35

VENUS OF MILO

Life is as ugly and necessary as the female body.

Death is as beautiful and necessary as the male body.

The soul is beyond male and female as it is beyond Life and Death.

Even as the Lingam and the Yoni are but diverse developments of One Organ, so also are Life and Death but two phases of One State. So also the Absolute and the Conditioned are but forms of THAT.

What do I love? There is no form, no being, to which I do not give myself wholly up.

Take me, who will!

COMMENTARY (ΛΕ)

This chapter must be read in connection with chapters 1, 3, 4, 8, 15, 16, 18, 24, 28, 29.

The last sentence of paragraph 4 also connects with the first paragraph of Chapter 26.

The title "Venus of Milo" is an argument in support of paragraphs 1 and 2, it being evident from this statement that the female body becomes beautiful in so far as it approximates to the male.

The female is to be regarded as having been separated from the male, in order to reproduce the male in a superior form, the absolute, and the conditions forming the one absolute.

In the last two paragraphs there is a justification of a practice which might be called sacred prostitution.

In common practice of meditation the idea is to reject all impressions, but here is an opposite practice, very much more difficult, in which all are accepted.

This cannot be done at all unless one is capable of making Dhyana at least on any conceivable thing, at a second's notice; otherwise, the practice would only be ordinary mind-wandering.