Customer Reviews

Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India

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If you've read "What the Buddha Never Taught" or "The Great Dragon's Fleas," you know Tim Ward's writing style. He traveled through Asia and writes about Buddhism with insight and humor. The third book in his non-fiction "nirvana trilogy," "Arousing the Goddess" takes the reader along with Tim and Sabina as they search India for statues depicting Buddha in the Earth-touching gesture. Along the way, Tim and Sabina fall in love and experience a sexual style that is at once physically uncomfortable and spiritually exciting. Ward adds a ferocious candor to his book, giving you an uncommonly vivid and intimate account of Tantric sex and the history behind it.

This is a thoroughly engrossing tale that is among the best travel narratives in recent years, right up there with William Dalrymple and Bill Bryson. He manages to cover familiar ground with a fresh voice, and uncommon ground with a style that never leaves the reader behind. Ward's at his best describing the everyday aspects of the subcontinent: ablutions in the Ganges, ordinary people forging an existence, and negotiating the seething cacophony of what is at once one of the world's most dazzling and unsavory lands. "Arousing the Goddess" is full of surprises, and in the end we are encouraged on our own path to truth. Buy this book if you ever plan to visit India, if you've been and want to relive the wonders, or if you're simply looking for an engaging read.

I loved this book from the moment I heard about it. Tim Ward's wonderfully lyrical narrative seduces you from the start and draws you into a world of mystical spirituality infused with some really hot sex scenes. In the vein of truly great raconteurs, he takes us to places we've never been and describes them with such artistry that all of our senses are engaged, as if we are there, walking the dusty roads with him. This is a sensuous and poetic work of art, one that I wanted to begin reading again the moment the last page was finished.

Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India is the personal memoir of one man's sexual and spiritual awakening in India. Author Tim Ward traveled throughout India and the far east for two years, and fell in love with a beautiful Austrian Indologist on her own search for knowledge. The energy harnessed the power of tantric sex to achieve a sublime plateau of bliss, color, sensation, and awakened truths amid their passion. Their journey is one that pursues enlightenment as well as spiritual wisdom, and the heat of their unions recalls echoes of the ancient sex practices of the mysterious Tantrics. An enthralling true story of physical, carnal, and spiritual exploration as witnessed, lived, and recorded by Tim Ward.

This is a lovely book that I was really sorry to put down. The author reveals a frank, and often humble voice that obviously really comes from the heart. While learning something new about India and its spiritual traditions, we also get a very real look at the mix of tension and magic that's a part of falling in love in an exotic world. The sex scenes are vivid and sensual: A spiritual book with naughty bits -- what's not to like? My favorite character, and the most powerful in the book, is that of India, personified by the goddess Kali. This is a moving book that you keep thinking about long after you've finished it.

Arousing the Goddess is a very welcome companion to Tim Ward's best seller "What The Buddha Never Taught". It gives us a much fuller picture of his incredible spiritual journey's in the East. The mode of writing he uses is pleasantly understandable for all to read and truly learn. Those that follow a spiritual path will find a great helping hand in the pages of this book. His description of certain practices, rituals and philosophies of the East have scarcely been put in print, making this work a real gem in the treasures of the East. The book is packed with lessons of inner discovery and knowledge. No-one can read this book and not get something out of it. The greatest, perhaps, is a deeper understanding of sex and love.

Wow, what a great novel! It is insightful and skillfully weaves together a spiritual journey through India with an unplanned, but welcomed love story. Arousing the Goddess is an easy-to-read novel which holds the reader's attention from the first to the last page. Tim is very open about his experiences, but he is also able to interject the right amount of humor and wit into the storyline.

As Tim and Sabina's relationship evolves, the reader is constantly left wondering what will happen next as they journey together. What makes this a great novel is that as the story unfolds, the reader can't help but get caught up in the different emotions (passion, frustration, disappointment, heartbreak) that Tim and Sabina experience both individually and as a couple. Additionally, the reader can relate to the different levels of their relationship and can share in their pain and joy. Tim is able to engage the reader throughout his story even to the end where he leaves the reader with a thought provoking question.

Would highly recommend this book to all those interested in travel and sex. For it provides a wonderful account of travelling through India and then goes very deeply into the experience of falling in love, and making love. I have studied the anthropology of sexuality at Cambridge University and the University of Hawaii, and this book deserves to be on every syllabus - I believe it is already on the syllabus of Claremont University in California. Even that doesn't justify this book for it also a deeply spiritual study of one young man's quest for meaning when he studies Buddhism. Not only that but is an easy to read account, that is absolutely gripping - and Tim's emotional honesty is breathtaking. I quoted extensively from on my book on travelling with your intuition Travelling Magically: How to Turn Your Journey into a Life-Changing Experience I read an enormous amount of travel books for it and quoted from some. But this book - I originally found from an amazon list - is way up there with the very best. Really, I wish I had come across it years ago. I can't recommend it more highly.

A mystical philosopher engaged upon an autobiographical journey into the East, "searching for the inexplicable, something to crack open [his] metaphysical prejudices." Arousing the Goddess introduces us to a true traveler, an intrepid spiritual pilgrim looking for that elusive point wherein the hand of heaven touches earth. Yet in the early naïveté of the journey, the sexual and the spiritual get fused and confused under the banner of Tantric allure. Though even in this, the author is honest, perhaps too honest. For painfully prolific are the pages sticky with the seedy recollections of one seeking to uncover the metaphysical nature of sex. All the while, this novice exploration into the ruins of Tantric lore proves something of a bust. And thus the spiritual journey must continue, as this bona fide pilgrim yearns for a greater glimpse into the mysteries of reality. And as such, he challenges each of us to overcome our confusions and our delusions and travel onwards into What the Buddha Never Taught.

This is a fun read...Sabrina is a "tireless" Goddess

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