Indecent Practices and Erotic Trance:
                           Making Sense of Tantra

                            by John Ryan Haule
                             Copyright © 1999
                           All Rights Reserved
                     http://www.jrhaule.net/ipet.html


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                                    Five

                             The Way Of Longing



                   * Encounters With Longing
                   * Mythic Images of Longing
                   * Shri Krishna-Caitanya
                   * Longing in Sahajiya
                   * From Vishnu to Shiva
                   * The Mad Woman of Calcutta
                   * Unconscious Reorganization of the Self
                   * The Attainment of a "Spiritual Body"



     Although kundalini tells us a great deal about eros in its
     fullness, the chances are that most of us are not going to be
     faced with the disorienting torture of a Gopi Krishna as soon as
     we have learned carezza. Indeed, the factor that carries us beyond
     the rung of the diamond ladder associated with carezza to the next
     is a quality that belongs very clearly to our Western familiarity
     with eros: longing.

     Eros, as we have already noted, is characterized by powerful
     tensions; for the promise of being lifted to the heights of divine
     union or plunged into the depths of utter destruction is always
     present, more or less noticed, giving every erotic encounter a
     sense of thrilling and dangerous fatefulness, lending it a
     compelling challenge. We know we have to do something about it,
     although we are torn. We want to give in but something stops us.
     We think we have acquiesced in this force that wants to carry us
     into its turbulence like flotsam and then discover to our
     confusion that we have held something in reserve. We want to run
     for our life, but something holds us back.

     Because eros sinks its roots into the physiology, emotionality,
     and imaginal immensity of kundalini, it makes us at least dimly
     aware of a threat to our sanity that is no less significant than
     its blissful promise. The upsurge of kundalini that would
     overwhelm our habitual and unthinking efforts to hang onto our
     memories of who we are, maintain our ego-identity, and cling to
     the hectic and ephemeral realities of the persona field brings to
     our awareness a conservative reflex lurking just out of sight in
     the the "pre-conscious" or "subliminal" domain of the psyche and
     that manifests itself as terror in the face of the unknown. In
     this context, Toomer's experience of that upsurge as a "seed
     outgrowing its pod" inevitably inspires ambivalence. On the one
     hand, we are more than curious about the nature of that "seed,"
     the atman or "self" that is unthinkably immense in contrast to the
     "pod" of our limited identity that has protected us with an
     illusory sense of safety and confidence that we know who we are.
     On the other hand, the prospect of that pod being torn open from
     the inside exposes us to an uncanny and horrifying unknown. We
     might call this the "vertical" tension of eros, for what would
     take us "upward" into a blissful cosmic consciousness also
     threatens us with a "downward" plunge into madness.

     The vertical tension of eros, however, may lurk in the background
     of our awareness. For the upsurge of a power as great as kundalini
     generally hides itself behind a more obvious tension. Whether
     achieved through the practice of carezza in the style of John
     Humphrey Noyes (what we have called "artificial eros") or
     encountered directly through a momentous meeting such as that of
     Muktananda's factory owner with his earthly Venus ("spontaneous
     eros"), eros always brings us face-to-face with a "horizontal"
     tension. The beloved partner in whose presence eros emerges
     appears to us as uniquely chosen by fate to awaken us from our
     slumber. We cannot believe that our earthly Venus or Adonis is
     just like everyone else. That partner of ours seems so fatefully
     linked with our own destiny, the incipient enlargement of our own
     being, that we cannot be casual, indifferent, or dispassionate
     about that special person's identity. We know with the certainty
     of erotic trance that we and our partner are linked forever on a
     plane of reality that cannot be obvious to our contemporaries but
     is undeniable to us. We find ourselves in the position of Toomer
     vis-ˆ-vis the people walking and driving on the streets below. We
     cannot avoid the impression that their eyes are closed to an
     immense reality that is beyond question for us. They move
     robotically like zombies while we are rubbing the sleep from our
     eyes.

     The horizontal tension between ourselves and our partner manifests
     itself as the simultaneous realization that the two of us are at
     some essential level "one" and yet distinct. The incontrovertible
     reality of our belonging to a we is opposed by our consciousness
     that we are nevertheless an I and a you. We can only get so near
     and never near enough. Only so distant but never unhooked. The
     horizontal dimension of eros makes us aware that we cannot get
     near enough to end the torment of our separateness nor distant
     enough to silence the shrill anxiety of our longing to be finally
     and absolutely one. The blissful promise of dissolving into the we
     threatens us with the loss of our habitual identity -- the I we
     expend so much energy retaining (ahamkara, the sense of me and
     mine). Simultaneously, to insist upon this illusory and ephemeral
     identity blocks the enlargement of our being that self-evidently
     can only be attained in the we. Caught in this horizontal tension
     of eros, we find there are only two options open to us. We can
     allow ourselves to swing heedless in the turbulence of desire,
     pulled willy-nilly in the roiling current -- headlong, perhaps,
     into passionate intercourse only suddenly to erupt into anger,
     hatred, and pain as we try to destroy the one being in all
     creation who has such power over us that we no longer know who we
     are. Or we can take a stand: hold firm against the storm, planting
     one foot securely in the knowledge that we are unquestionably near
     to one another, more near than we have been with anyone, and the
     other foot firmly in the realization that our distance is
     undeniable.

     Holding firm in the horizontal tension between the pull into
     nearness and the push into distance is the psychological
     counterpart of semen-retention. Carezza employs a physiology of
     distance to heighten the tension of eros. Once the physical
     "glide" has been attained and eros occupies the center of our
     attention, a new optimal distance has to be found. "Longing" is
     the name we give to desire held in check. Therefore if the rung of
     carezza is attained through the struggle with our physiology, the
     next rung is reached by our response to the challenge of longing.


                          Encounters With Longing

     If we have ever had a powerful encounter with spontaneous eros,
     perhaps early in our lives, we know exactly what its frantic
     imperative is capable of doing to us. Recall to mind the first
     individual whose being issued us a monumental challenge. No doubt
     there were earlier infatuations and romantic liaisons that seemed
     important at the time. But this earthly Venus or Adonis leaves
     them all pale by comparison. In the past we inevitably worried
     whether our feelings were reciprocated. We were impressed by the
     physical beauty and personal style of our intended partner and
     knew an adventure was open before us. But it was a horizontal
     adventure like everyone else's. We would "date," pledge fidelity,
     belong to the coupled scene of the persona field that looks
     forward to marriage, family, a joint bank account, dual ownership.

     The earthly Venus or Adonis who opens our eyes to the subtle
     plane, however, is a being very much apart from all that. The
     surging forth of eros is unquestionably a mutual event. There is
     no worry that this special person does not share our interest and
     is not already present with us on another plane of reality.
     Everything that went before, all declarations of eternal
     faithfulness, and all explosive breakups now appear to us as
     inconsequential and delusional. We know for the first time what
     Vimalananda meant when he distinguished between a "temporary and
     purely physical relationship," a "mental relationship that might
     last a lifetime," and a "permanent, eternal, and spiritual
     relationship." All of our previous relationships, whatever we may
     have thought about them at the time, are now revealed to be merely
     physical or mental. This one alone is spiritual and eternal. At
     this point we believe that the draw between us is absolute, beyond
     debate, and points unambiguously to genital union. The terrifying
     thrill of danger, meanwhile, is easily ascribed to the fear we
     will turn out to be inadequate to our own destiny. Perhaps my
     actions will not sufficiently reflect the intensity of my feelings
     and convictions; perhaps my naked body will inspire disgust;
     perhaps I will not be "good enough" in bed. We screen our real
     anxiety -- our terror of being destroyed by the overwhelming power
     of a kundalini that we do not know directly but only intuit --
     innocently behind these practical but relatively trivial fears.

     If everything works out and we find a time and place for our
     sexual encounter, we believe without question that the draw into
     unity will be realized genitally in simultaneous orgasm. As we
     approach one another, the imagined difficulties of getting naked
     are passed through without a hitch, for eros continues to lead the
     way. We find our own nakedness a delicious freedom, as we seem to
     shuck the penultimate symbol of the distancing barrier between us
     with our clothes; and the nakedness of our partner comes as a
     glorious revelation of vulnerability and openness. Our partner
     offers us an unrestricted gift that is far more than body, for we
     see that body on the subtle plane of trance, in the sacred space
     of cosmic union.

     Although we can hardly remain unaware of moist arousal in our
     genital organs, eros keeps the center of our consciousness behind
     our eyes as we contemplate the glorious mystery of our partner.
     Everything we imagined about that incomparable being seems
     confirmed as we give ourselves to an embrace more momentous than
     anything we have experienced in the past. The joining of our
     organs intensifies and deepens that embrace, even surprising us
     with its insistent rightness. We are "home" where we were always
     meant to be, though decades have passed without our knowing how
     estranged we have been from where we "belong."

