, with tears of awe and felt-confirmation flowing?†8 Here is an example from the Thirumandiram of Siddhar Thirumoolar (rendered ars erotically by me) so you can see for yourself.
825. Pleasure of Sex Union Is Endless When Breath Savoring is the Only Way
Anointing her body with unguents diverse—Bedecking her tresses with flowers
fragrant—Do you enjoy the damsel in passion’s union;—If your desire becomes
devotion—Prana will shoot up through the Spinal Pathway—
Then your enjoyment is endless.
826. If Breath is Savored, Delicious Enjoyment Results in Erotic Union
When they seek enjoyment—The breath standeth still;—The full breasted damsel
and fervent male—Stand in union exalted;—As liquid silver and gold—Their
passions emissions—In rapture commingleth.
827. Duration of Enjoyment Lengthens If Breath is Savored in the Copulatory
Yoga That is Practiced By the Hero and the Heroine—
Upward they drive the coach of breath—
That has its wheels in regions right and left;—
There they collect the waters of the heaven—And never the organs tiring know.
828. Xylemic Upflowing of Semen Urdhvaretas Through Breath Savoring—
This is the Meaning of That Union;
When in the sex act semen prepares to liquefy—
The yogi xylemic feels Seed turn instead into heart’s golden devotion to Goddess—
And attains urdhvaretas depths within;—And a matured auras radiator he then becomes.
829. Effect of Xylemic Upward Savoring of Urdhvaretas Xylemic Flow
He becomes fully matured of Knowing the path to all—the Enjoyment of all—
He becomes fully matured of self—He becomes fully matured of senses five.
830. Sex Union Through the Pariyanga Lasts Five Ghatikas and is Bliss
This is Pariyanga Yoga (cot yoga)—That lasts five ghatikas (2 hours)
Beyond the sixth—The damsel sleeps in the arms of the lover
Whom she has worshipped, too—In union blissful
That fills the heart—And passes description.
831. Matured Urdhvaretas Attainers Alone Can Resort to Pariyanga
Unless it be,—He had matured in urdhvaretas—The Pariyanga yoga—
Of five ghatikas length—No yogi/yogini shall—A woman/man embrace . . . .
834. Only Those Who Have Attained Khecari Puberty Have the Maturity for Pariyanga
Lest the silvery liquid into the golden flow,—The artful goldsmiths (practitioner)
sealed and savored it up with yogic breath—The sparks (Kundalini) that flew traveled up
by way of Spinal tube—There above,—They contained them with tongue’s tip.1
Within the yogic cosmology of reincarnation and antara-bhavas, these twilight teachings hold that Sringara Rasa is the most matured of all “enlightenment realms,” enjoyed literally “in heaven,” between earthly births. Or do these teachings refer to an earthly Sringara Rasa, as well? Perhaps the Sringara realm is permeated by samsara, the struggles, tragedies, and even horrors of human life, here and now, not in a fantasied utopian future? Indeed, perhaps as the neo-teachers teach and live, there is no urdhvaretas, no “authentic yoga,” no brahmacharya saints, no God/Goddess, and no limitations within a “scientia sexualis” to even be concerned about; heaven is simply, “Be-Here-Now.”
Or (as I believe), does Sringara Rasa emerge in its fullest glory only in wisely hidden, “beyond the pale” esoteric circles surrounding a living saint, such as Thirumoolar, whose shaktipat energies radiate from the vibrations of the twilight and kavi-poetic text as much as, or more than, from the semantic purport of the verses, vibrations that awaken and nurture the khechari prerequisite within this mystical mandala or “circle of initiates?” If so, perhaps it is because we are also in a dark wintery cosmic season that began in the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, that is slowly shifting inexorably into the spring era of an approaching next myriad thousands of years of Dvapara Yuga when charismatic ars eroticas of all sorts will once again (as they have countless times before in previous yuga cyclings) break through the world’s many reductive scientia sexualises and spontaneously emerge for the whole world family, like green buds after a “long, cold lonely winter”?2
BEYOND PROTECTIVE AMBIGUITIES AND SCHOLARLY DEMYSTIFYING CERTAINTIES INTO THE SACRED INTIMUS
When your lifelong loyal love relationship has traversed from cynical and scientia sexualis certainties into ever more sustained living in evanescent subtleties and the intimus, when you and your lifelong loyal love partner have reunited love-lust-fertility-devotion-play into an all-blendedtogether wholeness nurturing perineum-to-pineal maturity, when you have attained fluency with emotional and verbal communication and problem solving, and when you have opened access to numerous Inner Empathic Spaces, then you will be living at the entranceway to Sringara Rasa, the “heaven” of matured ars erotica passions. Khajuraho, Tibetan Buddhism Yab-Yum tangkas, and all pariyanga texts will be accessible to your ars erotically matured eyes, flowing with ecstatic tears of recognition, beyond the scholar’s puzzles, new age nascent understandings, and the psychoanalyst’s polymorphic distortions.
When the beauty of life and the great expanse of the tongue-awakened, perineum to pineal khecari puberty has blossomed, lovers’ devotional kisses, anywhere and everywhere, include a drinking of each other’s secreted entheogenic madhu nectars whose consciousness-enhancing powers derive from unlocking the matured creativity of retas, the seeds of life itself. These beyond semen, beyond ova, seed of seed nectars imbibed, through every pore and via visually “drinking each other in,” with speaking and hearing in endless repartees of “Om, Honey,” responded to with “Om, Baby,” responded to together with “We have found the endless way,” will nourish the rasas of ever-deeper devotion that provoke the curtains of the body to part and reveal yet another delicious realm of Holy of Holies and powerful aphrodisiacal nectars, as Melanie and Renee glimpsed.
