Sexuality and Spirituality
Excerpt from SEXUALITY and SPIRITUALITY
GURURAJ ANANDA YOGI: You may have very strong sexual urges and cannot fulfill them, so what do you do? Let’s first examine where these sexual urges come from. Psychologists have proved that it is the strongest urge in man. That urge is there to populate the earth ‑‑ it is necessary for procreation. If you were to go to one of the monks, you might be told, “Oh, well, you can’t fulfill them, so you become a celibate.” That is not what I would say. Being told to become celibate by a monk is just monkey business.
The sexual act is first committed in the mind. It is the equivalent of its physical expression because all urges, all emotions, and all feelings originate from the mind. So, when a person thinks of the sex act, he has already performed the sex act. Only the emission might be missing. So, celibacy is impossible. People who undergo various yogic practices will tell you that the sexual urge can be sublimated. It is turned into something which is termed in Sanskrit as “ojas”, meaning “light”. But that is a fallacy. The constituent of the emission (semen) is gross matter, and how is that going to turn into light? If you say you will turn it into light, what do you mean by light? What is that light? This remains indefinable. Every human being has been given certain organs, and these organs would not be there if they weren’t meant to be used. We don’t mean misuse or abuse, of course, but they are made for use.
For a mature man and woman, the sexual act becomes something divine, something extremely beautiful. A a total mergence takes place between man and woman, and in that mergence a forgetfulness occurs. Memory and forgetfulness are allied to each other like two sides of the same coin. The stimulation in man or woman is because of memory. Because of having had similar experiences in the past, even in the animal stage, then a memory naturally wells up in the mind of that pleasurable occasion. The mind is where the memory resides, and the memory is what stimulates. But during the act itself the memory must be forgotten, and you must be in the land of total forgetfulness. You forget yourself completely, to find totality in sex. To forget yourself completely means you forget your ego self. In that moment of ecstasy while peering into the eyes of your beloved, you are not there anymore. There is a force within you, a Divine force which is translated into its physical equivalent, that is just there, and you are only conscious of that spiritual force. So, you disappear‑‑your ego-self disappears—and a man functions ninety percent with his ego-self. His mind just goes from one thing to the other.
There are some theologies that regard the sexual act to be very sacred, and it is sacred.
It is only the abuse of it that makes it not as it should be. The sexual act should not be stimulated by lust. Lust comes naturally from the memory of a previous pleasurable experience. But this can be used as a starting point, and this is where sublimation comes in. This doesn’t mean some yogic practice to turn it into light, but instead to turn the first glimmerings of sexual stimulation or lust into love, and to allow this love to express itself. That is Divinity. When a man can really merge into his beloved, and the beloved can merge into her lover, then you are actually merging into God. If you can forget your ego self, you are not performing the sex act at all. It is He that is doing it. It is God with his counterpart, His manifestation. The manifestor and the manifestation have become One. The heat of the fire has become one with the heat; the fragrance of the flower has become one with the flower. So, you are doing nothing. If that could really be understood, then you will understand why the manifestor very naturally and spontaneously had to manifest this entire existence.
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