     As we begin to move together in harmony, our awareness shifts to
     the bodily level. At first we may overlook this change of focus.
     Bodily insistence constitutes, indeed, a displacement of our
     attention but is accompanied by an inevitable intensity that seems
     at first to confirm our highest hopes. Union is not merely in our
     minds and hearts, it is realizing itself in our bodies. We retain
     an awareness that our partner is the very one we have desired so
     constantly for days, weeks, or months. Possibly we are only trying
     to remind ourselves of this fact, while our bodily arousal moves
     to the foreground of our attention. For as we race toward the
     point of no return, the center of our consciousness slips from our
     grasp, slides irretrievably down through our body, and fastens
     tenaciously to our genitals in the moment that our spasm reflex
     takes over.

     Falling "forward" into orgasmic "explosion" releases the tension.
     If we are not too much identified by this time with the delicious
     bodily lethargy that results from the release of tension -- if we
     are able to remember in the reduced erotic trance that remains to
     us that it was union we sought -- we enter a space of sadness and
     loss. Somehow the ultimate joining of fiber, bone, heart, and soul
     that we had taken for granted has eluded us, as we lie spent and
     soporific, side-by-side but unspeakably distant from one another.
     We have been through something big, but instead of joining us in
     ultimate bliss, it has brought us face-to-face with insuperable
     separateness. We may cling to one another, recalling the immanent
     proximity that possessed us only moments before. But we are aware
     as well that these are only arms about rib cage and waist,
     belonging to two bodies that will ever be distinct. The silky skin
     of moments before has become unpleasantly sticky. Distance has
     reasserted itself, and we are left with our longing, undiminished
     but tempered with sober disillusionment.

     In the ordinary pursuit of orgasmic oneness that seeks a
     "liberated orgasm," therefore, our approach to one another seems
     hurried, even precipitous. Very likely we are not even able to
     retain consciousness of our aspiration to dissolve into weness as
     the point of no return overtakes us. The physiology of the spasm
     reflex reveals itself as far more than a stimulus-response event
     that takes place in the body. It draws our consciousness with it,
     down into our genitals, where bodily ecstasy is not exactly
     "ours." Our body asserts its primacy over our ability to freely
     direct our awareness. We lose sight of the goal of conscious
     union, and the moment passes almost before we can take note of it.
     Even if we have successfully achieved a simultaneous explosive
     orgasm with our partner, it has not so much confirmed our hopes
     for union as reminded us of our bodily separation. The ancient
     Romans had it right: Post coitum omnes animales tristes sunt. We
     have arrived only at a bodily goal, and this has left us saddened.

     At the rung of carezza, by contrast, the attainment of union is by
     no means so precipitous; and our awareness is not so easily
     submerged in the body's insistent reflex. In the first place, we
     can learn carezza only through extensive practice. We have to
     become thoroughly familiar with our own body and that of our
     partner. We have to learn what bodily arousal feels like in all
     the subtlety of its many nuances. No doubt Noyes learned gradually
     through months and perhaps years of withdrawal before the point of
     ejaculation. Perhaps the first stage was marked by the necessity
     of getting the tip of his penis outside of his partner before the
     inevitable explosion brought an end to his arousal. As he got to
     know his body more intimately, he must have found it possible to
     withdraw a moment earlier and allow his genital excitement to
     subside a bit before re-entering to continue his love-making.
     Perhaps he even learned to maintain his attention on his partner
     throughout such interludes of withdrawal, so that the erotic
     interaction did not have to suffer abrupt starting and stopping.
     Eventually, he must have learned that physical withdrawal was not
     necessary, that subtle shifts in his movements, breathing, and
     muscular contraction could reduce his penile stimulation without
     interfering with his love-making. He must have learned a great
     deal of what Vimalananda describes in the vajroli contest: moving
     to stimulate his partner without driving himself to the point of
     no return.

     If we practice carezza we will necessarily be more experienced in
     matters sexual and erotic. While we learn about our body's
     responses and those of our partner, we will also be familiarizing
     ourselves with the emotional and imaginal dimensions of eros. We
     will become more conscious of its vertical dimension, its power to
     overwhelm our ego in bliss or madness; and we will be less apt to
     hide it behind temporary concerns that have long been seen
     through. Our cultivation of slowness, too, will have taught us
     something of the horizontal tension so that we will have no
     illusion about finally overcoming the distance between us.
     Nevertheless, the shedding of clothes and initial embrace may have
     much in common with the experience of neophytes. As we begin to
     move together in harmony, our attention will shift to the bodily
     sphere -- although rather differently than in orgasm-pursuing
     intercourse. The center of our consciousness remains behind our
     eyes; and with it we continue to contemplate our partner while at
     the same time monitoring our own genital response. Every move we
     make will have these two objects in sight. Each is a small step
     forward on a journey with our partner; and each is simultaneously
     an exploration of our own arousal, testing whether we can go
     further, employing ways of side-stepping the precipice of
     involuntary spasms.

     Maintaining the focus of our monitoring awareness is both
     gratifying and frustrating during the twenty minutes leading up to
     "glide." On the one hand, the monitoring of carezza keeps us
     sharp, so that we can be more aware of our partner than in the
     fuzzy and diffuse consciousness of "explosive" intercourse. The
     drawback is that the arousal we are keeping watch over demands
     frequent adjustments, and these take our attention away from our
     partner and remind us of the distance between us.

     Upon entry into "glide," however, our freedom is greatly enhanced.
     The monitoring function can largely be neglected. Indeed, the
     genital organs themselves recede into the background. We know very
     well that they are there and are propelling our cruise across the
     subtle seas of eros, but invisible as the twin blades of an
     ocean-going yacht. Our attention is now free to explore other
     aspects of our love-making. We begin to notice, for example, that
     our own waves of arousal and those of our partner are quite
     distinct. We no longer have to deduce what our partner is feeling
     from the pattern of the breathing or other secondary indicators.
     We feel our partner's arousal ourselves -- almost in our own body.
     It murmurs through us like a distant rumor of breakers, pulling at
     us and drawing us along until our own bodily wave materializes,
     racing in tandem with its leader.

     This is the experience Vimalananda describes when speaking of the
     vajroli contest, as entering the body of our partner with our own
     subtle body. It is, indeed, a wonderful encounter, even numinous.
     No volume of experience can make us take it for granted, for it is
     perhaps our most dependable access to cosmic consciousness, that
     sense that we are no longer isolated within the cosmos at large
     but participate in its oneness. An important barrier has fallen
     between ourselves and our partner. In our heightened state of
     trance, our skin no longer confines us. It is hard to tell which
     one of us is inside the other. But the very fact that this
     marvelous ambiguity occurs to us emphasizes the horizontal
     tension. For although our nearness has leapt forward, we know when
     we feel our partner's body that it is not our own. However
     intermingled our sensations, there are still two of us. We wonder
     if Vimalananda has fallen into one of his famous exaggerations
     when he asserts "the union of two personalities into one." If not,
     he must surely have been speaking of a ladder rung well above
     where we are standing. For practitioners of carezza, every
     increase in nearness becomes a reminder of our distance and
     increases our longing.

     There is another way that the horizontal dimension of eros may
     impress us while practicing implosive orgasmic intercourse.
     Everything we have considered about carezza to this point has
     centered on bodily sensations, some belonging to the gross body
     and some to the subtle body. We can follow these bodily sensations
     with our eyes closed. When we open them and gaze into those of our
     partner, a wholly new domain of erotic interaction becomes
     available to us; and we are overwhelmed anew by the horizontal
     tension of eros. We have never seen those eyes so open and
     receptive. They seem to let us all the way in. Yet there is
     nothing fuzzy about that steady, intense gaze. Our partner is
     vividly present -- perhaps even disturbingly so. We are reminded
     of the flavor of that first gaze that originally transported us to
     the subtle plane and recognize a similar quality in our present
     nearness, now profoundly increased but declaring as well our
     otherness. We find we have moved neither closer nor farther,
     rather more deeply into the erotic tension. Our longing is less
     tumultuous but more profound. We stand in it firm and unmoving.
     There are moments when we can no longer tell which of us has the
     penis and which the vagina -- almost but not quite
     interchangeable. Not unlike the "glide" that "secures the semen,"
     bringing us to the rung of carezza, our longing holds us steady on
     the next rung.


                          Mythic Images of Longing

     Longing desire is well known in most of the world's literatures as
     a path of spiritual realization. Perhaps the "lowest" of these is
     our own Western tradition of Courtly Love in which "only
     unattainable womanhood could be deified" (Couliano, 1986: 16). The
     errant knight dedicated his warfare and jousts to a woman well
     above his station whom he had only seen from afar or perhaps
     merely heard of. In some cases he knew her personally and
     encouraged her to behave in as fickle a manner as she could
     contrive so as "to obtain the contempt of the beloved and increase
     her unattainability" (Couliano, 1986: 19). William IX of Poitier
     and Aquitaine, whom Denis de Rougemont (1956/72) calls "the first
     troubadour," devoted his best efforts to "The Unknown Lady" who
     first appeared to him as a transcendent fantasy figure while he
     was out riding. He began writing songs to her, and she assumed
     greater and greater importance for him as he came to know her
     better:

          She grew into a kind of erotic, mystical queen whom he
          served with his whole heart and soul. He did not know
          the difficulties and tasks she had in store for him, but
          he was burning to undergo them, so great was her worth.
          Obedience to her coincided with perfect fidelity to
          himself. "Through her alone," he sang, "shall I be
          saved" (Haule, 1990: 2).