We were tasting each other in a closeness we prefer to not tell you about, except to say that I felt like I was on acid or MDMA because Melanie became so wondrous to me, I can only compare it with a drug trip, but we don’t even drink! She was my goddess and I was hers. But it was “just us,” not something new agey at all. First, it was like total empathy for our whole life of suffering and all the years of breakups we went through, like a willingness to literally drink in each other’s darkest sweaty struggles, to know each other deeply. There were tears, and we licked them off each other with great tenderness. But then we got sweeter and sweeter to one another, higher and higher. We were getting free from every one of our sexual fears, hopes, and concerns, we were “worshipping” everything about each other, then endlessly dancing with each other. I try to explain it to you now, but you’d have to have been there, if you know what I mean. It’s been a year and we’ve never shared anything like it since. It was just a perfect storm of perfect us, a taste of heaven, ha! for a while.
Lifelong loyal love is the bond required by and further strengthened by these admixing exchanges of the silvery and golden bodily elixirs of life. As Xun Liu notes regarding Taoist pariyanga of duo-cultivation, there must be “genuine rapport” and mutual lifelong respect between the partners without which “the Phoenix does not chirp and the Turtle will not rise.”3
The twenty-year retas project, begun ideally by couples in their mid to late twenties, of creatively raising children to adulthood (and of elder care of parents and grandparents) can also bestow couples with the maturity requisite to approach Sringara Rasa. Thus, in their mid to late fifties, after the children have left the nest, the grihasthin couple has the time and foundation to extend their personal yoga sadhanas and couples’ practice periods and go forth into the longer hours of Sringara Rasa unions, beyond the pale of daily life schedules and concerns. As noted earlier, childless couples’ spiritual growth requires creative projects for our world family that are “equal to” raising a child or two, even for those living simple lives of private contentment. There are no shortcuts, no mere “be here now” consciousness shifts that skip us over this broad foundation of full maturation. Here are three more glimpses into Sringara Rasa from my couples work.
Frank: Once we got that eight-year thorn out of my foot of the affair or whatever the hell it was, then there wasn’t anything in the way for us. Our house had always been where all the kids came over to hang out with our kids, pancake breakfasts for twenty or thirty of them the morning of the big high school football games, everybody cracking jokes, including those kids from broken homes, the “lost puppies” we would call them, and we could’ve been one of them, seriously, that’s how close we got to it those years with that sliver gnawing at me that had broken our perfection; yeah, all along we have been best friends, best lovers, best parents. And I am a big guy, coach of the team and all that, so when I cried like a lost baby in Caroline’s arms and she started crying too, somehow, we got free and it all came together. I don’t want anything more, why should I? It’s all here, and we are ready to learn more, we will be your best students, I guarantee it!
Susan to Andrew: You just taste amazing! And your touch makes me feel how amazing I am; I didn’t know that before, none of this! And even though we got separated for about three years, I couldn’t think of anyone else but you, and here we are, and all we went through since then! We have our oasis and it’s always right there, endlessly there, no matter what else has to be taken care of. It’s perfect!
Natalia (translated from Russian): You talked about rasas and all that was kind of interesting, but it didn’t really do it for us. When you merely said, “Worship each other with every touch, every lick, and word,” that worked for us. Now we are there. Spaceba, Stuart.
Another aspect of Sringara Rasa is all heart, soul to soul and transcends the erotic-romantic and the physical realm entirely, as we see in this moving client vignette of a Down syndrome man and his brother that “just happened.”
Michael: I was watching Erich from across the room as he was watching TV and all of a sudden all of his Down features evaporated and in the exact moment that his face came into perfect focus, Erich jumped out of his chair, made a beeline to me, and threw his arms around me and said, “I love you, Michael,” and then he turned around and went back to his chair. He felt me see him, that’s what it was.
And here is another glimpse, beyond the pale, hidden and revealed in the twilight language that could not be any clearer but, then, “you’d have to be there.”
Mouths are inner-domed temples of echo-chambered yearning, wedding altars for entheogenic transubstantiations of each other’s honey-madhu sentience that wax and wane with the retas cycling lunar orb. Tongues are saints in their oral pulpits crying ars erotic love songs. Genitals are Holiest of Holies, magnetizing all with retas powers, blood cells jubilant with laughter, partners glued forever. In the moment of such unions, all devils cower as their dark loneliness is healed, all angels a-million trilling, every cell awake and quivering, spirituality charismatica, the endless wedding feast. Lifelong loyal love, the only truth there is.
And here is a scene from a story (or is it a true account?), entitled “Spiritual Wealth” by Baba Hari Dass, about the quietly meditative brahmacharya couple, Sulochana and her husband, Ramdeen.
Year after year passed and they both remained in the same cave, sitting in silence and enjoying the calmness of the jungle. They began to feel that they didn’t need to use words or talk to each other because they knew each other’s thoughts very well. All their communication was done through their mental waves, whether they were sitting together or far apart physically.
Ramdeen explained how this connection came about in this way:
Once long ago, my wife was sitting here all alone while I was sitting outside somewhere. She heard a sound inside her head. The sound became louder and louder. When I entered the cave I saw her sitting with her eyes closed, with no body consciousness. I rushed to her and tried to see if she was alive, but when my head touched hers, at once the sound started in my head, too. . . . After that, we don’t know what happened . . . when we came to our senses, we felt a peace which can’t be described . . . we sit in this cave and listen to that sound which . . . spreads all over the body . . . coming out through the pores of the skin and vibrates inside this cave . . . [now] for us the whole world is a cave and a jungle.
Baba Hari Dass continues:
The cave was changed into a big temple . . . but no one knows what happened to Ramdeen and Sulochana. Are they living in an invisible body?4