I don’t mean to say that marriage is an expression of lust. It is an institution meant to regulate unbridled sexual activity and to ensure that human energies are engaged in bringing up children and transmitting values through family. It is a social institution meant to stabilise the family unit, to ensure genetic continuity, to regulate the sexual impulse and thereby to maintain a fixed social order. This is the ordinary purpose of marriage. But a man and woman relationship can go beyond this limited frame into a true companionship. This however is rare and does not require the formal institution of marriage, sexual engagement and children etc to fulfil a deeper and higher purpose than marriage ordinarily provides.
Also we need to distinguish between love, lust and sex. Sex is the act, a biological mechanism evolved by nature for propagation of a species. It is associated with intense momentary pleasure through a network of nerves to ensure that the purpose of Nature is fulfilled. In human beings since every animal activity is humanised it gets naturally associated with the heart’s tender feelings of love. But in its origin love is very different from what we ordinarily experience. The true movement of love is to give itself and through this act of giving become one with the loved. When this urge to unite enters the physical body, it is compelled to use the means provided by nature. However the physical expression of love need not be sexual but something much more beautiful. It is simply a habitual association of love with sex that combines the two as if synonymous. Lust is however different. It is a rising up of intense passions and desire to possess, appropriate and the craving will to make one’s own what is not really given to us by destiny. It is wanting someone or something which is not yours.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
