The new names and new-old ideas

My scary-brilliant daughter, who's buzzed rings around me intellectually since very small, suddenly clarified something that had bothered me forever in the Yoga Sutras and many other systems. As we waited for some Indian takeout, we perused a New Age newspaper on the bench.

I was choking inside because to the large golden statue of Lord Ganesh and the small colorful statue of Shiva, Parvati and Balaganesha near the cash register, I had only made obeisance in my thoughts, not outwardly, other than gazing at Lord Ganesha's gently curving golden feet and telling him I could not, at that moment, do more than imagine. The murtis were so beautiful and loving, I was so drawn to them, but a cold, hard wall of rejection came from the humans who had placed them there. This is the context for what has come after, and it is to me still a gift from the Lord of Obstacles! Perhaps because of my rather unconventional appearance that day (my daughter is a photographer, I had been the subject) or my colorful half-sleeve tattoo, or my daughter's own art-student-feral attire, we'd been placed behind a screen to wait, rather than in the main area like the other patrons.

Something funny in one of the New Age entrepreneurs' ads got us on the subject of sexual fetishes, erotic feelings via, e.g., shoes, ropes, urine, leather clothes. Civil libertarians the both of us, we were considering that unless such fetishes involved children, coercion or serious harm there was no reason for society to condemn them. When after a thoughtful pause she added, "But when you consider the role and purpose of sexuality...they are so irrelevant," it was like lightning striking: in certain contexts, whether one has picked up the drycleaning is irrelevant. In other contexts, whether one takes prized artwork from a burning house is irrelevant. There definitely exist many contexts in which is irrelevant that one is aroused by/falls in love with tall dark girls, bespectacled elfin-type guys, redhaired Ph.D.'s, or immaculate classic car enthusiasts---you-name-the-quality-of-the-day--it's ALSO irrelevant. The frequent irrelevance of Eros to a given moment is the best explanation I have yet discovered for religious directives against it: when a person's chosen a good course of action, sadhana, obsessing over one's object of desire will only detract, or delay, its working.

The reason the question bothered me at all is that I don't believe in any system that tries to make us sheep. And I believe sexuality can be one of the spirit's sparkliest guiding stars. It can lead to honesty, to courage, to self-knowledge/self-acceptance, to spontaneity or to responsibility. As long ago as my first introduction to the diversity of human cultures, I've rejected the prohibitions regarding various types of sexual love in Abrahamic religions as unhealthy, authoritarian, sexist/homophobic, crippling, and stupid. But it took my daughter's honest question to show me two things: first that there were good reasons for sexual prohibitions, context-dependent, because in many contexts desire/eros is "so irrelevant." Second, I had been dishonest in failing to really question the sexist, sex-negative authoritarianism in yoga and much mainstream Sanatana Dharma. This was amazing; I was & am very thankful. Curious, honest questions: I'm for 'em: they work. More on what happened next later.