     William set the tone for the troubadours who followed in
     dedicating his life to a woman who could not be possessed. There
     was no possibility of setting up house-keeping with The Unknown
     Lady. William embraced an impediment to consummating his love --
     one greater than Isolde's marriage to King Mark or Guinevere's
     with Arthur -- even greater that the impediment of the "lady far
     above his station" who had inspired St. Ignatius of Loyola before
     his mystical conversion (Ignatius, 1974). The unattainable woman
     of Courtly Love consigned her lover to a life of longing, a life
     filled with the emotionality and endorphin-charged physiology of
     eros. Because she could not be possessed, her knight drew near to
     her only in imagination. Her image loomed before him as
     inspiration, constantly developed in prayer, song, and deeds of
     daring-do, transforming his life, removing it from the profane
     world, and transmuting his adventures to the imaginal plane.
     Women, too, dedicated themselves to lovers they knew primarily on
     the subtle plane. Many were "Brides of Christ," their hearts
     pierced with a sword of longing. St. Teresa of Avila attained this
     theological plane of love only after having fallen in love with a
     series of confessors -- spiritual/erotic lovers whose vows of
     chastity made them unattainable (Lincoln, 1984).

     Longing takes us to the subtle plane of eros, where we are very
     near to a beloved who may or may not possess a physical body. The
     beloved's constant distance and unattainability in the profane
     sense places his whole being on the subtle plane. The imaginal
     interaction between lover and beloved "purifies" eros of all
     profane possessiveness, elevates what might otherwise entangle
     itself in the profane considerations of everyday.

     More than forty years ago, de Rougemont (1956/72: 105-7)
     identified what has now become well known, the "Arab" component in
     Courtly Love, derived from the mystical tradition of Sufism. The
     most influential Sufi poet to identify longing as the soul's
     natural inclination to God was Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), who
     began his masterpiece, the Mathnawi, with the love-song of the
     reed, given here in the translation of Coleman Barks (Barks &
     Green, 1997: 28):

          Listen to the song told by the reed
          of being separated.

          Since I was cut from the reedbed
          I have made
          this crying sound. Anyone
          separated from someone he loves
          understands what I say.

          Anyone pulled
          from a Source
          longs to go back.

     Rumi begins with the mournful sound of the reed-flute (imagine,
     for example, the sound of an oboe or perhaps the English horn that
     torments the dying Tristan in the third act of Wagner's opera).
     The reed is incapable of singing any song other than that of
     longing, for it has been cut off from its "Source," and its whole
     being longs to return. Rumi means to say we have all been cut off
     from our Source, which is God; and as long as we wander the
     empirical world in the knowledge of this central tragic fact, we
     too will mourn with the desire to be reunited. Every man and woman
     in whom eros has surged for a lover who cannot be attained in any
     profane sense knows this experience of being cut off from the
     Source. For the beloved of a subtle-plane longing is always the
     "Source." A lover like this has awakened us from our profane
     slumber and revealed to us the outlines of our larger being, the
     seed that outgrows the pod. In naming that Source as God, Rumi
     reveals the implications of every longing that replaces a profane
     life with one that is lived on the subtle plane.

     Peter Lamborn Wilson (1988: 177) says this doctrine of desire is
     fundamental to Sufism, which sees the entire cosmos as moved by
     longing. Each heavenly sphere is turned by the Angel that governs
     it, and that Angel is drawn onward as it searches in longing for
     its Archangel. We humans -- indeed all beings -- whether we know
     it or not, are moved by our own soul's longing for its Lord, "to
     find itself in the divine cosmic dance." Ibn al-`Arabi may have
     been the most influential theoretician of this mythic idea. We
     know already what he had to say about the sexual union of man and
     woman in God. Elsewhere he says that separation and longing may be
     more important than union, "since from the psychological point of
     view it intensifies and prolongs the purity of love . . . in which
     the still unsatisfied lover knows the fiercest and most potent
     states of ardent desire, in themselves a kind of fulfillment"
     (Wilson, 1988: 88).

     In India, the Bhagavata-Purana, which dates from perhaps the tenth
     century of our era and is one of the most beloved, memorized, and
     recited of mythological histories, "considered by many to be equal
     in stature to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads because of its
     poetic language and its philosophical depth" (Fischer-Schreiber,
     et.al., 1989), is very familiar with the mystical value of
     longing. Perhaps everyone knows the story of how the Blue God,
     Krishna, attracted the milk-maids (Gopis) by night to leave their
     husbands and join him in his erotic rasa dance in the forest of
     Vrindavana. During the dance each one of the Gopis believed that
     he was dancing only with her. He was in the center of a ring of
     Gopis -- somewhat like the sexual circle ritual of the Aghoris --
     but by the power of his divine magic he appeared at the same time
     between each two of them:

          . . . during the dance Krsna disappeared from them, for
          into the minds of all the Gopis had come the thought "he
          is mine," and in that thought "he is mine," parakiya
          [true love in separation] cannot remain . . . But when
          longing again rose in the Gopis minds, Krsna again
          appeared to them (Dimock, 1989: 12).

     This dance was called rasa, meaning "enjoyment, passion,"
     referring to "spiritual delight in a state of ecstatic union with
     the Divine" -- far above sensuality or whatever can be described
     by the use of reason (Fischer-Schreiber, et.al., 1989). D. G.
     White (1996: 189) says, "If the universe is a great pulsating flow
     of essence and manifestation, rasa is the fluid `stuff' of that
     flow." Clearly rasa is an aspect of kundalini, the greater and
     impersonal power that rises up within us, reveals the poverty of
     our ego-attitude, and opens us to a cosmic consciousness in which
     we are no longer isolated "subjects" contemplating "objects" that
     are forever separate and alone. On the subtle plane we participate
     with one another in the oneness of the cosmos.

     For the Hindus, as for the Sufis, erotic longing is the link
     between the movement of the cosmos and the impulse of the human
     soul. Eros is a powerful and multidimensional term, for it refers
     both to the psycho-biology of sexuality and to the highest form of
     mysticism. For this reason, Jeffrey Kripal employs it as a central
     interpretive concept in his biography of Ramakrishna (1836-1886):
     "The erotic is a dimension of human experience that is
     simultaneously related both to the physical and emotional
     experience of sexuality and the deepest ontological levels of
     religious experience" (Kripal, 1995: 23).

     In that timeless[1] moment when we gaze into the open and
     steadily attentive eyes of our partner, pleasantly confused as to
     which of us is male and which female, we stand on the lower edge
     of that same longing that both united and separated Krishna and
     his beloved consort Radha. Whether we see our own earthly beloved
     as an incomparable human being or as "enchanted" -- even divine --
     is a function of the degree of our trance. Those who have shown us
     the way from the rung of longing on the ladder of ascent have had
     no doubt of the divine/cosmic nature of the rasa which filled them
     and changed their consciousness.


                           Shri Krishna-Caitanya

     One of the most exemplary of these is an enigmatic figure born
     more than 500 years ago in Bengal during a period of romantic
     enthusiasm in North India, and known as Shri Krishna-Caitanya
     (1486-1533). Like Vimalananda, Jesus, and the Buddha, he left no
     writings of his own behind so that we are dependent for our
     picture of him on the impressions he made upon his followers --
     particularly a certain Krishnadasa, who interpreted the events of
     Caitanya's life mythologically according to his own religious
     perceptions (Dimock, 1989: 85).

     Edward C. Dimock's book, The Place of the Hidden Moon (1989) is
     not only our best source for reconstructing the importance of
     Caitanya but has become a model for a host of scholars working on
     the history of religious movements.[2] At a time when the
     orthodox Hindu priesthood (Brahmanism) was rigidly dogmatic and
     opposed by various Tantric sects which had a tendency toward
     licentiousness as well as by the emotionalism of Sufi Islam,
     Caitanya carved out a middle position based on reverence for
     Vishnu (Vaishnavism) and expressed in vernacular languages rather
     than in the sacred but "dead" language of Sanskrit (Dimock, 1989:
     25-7). The Vaishnava (Vishnu-focused) revival for which Caitanya
     is responsible has much in common with the Western tradition of
     the troubadours -- namely "longing as an act of worship" (Ibid.,
     14).

