Humanity is obsessed with sex (Kama) and in the process has abandoned the Divine (Rama).

There is no other species in this world that proudly displays the sexual genitalia of another species in their places of dwelling, working and worshiping—and even adorns their hair with them. They are touched, plucked, sniffed, powdered and eaten and even crushed into potions and drunk. Yes, flowers are the sexual genitalia of another species, and humanity and the world would not be the same without them and without sex.

Have you ever wondered why there is such a longing for food, water and sex, and why they are so tempting and addictive?

The answer is simple: all three of them utilize all six senses (sadayayatana)—touch, hearing, smell, sight, taste—and also the mind (manas). The only difference is in the level of utilization of the senses and the body organs involved. Your body is the doer (karta) and your mind is the enjoyer (bhokta). This creates another level of feeling that is nonpareil.

These three are a veritable feast for the body and the mind. They take the body and the mind to another level. Other than puja (traditional Indian form of worshipping the Divine and thanks giving), which also involves all six senses, no other single activity can so soothe and elevate you.

It is sex alone, out of the three—food, water and sex—that has the potential of elevating you to supra consciousness.

The urge for food, water and sex is perfectly natural. You never denounce anyone who says they are hungry or thirsty. If they are thirsty or hungry, you serve them water or food. But what happens to your poise and equilibrium if someone says they are feeling sexy? You immediately denounce them.

You do not even have the courage to talk about sex in public.

You are not even inclined to try to understand sex. You are afraid to discuss sex and to try and understand sex. What kind of fear is it that plagues you, so that you are not prepared to understand the force out of which the whole world is born? What is this irrational fear? Why does sex alarm you so? It is because the word sex has become so condemned.

Sex has become an open, festering wound. It needs to be healed. It has to be cleaned and it has to be taken out of the gutter. A temple has to be made around it. You can rid society of the ghost of sex only when you develop the courage to talk about sex in a rational and healthy manner, and not by whispering about it in hushed tones, embarrassed that somebody may hear what you are talking about it. Open, soul-searching dialogue leads to understanding. By understanding sex, you can transform, sublimate and transcend it. Unless that happens, you will die, and even in death, the ghost of sex will haunt you.

Those who slander sex have blasphemed the Divine, as sex is just another form of Divine energy.

Like the Divine and all forms of energy, it is neutral. Your perception of the Divine makes you credit the Divine with certain qualities—similarly, your use of sexual energy colors it good or bad. Sexual energy is just grace, a benediction. You should be full of gratitude to the Divine.

You are surrounded by an ocean of sex.

You cannot run away from sex—art and literature are replete with it. There is not a single magazine cover, print or television advertisement or film poster that does not have sexual undertones. Look at the paintings of deities in calendar art—they are totally sensuous. Look at the idols of deities in places of worship—they are all beautifully proportioned, curvaceous and sensuous. So, it makes no sense to deny sex and agitate your mind. It makes more sense to become aware and to accept what is and calm your mind. Save your mind—save yourself.

Look at the all the living things in the universe. Their whole energy is directed towards continuous procreation, of creating new self-forms.

What is a seed’s destiny?

The seed is destined to grow into a new plant, into a new flower, into a new fruit, the fruit will again reinforce the seed—and so the cycle repeats itself. Life is a force that is continuously regenerating itself. Life is an eternal process of self-creation. The same process is true of you and in you. You have labeled this process sex. The urge to procreate has been wrongly looked down upon for thousands of years. Instead of accepting it, it has been abused. It has been denigrated, debased and cruelly flung into the gutter, to needlessly deny it, to needlessly hide it. It has been needlessly concealed, as if there were no place for it in life, no room for it in the scheme of things, as if to accept it were blasphemy.

You have not freed yourself from it by denying it, by concealing it, by trampling on it, by not accepting it—on the contrary, you have entangled, ensnared and entrapped yourself in it even more, like an insect in a spider’s web. This repression has yielded a result opposite from the one desired. The reality is that there is nothing more basic and nothing truer than this urge, and it should be accepted and given its rightful place

If you want to make a thing more popular, then disparage it, drive it underground—even better, ban it.

You will succeed on two counts—that of popularizing it and, at the same time, spreading misinformation about it. The very people who taught you to be against sex are the very people who are fully responsible for making you so aware of sex. The over-sexuality that exists in you can be blamed on their perverted teachings. Those who forbid a healthy dialogue and a healthy attitude toward sex are the very same people who have pushed you into a quicksand of sex, from which you are finding it increasingly difficult to extricate yourselves from.

Those very people who are frightened of sex, have convinced themselves they are innocent of sex, and that you are guilty of sex—and that they are differently enabled just because they deny sex, by refusing to talk about sex, by just blindly sweeping it under the covers, by ignoring sex, by refusing to accept sex. What a laugh! They are gone cases. They belong either in a circus where the physically differently enabled can showcase their differences, or in the mental ward of a lunatic asylum for being differently enabled mentally.

