"That's how the boy Neelkanth become one of the greatest spiritual leaders of a critical period in India's history. His lessons inspired millions and continue to do so, lessons of wisdom that is the essence of our Indian culture and of our unity in diversity. He will be forever revered as a teacher. Perhaps in that he lives on in the hearts of our people, and perhaps his name might endure past the time span of the six temples that he had helped to build. He truly gained immortality in his brief lifetime, which ended at the early age of 49 in 1830. But his message too, is eternal. It is the timeless message that we have yet to learn fully, that we are a single human family, capable of living together and loving one another. This profound message might be the greatest gift that India can offer to the world, and it does so with love."

      Indira placed the book that she read some of the facts from onto the table before be. "So tell me, Peter, which sites do you wish to visit?" she said.

      "Which sites would you like to show me that you personally would be proud to have me see?" I asked.

      "Oh!" she said. "Actually what puzzles me about my own journey through our history is something that we seemed to have lost." She went inside and came back with another book. Here is an ancient text from the Upanishads that is totally focused on sex. We find some attempts made there to acknowledge that sex is one of the most deeply rooted elements in the human experience and is something greater than just a pleasurable experience. Some attempts had been made to give it a spiritual dimension that I find inspiring even though there is a great deal spiritually lacking. For instance, in Hindu the human body is seen as a temple. In the Upanishads an attempt was made to uplift sex into this more precious dimension of a temple. Here is verse from the Upanishads." She opened the book at a bookmark. "The writer say this about having sex with a woman:

      Her lap is the sacrificial altar,

      Her pubic hair the sacrificial grass,

      Her skin within the organ a lighted fire,

      Her two labia of the vulva are the two stones of the soma.

      He who, knowing all this, practices sexual intercourse, assuredly wins as great a world as would be won through the Vijapeya sacrifice."



      "Why does this puzzle you?" I asked.

      "It puzzles me because all the great religions move away from sex as a spiritual expression, but the Hindi spiritual force draws us towards it. Has our deep spiritual history brought forth something that is a mistaken concept?"

      I shook my head. "If I'm not mistaken, the very word, Upanishad, means something like, inner or mystic teaching. Could that be lost? I don't think it has been lost, which is evident by the great sexual writing, the Kama Sutra that survived two millennia and was a part of the very earliest revival of the spiritual dimension of Hinduism following the Vedic Dark Age and the Brahmanic Dark Age. It appears the Kama Sutra was written almost in parallel with the dawn of the humanism of Islam that followed the emptiness and desolation that the Roman empire had spread across the land, the emptiness in which Rome collapsed on its own sword. The development of Islam after the emptiness that had lingered past the fall of Rome caused a period of revival that was felt around the world. That's the timeframe in which the Kama Sutra was written, which eventually became reflected a few centuries later in the great erotic temples of middle India that you told me about."

      "You mean the temples of Khajuraho that are known for their countless erotic sculptures?" said Indira. "Some say they were pleasure temples for the royalty."

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche