Let me analyse Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. My first objection to it stems from sheer common sense and not at all from the study of definitions. The first occurrence of this term in the Record is in the diary notation of 15 January 1913. Let us figure out how many years of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had completed at this point of time. If he had begun his Yoga in 1905, he would have spent 8 years from his practice of Pranayama to the two important realisations of Nirvana and the cosmic consciousness up to the “prolonged realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours” in Pondicherry around August 1912. Now it is hard to believe that after so many years of Yoga and so many major spiritual experiences, Sri Aurobindo was still in the process of attaining “spontaneous erotic delight”! I would, personally, fall off my chair and be convulsed with prolonged fits of laughter! Recovering from my laughter, I would ask Heehs one simple question: “What is the necessity of having ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ when just plain sex would do or bring about the same net result? Or is it that ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ comes after many years of difficult yogic practice in spite of it being perfectly useless for man’s physical health?” The next grand conclusion that you can perhaps expect from him is that it is indeed the highest consummation of Yoga! It is precisely because of this eventuality that I would like to alert readers beforehand that they are being taken for a ride. It is dangerous to commit mistakes of this kind in spirituality because by the time you realise that you have gone astray, you would have ruined your life for good. Traditional wisdom (apart from plain common sense) has been repeating it from hoary times not to mix sex with spirituality and Sri Aurobindo has been uncompromisingly clear on this issue. His Yoga can be practised in spite of sex, but not through sex, and he forbade his disciples from any immixture of it. The sexual energy, however, has to be sublimated and transformed into the “pure divine Ananda in the physical”, of which sexual pleasure is “a coarse and excited degradation”.
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