     The man who was initiated with the name Krishna-Caitanya began his
     religious career as the master of a small Sanskrit school under
     the name Vishvambhara. But when he traveled to his father's town
     of Gaya at the age of twenty-two to perform his father's funeral
     rites, he apprenticed himself to an emotional ascetic guru,
     Ishvara Puri. He returned to his mother's town of Navadvip in a
     state of divine madness and in short order became the central
     figure in a scene of wild religious enthusiasm for a period of a
     year, ending it abruptly when he entered an ascetic order.
     Although he wished to make his home in the distant forest of
     Vrindavana, where his beloved Krishna had lived and danced with
     the Gopis, he respected his mother's wishes and stayed in the
     nearby town of Puri (Ibid., 30-1). He began his life of longing in
     separation -- not only because his divine lover danced only on the
     subtle plane, but also because he did not allow himself to travel
     to the sacred forest where mythology locates that dance.

     Because our present knowledge of Caitanya is based on legendary
     biographies, Dimock says, "What Caitanya was and did is less
     important than what people thought he was and did; his acts are
     less important than their quality of immortality" (Ibid., 32).
     People believed that Caitanya was both Radha and Krishna. Krishna,
     an avatar of Vishnu, is the very model of divine love, for he and
     Radha "were one soul in two bodies." Separated by their two bodies
     as we are from our longed-for beloved, the union Radha sought
     always eluded her, eternally increasing her longing. For this
     reason, the madness of Caitanya's longing and his asceticism has
     been taken as a description of the path any human being may
     follow. Regardless of our gender, we are all Radha, longing for
     our Krishna. But Caitanya was an extraordinary mortal, for he was
     also Krishna:

          He was Krsna internally, Radha externally: his golden
          color was that of Radha; his deep love and longing for
          Krsna were those of Radha; and yet, within, he had the
          full divinity of Krsna. When Radha and Krsna were two
          [i.e., separated in their two bodies], neither could
          experience love to the full. Krsna giving and receiving
          love, could not experience fully Radha's joy in giving
          and receiving, and so also with Radha. When they became
          one, in Caitanya, their joy was doubled (Dimock, 1989:
          32).

     In a variation on this belief, every woman is female because she
     has a preponderance of Radha in her makeup, while every man is
     mostly Krishna. When we realize this consciously, our sexual
     unions become acts of worship that unite the two divine
     principles. The draw toward sexual union begins in our physiology,
     with the pleasure principle (kama). For most individuals, it never
     goes beyond kama; but when transformed into true love (prema) it
     no longer leads to the miseries of ordinary erotic love, but goes
     beyond them to divine love (Ibid., 16). Nevertheless kama is the
     beginning point, and one cannot ascend the ladder without
     negotiating the first rung. Longing to go beyond is the way of
     salvation. "For the more intense is viraha [longing], the greater
     is prema" (Ibid., 17).

     This doctrine that longing redirects us from pleasure to true love
     is no abstract proposition. It is a statement of psychological
     truth. There is no genuine love in the mere pursuit of pleasure.
     We are after our own satisfaction, and our partner is no more than
     the means we wish to employ for our self-centered ends. But when
     the object of our desire refuses us, perhaps even contrives a
     tantalizing fickleness, and no other partner can attract our
     interest, the person through whom we once sought pleasure becomes
     the object of our longing. Longing itself is a sort of trance
     state. We see the object of our desire with new eyes. A "subtlety"
     begins to make itself felt in our attitude. When the object of
     sexual pleasure becomes the apple of our eye, kama has begun its
     transformation into prema; and the engine for this change is
     longing (viraha).

     This is why the Hindus say that one who has transformed the
     pursuit of pleasure into divine longing has conquered illusion
     (maya) and seen beyond appearances to the divine reality that lies
     beyond them. Longing brings us to the subtle plane, where our
     intended partner becomes at least an incomparable being for us.
     The more prolonged and intense our longing, the more subtle our
     perceptions become. The eye of our imagining soul lends more and
     more a cosmic dimension to our relationship. Frustrated in gaining
     the immediate gratification we sought, our seeking itself takes on
     an "ultimate" quality. Our internal monologue has changed. That
     remarkable individual we cannot ignore has become our beloved. Our
     longing may become the central emotional reality in our lives, as
     it was for the knights of Courtly Love. Everything we do, intend,
     and wish for becomes saturated with the image of our beloved. Our
     unattainable one possesses us. A whole life can be revised. This
     is why the followers of Caitanya believed, "Ultimately one can
     pass even beyond the pleasure of actual union . . . and know the
     divine joy entirely within oneself" (Dimock, 1989: 15).

     A crucial turning point in Caitanya's life was his meeting with
     his future disciple, Ramananda Raya. According to the legend, this
     meeting was distinguished by Caitanya's showing Ramananda his true
     form as Radha-Krishna. Evidently he meant to show Ramananda the
     degree of his attainment and satisfaction: that he "knew the
     divine joy within himself." His longing for Krishna had turned him
     into Radha, and Radha's longing for Krishna had turned her into
     her beloved Lord. Caitanya had become both of them, united at
     last. But Ramananda was apparently unfazed by this claim. He
     responded by explaining to Caitanya the meaning of the ecstatic
     emotional attitude in which he identified with Radha (his
     Radha-bhava[3]). The surprising result of this meeting is that
     from then "until the end of his life, Caitanya is more and more
     subject to fits of wild enthusiasm and depressed longing for his
     Krsna" (Ibid., 149).

     The problem here is that Caitanya is said to have abruptly ended
     his "wild religious enthusiasm" at the age of twenty-three, when
     he entered an ascetic order. The story suggests that the
     god-maddened longing that afflicted him for a year brought him to
     an early realization of his inner Krishna-nature. The fact that
     his Radha-bhava, his insane longing, could be stirred up again and
     last the rest of his life makes us wonder about the solution he
     claims to have found in his early twenties. He must have been
     struggling to reconcile his extravagant madness with the quiet
     bliss expected by his orthodox beginnings as a Sanskrit scholar.
     Perhaps he was frightened by his madness and tried to deny it. If
     so, the meeting with Ramananda convinced him that his insane
     longing was a legitimate expression of a sacred experience, that
     anything less amounted to denying reality. The legendary
     biography, therefore, presents the madness of divine longing as
     the ultimate truth.


                            Longing in Sahajiya

     Dimock believes that the meeting between Caitanya and Ramananda
     was constructed by the biographer Krishnadasa in order to make
     Caitanya into a saint whose life agreed with Krishnadasa's own
     Sahajiya faith. The Sahajiya movement "was dedicated to . . . the
     transmutation of sexual pleasure into transcendental bliss,"
     particularly "with a woman other than one's wife" (Feuerstein,
     1990). "Sahaja literally means `easy or natural': the natural
     qualities of the senses should be used, not denied" (Dimock, 1989:
     35). We saw an example of this in Chapter One, where Eliade
     described how the Sahajiya practitioner acts as a servant to his
     future yogic consort, sleeping at the foot of her bed, on her left
     side, etc. Caitanya's influential disciple, Ramananda, practiced a
     variation on this theme in that he kept

          two girls "of surpassing beauty," who were skilled in
          dance and song, whom he would treat in a somewhat
          intimate fashion, bathing and dressing them, rubbing
          their bodies with oil, etc. But, the text says, he
          abstained from sexual intercourse with them. . . . "His
          passion was the same at the touch of a piece of wood or
          stone as it was at the touch of a young woman: such was
          the nature of Ramananda Raya. He played the role of
          servant to them" (Dimock, 1989: 53-4).

     We might be somewhat skeptical of the "piece of wood" claim.
     Surely Ramananda's goal must have been the "autonomization of
     sensual pleasure -- regarded as the sole human experience capable
     of bringing about nirvanic bliss" that Eliade describes. But we
     would have to understand this practice on the model of carezza,
     where one's physiology is overcome for the sake of entering
     trance. Ramananda, although outwardly he acted cool, must have
     been seeking to increase his longing, arousing his sexual desire
     so as to turn pleasure (kama) into divine love (prema). Only this
     would account for the fact that his meeting with Caitanya resulted
     in a disturbing increase in the madness of Caitanya's longing,
     strengthening his identification with Radha, and making the
     Krishna he inwardly was the unattainable object of his maddened
     desire (viraha).

     The Sahajiya discovered that chastity -- especially in the face of
     extreme temptation, such as that posed by Ramananda's dancing
     girls -- formed a useful barrier to easy union, increasing one's
     longing and thereby purifying one's desire (Dimock, 1989: 53).
     Because Caitanya's biographer was a follower of Sahajiya, he wants
     us to believe that Caitanya united Radha and Krishna only in a
     state of extreme longing in which he lost his orientation in the
     world of space and time -- lost his ego -- in the madness of Radha
     who could never get near enough to her beloved Krishna. This is
     the Caitanya of Bengali faith, the only Caitanya we have.

