Beatrix Murrell, seeing that I was considering not offering any more courses within the narrow time frame of the January intensive session at JST-Berkeley, suggested that I might do a series of blogs based on a book I coauthored years ago with Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast, Belonging to the Universe. This is a good suggestion, and I shall take it to heart, with the further consideration that it is time to update my contributions to that book.

In the meantime, I want to reflect in depth on Jeffrey J. Kripal’s difficult book on the erotic and the mystical in the life of Sri Ramakrishna, Kali’s Child. The underlying thesis of the book is not difficult for me, personally. I have already realized that these two dimensions in my own experience are as inseparable as the human and the divine in Jesus (or, for that matter, in anyone venerated as an avatara within Hinduism, like Ramakrishna himself). Divinity incarnate in humanity, or the human divinized, necessarily includes human eros. In terms of the Orthodox doctrine of incarnation, “What was not assumed is not redeemed.” In other words, if eros is banned from the mystical, then it is also banned from the human.