What between a play party and a love temple?
What is a temple if not a place to connect the human and the Divine?
For thousands of years, all around planet earth, humans have created buildings and monuments, some of them very impressive and sophisticated and some very simple and humble, but the way we know to call them all ‘temples’, or ‘shrines’, is because they were all used to serve as a contact places between humans and the divine. Any temple around the world, no matter the culture or the religion it was made by, was and is always a place of contact between those two realms: human consciousness and the divine.
Love temples are the same.
Love temples are places for us humans to come with our broken humanness and connect with sacred divine realms by the means of love, eros, and sexuality.
Love temples are different than “Play Parties” in the intention that stands behind them. A play party is mainly a party. At a party, you come in order to have fun, enjoy yourself, socialize, and maybe get laid. But to a temple, you come with a desire to have your heart open to the mysteries. Like any temple in the world, love temples should always have altars for worship, corners for meditation, and places for prayer. The unique aspect of a love temple is that a legitimate altar can be an erected lingam, a place for meditation can be an open yoni and the act of prayer might be combined with pelvic thrusts and deep moans.
Indeed these were common parts of the rituals that were performed in many ancient temples. In many cultures around the world, including the middle east, fertility rituals were part of the yearly, and sometimes monthly rituals that would be held in the temple. Some temples were serving mainly the nation, and it would be the royalty and the priesthood that would engage in ritualistic sex, but in some other temples, usually in local shrines, Kedeshas were available to serve to laypeople and pilgrims.
Part of the revolution of our times is that a lot of what in ancient times was kept from the public is available today to people regardless of their social status. Our post-modern Love Temples are places like that. It doesn’t matter who you are and to what social class you belong, as long as your heart’s desire is to find your connection to the Divine you are invited to the love temple rituals. You can of course go to a church, synagogue, a mosque, or a Buddhist temple, but there it is less likely that you will be able to get naked and worship with your entire being. Love temples are places that invite you to full integration of spirit and matter. Your body is seen as a sacred instrument and your pleasure as sacred energy, or even as an offering.
In a love temple, it is also not really important if you are a Buddhist, a Jew, a Muslim, Christian, or a total pagan — as long as your religion is the religion of love. Love doesn’t care much through what archetypes you feel it is right to call her, as long as love is what you call, all the rest is not so important. There is no dogma to love temples, the religion of love is flowing like a river and dancing like a flame. It is alive, not fixed in a box of words. Any teenager that had ever fallen in love knows that no words can ever contain love, therefore love is never a dogma, but a felt vibration.
Coming to the temple of love does not mean you are going to get together with someone and have your desires met. In a love temple, there is a place for tears, broken hearts, and the sacred feeling of being alone.
I remember stepping once into a love temple in a place where no one knew me. Everybody was engaging with each other, but I was left alone. No one came to connect with me. I felt the pain of loneliness crawling into my heart, but then I felt into all the lonely people of the world. Millions of them. Elinor Rigby, Father Mackenzy, and all the rest. I found myself holding this archetype of the older man that no sexy woman would engage. I felt I need to hold this position with dignity and in a mode of prayer. It was a very meaningful evening for me. An evening of deep prayer — not for myself, but for all the homeless and lonely people of the world. They too deserve love to reach them, and good sex to open their body to goddesses. In a love temple this is an important position — the position of holding the pain of humanity and bringing it into the temple.
I wish we stop calling play parties temples, and start relate to love temples in the deep manner they need to be related to.
Ohad Pele / February, 2022