     The wild enthusiasm and depressed longing of Caitanya had a cosmic
     dimension as well. For Caitanya followed his mother's wishes,
     settling far from Krishna's forest of Vrindavana, and spent his
     life longing to be in that place where Radha and Krishna enjoyed
     their eternal love play. In his divine erotic trance, however, he
     found an "eternal Vrindavana," "the place of the hidden moon,"
     within himself.[4] By his longing, he turned himself into an
     image of the universe, a microcosm which contained Vrindavana. In
     the universe at large (the macrocosm) "a stream of rasa flows
     perpetually from the eternal Vrndavana to earth, manifested as a
     stream of rasa flowing to and between men and women" (Dimock,
     1989: 168). The human body mirrors the cosmos on a small scale,
     with hell located in the sexual organs at the bottom and the
     heaven of "pure consciousness, truth, and bliss -- the brain -- at
     the highest" point (Ibid., 170).

     The idea that the juice[5] of desire (rasa) is both the driving
     force of the universe and of our own sexual/mystical selves will
     not be understood if we think that it is merely a theological
     proposition, handed down from detached philosophers and required
     of ordinary believers who have barely a clue as to its meaning --
     much as we might look upon the virginity of the mother of Jesus or
     the infallibility of the pope. We come closer to understanding it
     if we think that the image of cosmic juice forces itself upon
     those who stand on the diamond ladder's rung of longing. It is
     unquestionably a manifestation of kundalini, the life-energy of
     the body-soul that surges up and overwhelms the ego.

     The longing that we Westerners are exposed to when we practice
     carezza inspires us also to speak of "liquid energy" and makes us
     think that we have had the merest taste (rasa) of cosmic unity.
     For we have slipped out of our skin and feel the waves of arousal
     moving through our partner's body -- almost, but not quite, the
     same as we feel our own. We may try to discard such impressions,
     saying: "For a moment there, I almost thought I was feeling what
     you are feeling. Isn't that crazy?" A serious challenge is posed
     to our consensus view of the world -- the picture we have to
     follow if we are to get to work on time, or perhaps at all.

     The religious cosmos entered through erotic trance convinces us by
     its numinosity, the terrible power of kundalini. When we enter the
     subtle plane, we find ourselves in the grip of unthinkable forces;
     and we have no choice but to believe. We believe involuntarily. In
     fact, the word believe fails to do justice to our experience, for
     it has a pious and tentative connotation. It makes us think of
     fuzzy platitudes and dogmas laid down from on high. In the state
     of erotic trance, by contrast, we do not feel we "believe": we
     simply know. We know with a conviction that is unassailable. When
     we say, "For a moment there, I almost thought . . . ," we reveal
     that the trance has ended. We have returned to the profane world
     of consensus reality, where the religious cosmos is only a pious
     rumor.

     The religious longing of Caitanya and his followers has to be
     understood as a distinctive state of mind attainable by anyone who
     enters fully into the longing that becomes available on the step
     located above carezza on the diamond ladder. In that state there
     is no doubt of the proximity of Krishna, the erotic lord of a love
     that cannot be contained within the strictures of wedlock. This is
     why it is important that the Gopis are married. They have risked
     everything in consensus reality on the strength of a longing that
     brings a higher reality to presence. Faithfulness to one's divine
     lord is not a matter of contract, propagation of the species, or
     "social cement." It constitutes an irresistible pull whose madness
     is anti-social and an affront to consensus reality. The
     verticality of the ladder triumphs over horizontal common sense.
     One is drawn into the sacred sphere, where the rupture between
     human and divine is analogous to that between male and female --
     and the longing of the one symbolizes and incarnates the
     desperation of the other.

     Erotic longing is a psychological reality that no one escapes. It
     may indeed be construed as a sort of imbalance and pathology that
     cries out for psychiatric treatment. But Ramamanda's message to
     Caitanya is that such insane longing is pathological only from the
     conventional point of view. Give yourself over to it and the
     divine realm will open itself to you. You will find the juice of
     desire that fills your body is the same as that which moves the
     cosmic spheres. Krishna is dancing with his Radha. Close your eyes
     to that and you have missed the essential point; you have chosen
     empirical seeming over divine reality. The madness of your trance
     is your opportunity to bring the profane world to a stop and avail
     yourself of a greater reality.


                            From Vishnu to Shiva

     Caitanya's influence brought about a "golden age" for the Vishnu
     religion in Bengal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
     But by the end of that time it had become too formal and
     respectable to have influence on the ecstatic religious sentiments
     in village life. The great poet Ramprasad Sen (roughly 1720-1780)
     refocused popular devotion with a body of poems that can still be
     recited by Bengali school children today. Malcolm McLean's
     historical study of this legendary figure (Devoted to the Goddess,
     1998) shows that Ramprasad caused a resurgence of the rival Shiva
     tradition, which flowered for another two centuries (the
     eighteenth and nineteenth).

     Ramprasad, however, is a far more enigmatic figure than Caitanya.
     Very little is dependably known of his life, and there may even
     have been several different poets responsible for the works that
     bear his name.[6] McLean has solved the problem of how to
     approach Ramprasad on the model of Dimock's treatment of Caitanya:
     he has described the Ramprasad who lives in the minds and hearts
     of his followers. In doing so he has discovered that the legend of
     Ramprasad bears too many similarities with that of Caitanya to be
     considered accidental. McLean has, therefore, concluded: "A
     conscious effort was made to portray Ramprasad as a Caitanya-like
     figure in order to generate a revival in Sakta[7] [Shiva-focused]
     fortunes similar to that gained [for the religion of Vishnu]
     during sixteenth-century Vaisnavism" (McLean, 1998: 44).

     The change in deity from Vishnu to Shiva, however, is no
     incidental detail. Caitanya's Vaishnavism borrowed a great deal
     from the Sahajiya movement, responsible for such practices as
     Ramananda's bathing his dancing girls with his own hands in hopes
     of becoming as unmoved by their luscious flesh as by a "piece of
     wood." The Sahajiya were outwardly cool and respectable. Their
     indecent practices were designed to fuel an erotic chastity
     practiced in private. They followed a boyish god in Vishnu's
     avatar, Krishna, a charming and impudent lad whose naughtiness
     produced a lot of clucking, but with whom no mother could be angry
     for more than a moment.

     Shiva, on the other hand, is a scandalous and outrageous god. He
     is not to be found dancing with milk-maids in forest clearings. He
     haunts cremation grounds, smeared with the ashes of human corpses.
     The ideal of a penis as flaccid in a throng of love-crazed
     followers as in a placement of wooden statues has nothing to do
     with the ithyphallic Shiva. Vishnu is the sustainer of the
     universe, and the followers of Caitanya did their best to sustain
     decorum while pursuing their madness within established forms.
     Shiva is the destroyer, and those who cultivate his form of
     madness delight in overturning every sign of respectability.
     Incest for example: the Vaishnavas forbid the mingling of parental
     and erotic love in their ecstatic longing, while the Shaivites
     make a point of it (McDaniel, 1989: 89). We are reminded of the
     sexual relationship between the boy Bhattacharya and his
     "spiritual mother," the middle-aged Lady in Saffron.

     June McDaniel's study of contemporary ecstatic religion in Bengal
     (The Madness of the Saints, 1989) begins with the history of this
     movement, including Caitanya, Ramprasad Sen, and Ramakrishna as
     exemplary madmen. She notes that the Shiva-oriented Tantrics and
     Bauls[8] "have sex without sensuality while the Vaisnavas have
     sensuality without sex" (McDaniel, 1989: 274). This crucial
     distinction reveals the different orientation of the two
     religions. Those who worship Vishnu accept the social taboo
     regarding sex outside the bonds of wedlock. In their chastity they
     stop short of intercourse but employ all available means to stir
     up a state of sensual arousal -- subsequently to be transformed
     through longing into spiritual experience. Worshippers of Shiva,
     however, are readily prepared to violate the taboo but do so in a
     way that is spiritual in aspiration rather than sensual. For the
     Shaivite Bengali saints: "Lack of adaptation to the physical world
     [i.e., in madness] is secondary to a gain in adaptation to the
     spiritual one [i.e., the subtle plane of trance]. Rather than a
     loss of emotion there is intense love and enthusiasm, and instead
     of primitive sexual and aggressive impulses there is prema"
     (Ibid., 286).

     Contemporary Shaivism emphasizes not Shiva so much as his consort,
     Shakti, weaving together Tantric Buddhism, Vaishnavism, yoga,
     shamanism, and village deities within an oral tradition whose goal
     is divine madness for the Mother, a state of possession in which
     she is worshipped as enthroned in paradise. Her devotee longs for
     her blessings, conquers her with magic, and merges with her as an
     aspect of the self (Ibid., 86). Clearly Vimalananda and
     Bhattacharya live in this version of the Tantric world.

          The desire to become mad with love (divyonmada) for the
          goddess is comparatively recent. Goddess worship was
          more yogic and shamanic, an esoteric cult until its
          popularization by such poets as Ramprasad Sen and
          Kamalakanta in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
          . . . Madness then became a sign of devotion, the
          worshipper being a mad child of mad parents (Ibid., 91).

