The carving.. It was amazing

I’ve always been a fan of the erotic art displayed throughout many ancient Indian temples, but this one was unique. I couldn’t recall seeing anything like it.

The tour guide signaled it is time to move on, but I just stood there gazing at it.

This would have normally looked like another Kamasutra-type form of art, not unseen in many South Indian temples.

But this time it was different.

The vagina. You and I know what it is, right? The ancient Indian was apparently no stranger to it either.

Observe how the vagina is depicted in this carving. Widely open where the clitoris is vividly marked giving it an eye-like shape.

For ancient Indians the eye was not merely an organ for visual perception but a symbol of awakening ability to insight deeper into the source of things.

(To avoid blunt use of terms we shall by ancient Indians assume a fixed period of the history of the civilization that lied in these lands such as year 3200 BC, the period when approximately Krishna was born. That period corresponds with the appearance of Mahabharata which is one of the better documented historical periods in India)

The eye like shape of the vagina practically looks the same like the Ajna chakra or the Third Eye chakra, the Center of Insight and Perception, the point beyond which one is awakened and dualities seize to exist.

Both of them have the same shape here, as if both of them hold equal importance.

How come the base chakra which is often called the animalistic chakra because that’s how sex is being considered nowadays is also depicted as yet another eye?

The ancient Indians living 3 millennia ago did not consider sex as a base instinct and source of pleasure programmed into us by nature.

Sex to them was a path, a doorway to our higher potentials, to self knowledge and self awareness. Something so important that it is responsible for taking us almost to the topmost level of our journey towards self realization.

The reason why such lowly chakra and such high placed chakras are depicted with the same shape is because both are invitation to awakening and realizing our full potentials.

The only reason why even the Third eye is not the highest center but just a level below the Sahasrara, the center of cosmic consciousness is that through sex we may climb almost to the top.

However, to reach to the final stage we will have to outgrow, that is, transcend sex as well.

The ancients didn’t see sex in terms of sin or virtue..

To them sex or what actually happened during sex was another form of energy, force and we know from physics that every action equals reaction in other words, a newly generated force that pushes in the opposite direction.

Sex is another type of force or energy which like any other type of force tends to trigger reaction, that is, a resurrection back to the source that triggered it, to god, to the Divine, whatever you may call it.

If sex is the most powerful force we can ever experience, we can conclude that the pull back of that force to return towards its origin will also be equally powerful.

That is why Tantrics consider sex to be the best path towards spiritual illumination, the return to the Source.

The carvings and murals on the walls of Indian temples is not the only spot where we can spot the knowledge ancient Indians possessed in the sensual art.

Kamasutra one of the greatest work of art and knowledge ever produced is another proof, if only it wasn’t so widely misunderstood:

A woman should study the Kamasutra and its subsidiary arts before she reaches the prime of her youth, and she should continue when she has been given away, if her husband wishes it…

How many of you knew that?

How many people know that Kamasutra is a reading primarily intended for women?

How many parents would allow their daughters to study the sensual arts before they even complete 18 years? To us this would equal getting our daughters ready for prostitution.

The authors of Kamasutra further added:

Women are like flowers, and need to be enticed very tenderly. If they are taken by force by men who have not yet won their trust they become women who hate sex.

Sounds familiar?

Stories ranging from woman growing to hate sex or be completely indifferent to it to unhealthy amounts of feminism which one can feel especially here in the capital are not unseen these days. Will I go too far to add the problem of raping to the list of problems caused by the same behavior?

And yet instead of educating our daughters into the sensual art and turning them into wholesome personalities we shun them away from the existence of it until an act called marriage occurs.

As if marriage in India wasn’t already impregnated with so many other burdens and demarcations that can bring a person to a point of mental wreckage - separation from the family and the most challenging of all – the compulsory consummation of the first marriage night – which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if Indians didn’t close their sons and daughters away from it until that day itself.

Sex on the first night of the marriage is NOT a voluntary act for many Indian women. It is a social duty and there is a boatload of mouth gaping the very next morning to confirm that the act has happened.

To make the situation more challenging, the very law in India predicts that unless a marriage is not consummated divorce is allowed, but in no other case.

Sex is too important to be left purely as a matter of religious belief or political attitude managed by someone else.

The sooner the Indian middle class awakens to this fact the better will be for all of us. Else what awaits us ahead might be nothing less than a handicap.