Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume IV - Part 3
The only truth in that [the saying that “sexual pleasure and Brahmananda are brothers”] is that all intense pleasure goes back at its root to Ananda – the pleasure of poetry, music, 
production of all kinds, battle, victory, adventure too – in that sense only all are brothers of Brahmananda. But the phrase is absolutely inaccurate. We can say that there is a physical Ananda born of Brahmananda which is far higher, finer and more intense than the sexual, but of which the sexual is a coarse and excited degradation – that is all.