     Religious madness is distinguished by a trance state in which the
     polar opposites, the "worlds of matter and spirit, are suddenly
     seen to be united and the illusory barrier between them falls"
     (Ibid., 250). This results in a formless state of consciousness in
     which all distinctions are destroyed and the worshipper is filled
     with a sacred liquid substance (bhava or rasa[9]) that is said to
     cause the madness (Ibid., 90). Typically, there are two stages in
     this form of ecstatic religion. First comes the madness of
     longing, where the individual is obsessed with the anxious
     question, "Will the goddess come again?" Later on, perhaps decades
     later, a calmer state supervenes. McDaniel calls this later form
     of ecstasy "divine madness" or "love in union," for the worshipper
     is convinced of the permanent presence of the goddess (Ibid.,
     195).

          The worshipper attracts [the Mother] by his madness --
          being mad herself, she recognizes a kindred spirit. The
          more intense his passion and the more irrational his
          behavior, the more he is her child. Yet after this is
          the state of divine madness (divyonmada), in which the
          fires are cooled and the devotee is eternally a child in
          his Mother's lap; he need not yearn for her, as he has
          been accepted. At this stage, his madness is action that
          is beyond human understanding, totally free and
          spontaneous, beyond good and evil (Ibid., 145).


                         The Mad Woman of Calcutta

     As an example of this process,[10] McDaniel relays the story of
     the "Mad Woman of Calcutta," as told by the Baul authority Shri
     Anirvan:

          About twenty years ago in a residential section of the
          city, people used to see a very young and beautiful
          woman stopping passers-by on the sidewalk in front of
          her house and asking them, "Where is Shyama Babu? Have
          you seen him? If you tell me where he is, I will go and
          fetch him." Her beloved was dead and she was still
          waiting for him, living from her love of him. And love
          had betrayed her. The passers-by played cruel tricks on
          her.

          Then another phase began for her. She clung to young men
          as they were going by and said to them, "You are my
          Shyama Babu, you have come back." Since she was not a
          prostitute, these men drove her away and ill-treated
          her, even threw stones at her.

          After several years, one of her neighbors who had known
          her in the past noticed her sitting all day long at the
          foot of the sacred tree of that district. She had aged
          but her face was radiant with joy. She recognized her
          neighbor. He asked her, "Have you found your Shyama?"
          "Yes," she replied with a lovely smile. "Look, there he
          is," and she pointed to her breast (Ibid., 192).

     On the basis of many such stories, McDaniel reconstructs the
     essential pattern of Bengali holy women, identifying five
     characteristics: (1) Their early life is marked by visions and
     trances which make family and friends suspect illness and
     psychopathology.[11] (2) They are usually married, often against
     their will, resulting in a labile relationship with many split-ups
     and reconciliations which is finally stabilized when the woman
     either initiates her husband into her own religious path or
     worships him as a god. (3) Her life defies all social norms. (4)
     She never achieves a final "divine marriage" but follows a life of
     longing. (5) She becomes a legend in which the tales told about
     her dwell on her life experiences, emphasizing her madness and
     down-playing whatever miracles may have been ascribed to her
     (Ibid., 232).

     What is most remarkable about McDaniel's research is that for
     those who enter spontaneously and unreservedly into religious
     madness, the chaos of psychological disintegration represents only
     the beginning of the process. Again and again, the saint who
     submits to the insanity of divine longing finds that that
     tumultuous condition of being totally out of control eventually
     organizes itself, as it were from the inside. The saints continue
     their life of longing. Symptoms of madness do not entirely
     disappear. But a surprising degree of stability is finally
     achieved. We might even wonder whether in a cultural context less
     enamored than that of Bengal with signs of psychological
     disorientation the stabilized saint might strive to make himself
     appear a good deal more "normal."

     When Gopi Krishna fought the effects of kundalini, he did
     everything in his power to restore the functioning of an ego that
     appeared to be no match for the power surging within him. He
     counted his steps, fixed his eyes deliberately on the empirical
     objects in his surroundings, one-by-one, and above all avoided
     meditation. He learned to do nothing that would increase the
     manifestation of that unconscious power derived from the
     instinctual foundations of his psyche, and directed as much energy
     as he could to ahamkara, the sense of me and mine that reorients
     itself automatically in those who remain innocent of kundalini's
     reality.

     The mad saints, however, have courted kundalini. They valued her
     spontaneous emergence and the disorientation that she brought them
     as a sign of favor from their goddess. In most cases, it appears
     they had little choice but to succumb. Possibly they were cursed
     -- or as they would say, "blessed" -- with a weak ego-structure to
     begin with. In any event they seem to have made little effort to
     restore whatever ego-functioning they may once have had. They
     embraced their madness as an overwhelming erotic trance that made
     a chaotic and fragmentary manifestation of the sacred cosmos a
     constant in their lives. They suffered from their disorientation
     and from the disapproval and horror of their family members and
     neighbors. The profane world for them was a place of torment from
     which they found respite in their visions and trances.

     Their trance, however, was by no means the non-dissociative sort
     that convinced Toomer that the seed which had outgrown its pod was
     a revelation of wholeness. They spent perhaps decades in a
     condition of blatant madness, sparked frequently enough with
     intimations of its divine origin so that they had little desire to
     interrupt it -- even if they had had the strength to do so. In the
     end for many of them, kundalini brought them a realization not
     unlike what blessed Toomer right from the start. They came to
     realize a wholeness which exists outside the ego in atman or self.
     The torment of their madness was characterized by a longing for
     the divine, the greater reality that Hinduism calls brahman and
     atman. In loving their goddess, they loved kundalini; and in the
     end she proved a faithful mother. Their psyches were re-organized,
     and they found their Beloved within.

     Respectable saints strive for madness, and employ a host of
     traditionally sanctioned devices to reach a state of religious
     trance. For them ritual is a means which subordinates madness to
     its own formal structure. Those, however, who appear to have been
     mad from early childhood or who have spontaneously lost their
     minds in adolescence require no ritual to engender their insane
     longing. For them, ritual develops spontaneously and unconsciously
     while they are out of their minds. Their madness organizes itself.
     This phenomenon is fairly common in Hinduism. Not only exemplary
     individuals like Muktananda (1978) but also several American
     practitioners of yoga with whom I have spoken report that in the
     altered state of consciousness engendered by yogic practice, one
     finds oneself spontaneously making gestures (mudras) which may
     appear strange and disturbing at first but which are later
     discovered to have been defined long ago in the yogic tradition.
     It is reasonable to think, in fact, that all of the yogic
     practices we have today were originally discovered by individuals
     who had entered a madness that organized itself.

     The story of the Mad Woman of Calcutta exemplifies this pattern
     very well. We know nothing of her interior life except as it is
     displayed in her public behavior. In the first two stages, she
     provokes the disgust, anger, and fear of neighbors and passers-by
     by her flagrant abnormality. Apparently decades have passed before
     she reaches the third and final stage of her process; for in the
     beginning she was "very young and beautiful," and in the last
     stage "she had aged." But by the end her insane longing has given
     way to a blissful achievement. She has found her lost beloved
     within. The self that seemed to have disintegrated in blatantly
     psychotic fashion has found a higher level of integration. Her
     experience resembles that of Rumi:

                I have lived on the lip
                of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
                knocking on a door. It opens.
                I've been knocking from the inside!
                            (Moyne & Barks, 1986: 75)

     In a cultural atmosphere where spiritual madness is distinguished
     from profane pathology[12] and not only tolerated but revered, we
     find that the intense longing one may experience on the sexual
     ladder of ascent has spiritual possibilities our own culture dares
     not contemplate. Those mad with longing, however miserable they
     may be, have entered a trance which brings numinous realities to
     consciousness. It reveals that our life in the hectic and
     ephemeral world of social responsibility is missing something
     essential. This sense that something is missing and that life
     cannot be whole without it constitutes a cultural treasure.
     Ordinary people who are not blessed with such insanity are
     constantly on the look-out for signs that someone has had a taste
     of it. From the perspective of what we Westerners take to be
     "ordinary consciousness" or "sanity," even the common run of
     Bengalis are insane. Their reverence for the saint mad with
     longing proves their own disorientation.


                   Unconscious Reorganization of the Self

     There are in effect three forms of god-madness in Bengal: those
     who long to be insane, those whose longing has made them blatantly
     insane, and those who have lived with their insanity long enough
     to have reached a new level of integration -- what we may call the
     self-organized insane. The last of these categories is the most
     important and the greatest challenge for our Western assumptions.
     For the Bengalis it constitutes the ultimate proof that insane
     longing has a purpose. They make sense of it by saying: "The
     physical body can only hold so much love, after that one needs a
     spiritual body. Until the excess love can be organized into a
     spiritual body, it will overflow into ecstatic symptoms"
     (McDaniel, 1989: 85). This is an argument about the rung of
     longing that parallels quite nicely what we have already seen
     concerning carezza. Those who practice carezza might well say,
     "The ejaculatory body can only hold so much arousal, after that
     one needs a `glide body.' Until the excess arousal can be
     organized into a `glide body,' it will overflow into spasms."

     Most sexually active adults have no patience for carezza.
     Consequently they are apt to believe those who have undertaken
     such self-discipline to be "perverted," "self-delusional," and the
     like. Those who are standing on the rung of longing and speak of
     gliding into a "spiritual body" appear to our profane Western
     consciousness to be even more dangerous and out of touch. The
     insanity engendered by longing is more than indecent for us. It is
     psychotic and cries out for medication. We are so disturbed by the
     flagrant symptoms that we want to do everything in our power to
     shut them down (asylums, medication, electro-shock). It never
     occurs to us that they might be leading somewhere -- that a higher
     state of spontaneous integration is possible.[13] Indeed, it
     generates no little anxiety among Bengalis:

          The highest ecstatic state is Radha's mahabhava,[14]
          which includes incoherent speech, irrational behavior,
          and all possible emotions experienced intensely and
          simultaneously. Radha's divine madness is a state so
          passionate and extreme that it is even a mystery to
          Krsna, Radha's lover and Lord (McDaniel, 1989: 29).

     McDaniel's research controverts our dearest assumptions, for she
     reveals that when insane longing is allowed to run its course it
     does indeed generate a "spiritual body," that is, a new
     psychological integration. The deeper layers of the unconscious
     that are responsible for the mad symptoms can be brought together
     into a new, more comprehensive and satisfying sense of self, where
     the mad saint achieves a "vivid relationship to the deity or
     Absolute" (Ibid., 23). The kundalini which in the beginning
     appears to despise and humiliate us turns out in the end to be our
     divine Mother.

     McDaniel illustrates this possibility for a new integration in her
     concluding chapter, where she contrasts the ritual pattern of
     orthodox bhakti yoga[15] with the ecstatic life of the
     spontaneously mad saint. She identifies five stages in each. (1)
     The sane disciple is initiated by a guru who stabilizes his social
     role, while the mad saint is emotionally out of control from
     childhood and finds the visions and trances a nurturing respite
     from a rejecting social order. (2) In faith and dedication the
     disciple takes instruction from the guru; meanwhile relatives and
     neighbors try to restore the mad saint's sanity by medical and
     religious means or by arranging a marriage, and the ecstatic
     herself tries to imitate normal life so as to control and
     understand what is happening. (3) The disciple's practice becomes
     more intense and disciplined, perhaps involving austerity,
     isolation, or joining a community; meanwhile the ecstatic
     withdraws into seclusion or wanders from place to place attempting
     spiritual practice, generally without instruction beyond inner
     voices, though there may be one or more gurus. (4) The disciple
     finds the mantras[16] come "alive" and there are real feelings of
     love; in contrast, the ecstatic undergoes a crisis involving death
     and rebirth wherein the spiritual relationship with the deity is
     finally stabilized. (5) The disciple takes on a spiritual role in
     the community as a guru; the ecstatic, too, is recognized as a
     guru, and the persisting mad behavior is taken as evidence of
     religious insight (Ibid., 263-4). By the end of the two processes,
     a real similarity has been attained, especially if the ecstatic
     has learned traditional rituals and nomenclature. Their difference
     lies in the continuing evidence of madness in the ecstatic.

     We may wonder how many spontaneously mad ecstatics achieve a
     re-organization of the self such as that evinced in the Mad Woman
     of Calcutta. McDaniel provides no statistics. To some extent
     numbers are not important. The point is that the diamond ladder
     describes what is humanly possible. The fact that each successive
     rung has had fewer visitors than the last is very much to be
     expected. The majority of us are capable of standing on the first
     rung -- if only for the brief moment of spasmodic orgasm. Some
     have struggled with the meaning of their orgasm and endeavored to
     enjoy it for its own sake -- regardless of cultural disapproval. A
     few of these have noticed the rails of the ladder and secured
     their stance by grabbing hold with their hands and have called
     their orgasms "liberated."

     As soon as the ladder is recognized as a device for ascending, we
     become curious about where it may lead. Some of those who have
     "liberated" themselves internally from social censure have
     experimented with carezza and learned that efforts to contain
     their physiological tension can lead them into a glide, where an
     orgasmic state of arousal can be sustained for a period of minutes
     or perhaps hours. It enables them to explore in erotic trance a
     subtle plane of non-ordinary consciousness never dreamed of by
     those who teeter in ignorance of a ladder of ascent.

     Each rung challenges us with a new sort of tension that must be
     held if we are to remain there. On the first rung, we must submit
     to our physiology while retaining a certain level of individual
     consciousness that this is my experience. When we hold too tightly
     to our ego-control, the physiology of orgasm is impossible. We are
     psychologically "impotent" or "frigid." When we give over too
     completely to our physiology, there is no "I" left to experience
     it. Because this first-rung tension is not terribly hard to
     contain, most humans are capable of enjoying "explosive,"
     "forward-falling" orgasm. Furthermore, we are challenged to hold
     the tension between what appears to be valid for us (the two
     partners) as well as what is enjoined or condemned by our society.
     Those unable to hold onto what is "valid for us," succumb to guilt
     or inhibition and fail to "liberate" their orgasms. At the other
     extreme, those who lose all social responsibility forget even
     their partner and fall victim to obsessive thinking and compulsive
     behavior. At the rung of carezza, we have to hold the tension
     between the physiological spasm reflex and our erotic
     consciousness. When the tension is held sufficiently, we glide
     into a state of trance where our pleasure and mutuality are
     substantially enhanced.

     Exploration of the erotic tension takes us to the rung of longing,
     where we find that there are two sorts of tension. A vertical
     tension confronts us with the opposition between divine numinosity
     and the destruction of madness. Both involve a loss of ego. The
     promise of bliss encourages us to let go, while the threat of
     final destruction compels us to cling to our personal sense of who
     we are. If we are able to hold this vertical tension, we discover
     a horizontal conflict: we want to get nearer to our partner, but
     each step forward reveals the insuperability of our separateness
     and distance. If on the contrary we wish to flee the agony of this
     tension, we find we are held in spite of ourselves. Such is the
     nature of eros. Rooted in the physiology, emotionality, and
     involuntary imaginality of kundalini, it is comprised of
     unconscious forces much greater than the ego. In longing we find
     we can relate to eros but cannot control it.

     Just as holding the tension between consciousness and physiology
     at the rung of carezza moves us into a subtle plane of awareness
     automatically, i.e., by a force outside the control of our ego and
     at a moment we cannot anticipate; so also the double tension of
     eros on the rung of longing has the power to move us automatically
     into a sort of god-consciousness. The mad saints have made no
     effort to hold the tension of eros. Either because their egos are
     too weak or the arousal of kundalini too strong, they have simply
     relinquished their ego and allowed the erotic force of kundalini
     to dance upon their prostrate form. They are awake to a chaotic
     stream of highly charged subtle realities of which they can make
     little sense beyond knowing that they belong to the goddess who
     batters them. They have been drawn into a state of mind that
     appears insane from the ordinary point of view but which
     subjectively is experienced as a powerful and important new
     development.


                    The Attainment of a "Spiritual Body"

     What we have seen over the 500-year history of ecstatic religion
     in Bengal is that there are two approaches to the rung of longing.
     An orthodox and socially responsible approach builds upon a stable
     ego-structure, employing ritual to loosen the rigid boundaries of
     an ego that is well adapted to the social world of ordinary
     consciousness. Although many may not make it securely to the rung
     of longing, there appears to be a sizable number of gurus who
     have.[17] On the other hand, some individuals are blessed (or
     cursed) with a weak ego-structure, inadequately adapted to the
     social world and ordinary consciousness, and without boundaries to
     protect them from the onslaught of unconscious forces. Some of
     these are simply psychotic. Others are "god-maddened." In the
     context of Bengali culture, to be "god-maddened" means that,
     however tormented and miserable one may be, a wholly unconscious
     process has begun reorganizing the personality from within.

     By analogy we may say that those of us who have found ourselves on
     the rung of longing may encounter rigidities or structural flaws
     in our ego-structure which may take us into experiences not unlike
     those described in the religious literature of Bengal. Those of us
     who are too rigidly or defensively secure in our personal sense of
     self may nevertheless encounter the open receptiveness and steady
     attention of our partner's gaze as opening onto a subtle plane of
     relationship in which we are stuck between a well-defined nearness
     and distance. We will be filled with a longing to go further but
     an incapacity to do so. Our beloved will be seen with new eyes,
     more deep and soulful than that "special friend" that appears to
     the eyes of ordinary consciousness. The mystery of our beloved's
     unique personality will surely be glimpsed. The timeless moment
     will have a certain numinosity and promise. But our beloved will
     remain a human being for us -- a uniquely wonderful personality,
     but very clearly a human being. If we are tempted to call this
     longing bhava, we are correct insofar as it is a personal emotion,
     but there will be no insanity. We will feel held back from a great
     promise, dimly intuited. Others who have not reached this stage
     may be ready to call us crazy even to dream that there is anywhere
     further to go. But we will find that we are not crazy enough.

     If our ego-structure is somewhat weaker, or the unconscious forces
     more fully aroused, our beloved's personality will be far more
     numinous to us -- we will be inclined to say "enchanted." An
     enchanted being is not quite human but redolent of an uncanny
     power that we will find both fascinating and dangerous. We will
     wonder if we are up to tangling with one whose moves can be
     entirely unpredictable, who may demand more of us than we are able
     to give, who may infect us, too, with a disturbing sense that at
     any moment we may go out of control. We may detect an impersonal
     glint in our beloved's eye that speaks of forces distinctly
     animal-like, suggesting a ferocity and impulsivity that horrifies
     us. At this point, the word bhava seems far more appropriate. Our
     longing to engage more deeply with this uncanny other seems
     distinctly ill-considered from any rational point of view. But the
     promise is too fascinating to relinquish. Our entanglement in the
     push and pull of eros takes on an unmistakably insane tone.

     Enchanted beings dwell rather more closely to the ordinary world
     than divinities. When in the eyes of our bhava-filled erotic
     trance, our beloved takes on godly qualities, we tremble with awe.
     To be in the grip of a divine being is to be moved to adoration
     and worship. Although no guru has given us a mantra containing our
     beloved's name, we are involuntarily possessed by the need to
     acknowledge the august divinity undeniable in our beloved's eyes.
     Our attitude of worship may last only a matter of minutes. The
     time cannot be calculated. But it can also persist into the next
     day or week. If so, we will be beside ourselves in our efforts to
     find ways to express our impossible emotion. Perhaps we will be
     moved involuntarily to make gestures, sighs, shed tears, or
     pronounce the mantra of our beloved's name aloud at the most
     inopportune moments. If so, we will have had a taste of what the
     Bengalis mean when they speak of Radha-bhava.

     If the diamond ladder's rung of longing brings us madness, and
     even if it only makes us wish we were insane, it confronts us with
     the limits of our will-power. For whether we court insanity like
     the disciple of yoga or try to extricate ourselves from it, we
     know the power of eros lies entirely outside our control. There is
     no pleading with eros: "Just take me upward, don't destroy me!"
     Disciples of orthodox ritual know that a lifetime of supplication
     may not be enough to obtain even the slightest taste of bhava. On
     the other hand, those who have done nothing at all to deserve it
     may be transported immediately into "god-madness" and shattered.
     Although the way of longing is filled with uncertainties,
     McDaniel's thesis offers no little comfort. For some of those who
     have given themselves over entirely to their desperation for the
     Beloved have been guided from within, through no merit or fault of
     their own. Bhava prepared a "spiritual body" for itself, and women
     and men were able to say, "Look, there he is!" and point to their
     own breasts.

     According to the story, the Mad Woman of Calcutta longed for a
     human beloved who had died. There is no mention of his being
     "divine." But we do witness an interesting progression in the
     three phases narrated to us. In the beginning she searches for him
     in the empirical world: if only people will tell her where he is,
     she will fetch him. This describes a beloved confined by the laws
     of space and time. In the middle phase we are told that she clung
     to young men as they passed her, asserting that they were her lost
     Shyama Babu. She did not fall on young women or middle-aged men.
     She showed some discrimination. But we are not told that she
     identified only young men of a particular build or shape of nose.
     We are led to believe that at this stage virtually any young man
     was a candidate to be recognized as her Shyama. Her beloved has
     shed his definitive shape like a ghost or one who is enchanted. He
     can appear anywhere, take nearly any form. He lurks within every
     young man as the reality beneath appearances, and vanishes the
     moment he is recognized. Her longing has raised her to a subtle
     plane perversely designed only to further her longing. Longing has
     deepened her bhava, and her symptoms have become psychotic.

     By the end it is clear that her longing has built for her a
     "spiritual body" capable of containing her bhava. Her florid
     symptoms have disappeared. She is radiant with joy because, while
     sitting under the sacred tree of her district, she dances in a
     cosmic Vrindavana with her Krishna. The bhava that drove her mad
     and destroyed her personal ego has now become rasa, flowing
     eternally from the Vrindavana of the macrocosm, invisible to
     fleshly eyes, into her own breast. Her "spiritual body" contains a
     microcosmic Vrindavana that fills her with the joy of divine
     union.

     From the profane point of view she is still mad. She dwells in an
     impossible world. But it is a peaceful and joyful madness which
     presents a disturbing challenge to what we take for "normal." The
     narrator of the story wants us to question our notions of
     normalcy, wants to bring us face-to-face with what we are missing
     -- with what our internal monologue denies. What we take to be the
     curse of insane longing is a secret blessing. It takes us through
     torment to hard-won attainment, even though we have not the
     faintest idea how it occurs. We ourselves build nothing. We only
     suffer. An unconscious process constructs a "spiritual body" while
     battering us mercilessly before smoothing out into a bliss-filled
     glide.



     ----------------------

       1. Vimalananda: "If you can remember what time it is, you have
          no capacity for love" (Svoboda, 1994: 169)

       2. Cf Wendy Doniger's Preface to the second edition of Dimock
          (1989) and June McDaniel (1989).

       3. Bhava: "emotion, ecstasy"; any one of the attitudes one may
          take to one's chosen divinity -- servant, child, parent,
          sexual lover, etc.(Fischer-Schreiber, et.al., 1989).
          Radha-bhava is the attitude of being Radha in longing desire
          for Krishna. In Bengal, bhava represents "the religious
          extreme of the personal" in one's emotional attitude toward
          the deity, while rasa is "the religious extreme of the
          impersonal." Bhava is a sacred fluid that fills our personal
          ego and bursts its seams, spilling out in the symptoms of
          insanity. Eventually it builds a new receptacle for itself
          ("spiritual body" or "self"); our torments are changed to
          bliss; and personal bhava is replaced by cosmic rasa
          (McDaniel, 1989: 81, 90).

          Dr. Cornelia Dimmitt points out that these meanings of bhava
          do not represent standard Sanskrit usage and are therefore
          envidently peculiar to Bengal. The literal meaning of bhava
          in Sanskrit is "birth, origin, coming into existence, state
          of being, existence." In making it the fluid of their
          spiritual existence, apparently the Bengali tradition refers
          to the physiological, emotional, and imaginal impression of
          being filled with an awareness-transforming fluid. They only
          "come into existence" spiritually when filled with this
          subjective impression.

       4. I.e., in his crown chakra, which is traditionally represented
          as the moon.

       5. "Rasa stands for bodily liquid in general and the humors
          (dosha) in particular." It also means the water element,
          taste, and bliss. In alchemy it refers to mercury
          (Feuerstein, 1990).

       6. Usually some form of his name has been incorporated into the
          final two lines of the poems attributed to him.

       7. Shakta is the religion of the goddess, Shakti, who is Shiva's
          consort.

       8. The Baul sect: probably the maddest of contemporary Bengali
          ecstatics, they appear to have combined Shaivism with Sufism
          in their religious understanding.

       9. According to McDaniel's study, the Bengalis attribute bhava
          (personal emotion) to the first stage. It is transformed into
          rasa (impersonal emotion) in the final stage. Bhava is my
          longing. Rasa is cosmic longing.

      10. This is the shortest of many examples, including some rather
          famous figures. Another source of information about many of
          these same female saints in which, however, the element of
          madness has been somewhat de-emphasized is Linda Johnsen's
          Daughters of the Goddess (1994).

      11. This is a universal characteristic of shamanism, an
          indication that one is "elected by the spirits." Cf. Eliade
          (1964); Neihardt (1961); Merkur (1992).

      12. In a section titled "Madness and the Indian Medical Model,"
          McDaniel shows that Indian culture is well aware of madness
          as a form of psychopathology and distinguishes this from
          spiritual madness (Ibid., 11-17).

      13. This parallels the argument of psychiatrist and Jungian
          analyst, John Weir Perry, who has shown that young
          schizophrenics whose "psychotic process" is accepted and
          supported with empathy go through a process of disintegration
          and then re-integration -- a transformation process that
          brings about a valuable re-adaptation to life. We rarely see
          this because the schizophrenic's symptoms so frighten the
          rest of us that we do everything in our power to shut down a
          process that is striving for a re-organization of the self
          (Perry, 1974).

      14. Mahabhava: "the greatest bhava," the highest state of insane
          longing.

      15. Bhakti yoga: the path of love and surrender that, under the
          direction of a guru, classically follows four stages: (1)
          bhakti (veneration), (2) bhava, (3) prema, (4) mahabhava
          (Fischer-Schreiber, 1989).

      16. Mantra: a word, phrase, or collection of syllables, usually
          incorporating a divine name, given by the guru and kept in
          secret by the disciple; recited continually in meditation;
          eventually is perceived as being identical with the deity
          invoked (Fischer-Schreiber, 1989). This last stage is what
          McDaniel means by "the mantras come alive."

      17. This is not to deny that some -- perhaps most -- who set
          themselves up as gurus may be charlatans. Charlatans are
          everywhere -- among disciples, mad saints, and academics, as
          well -- which does not prevent there being sincere and
          accomplished individuals in all of these groups.