The strong and recurring pull toward sex is for the momentary realization of samadhi, a peek into supra consciousness, of which you get a glimpse in coitus.

Sex is the first experience of unity. 

You should try to grasp and hold on to that glimpse of samadhi which flashes like lightning and then vanishes. At the time of having sex, you are closest to existence. Your effort must be to know it, to become acquainted with it, to hold on to it. If you have a glimpse of that glory even once, you can pursue it, through meditation (dhyana), and yoga, to establish a deep and lasting relationship with it.

To know sex is to be free of it, to transcend it. And when it becomes part of your understanding, part of your knowledge and of your life, there will be no more room for lust. Then the path to samadhi is yours.

The great pull and allure of sex is that intercourse gives you a momentary glimpse of samadhi.

In the moment of orgasm, there is no mind. As there is no mind, you experience the bliss of samadhi—momentarily. You have to know and to meditate upon this momentary glimpse. You have to focus on it with awareness. The ultimate realization, even once, is enough to free you from sex forever. With one single experience, you can break through the barriers of ignorance (avidya) and  ego (ahamkara) caused by your erroneous identification with the body (sharira), breath (svasa), mind (manas), intellect (buddhi), memory (smriti), to rise from the lower self to enter the fringes of samadhi and realise the higher Self. There is a spiritual experience behind the craving for sex. 

Bodily fluids—blood, semen, vaginal—are full of Prana—the universal life force.

People observed that loss of blood—read Prana—over a certain amount, leads to death; and came to the erroneous conclusion that what is true for loss of blood—must be true vis-a-vis the loss of other bodily fluids—sperm and vaginal—that is, if you lose them, you die—and hence the converse must be true: if you retain them, you live.

Ergo, the nonsensical idea arose in the East that if you can retain the bodily fluids—Prana—in the body, you will become an immortal.

If you remain celibate, if you do not engage in sex, you will never die. That is foolish, because death cannot be avoided. Death is not something that is going to happen in the future, it has already happened with birth. You are inching towards death with every breath. It is only a question of time unfolding. You are rushing towards it each moment. So do not try to be celibate just to avoid death. The people who try to thus become celibate are afraid of death, and one who is afraid of death can never know what deathlessness is. You can indulge in sex or you can indulge in celibacy, it is not going to make any difference to whether you die or not. Do not impose celibacy and frustrate yourself—become naturally celibate and celebrate life.

You become naturally celibate when you have been awakened by self-knowledge.

You then do not have to impose celibacy on yourself. Celibacy then is neither the result of your actions nor of your endeavours. Your celibacy is not based on opposition to your unconscious mind but comes out of the fullness of your inner being. There is then neither duality nor multiplicity in you, but unity (yoga). You are then integrated. You are then free of duality (dvandvanabhighaata).

Never enforce any celibacy on yourself.

To reach celibacy, sex must be understood. To understand sex, go deep into it—go to its very core. You will then see sex is loosening its hold over you. Sex has a profound beauty as life comes out of it, ergo, sex cannot be a sin. Repression is a sin—it is a denial and denigration of Creation. Sex energy is very natural, it is inborn. It is part of your being. Do not condemn, judge, fear, fight or deny it. Simply become aware of it, accept it and approach it—more meditatively—in a more spiritual manner, and ascend beyond sex.

Celibacy is a tremendous understanding of your energies and their possibilities. Celibacy is not of the body or mind. Celibacy is of the spirit. Celibacy is not a control or discipline. Celibacy should not be forced or crammed into the body, then shoved into the mind and then pushed into the spirit.

Celibacy should be natural.

Let it take root in the spirit, sprout in the mind and flower in the body. When sex disappears into love and love disappears into prayer, celibacy blooms from within like a blossoming flower. Let there be a growth and blooming from the inside. Then it will no longer be a self-mortification of the body nor a suppression of the mind, but it will be gainful and a pleasurable expression of the spirit. The sage Patanjali says, in PYS 2.38: When the sadhak is firmly established in continence; knowledge, vigour and energy flow to him (brahmacharyapratisthayam viryalabha). The brahmachari transforms the energy of procreation into spiritual energy (ojas), emanating lustre (tej).

The sex energy inside every living being (including humanity) is more powerful and vital than any other force known to mankind, including nuclear force.

It creates a new life. An atom of man’s energy can create a new life, a new person! No other force known to you can do this. An infinitely small atom of your sex energy has billions of possibilities in it, it has unlimited potential. All-time greats like Mahavira, Buddha, Christ, Shankaracharya, Leonardo Da Vinci, Einstein, Gandhi, are a result of sex! But in order for these possibilities to materialize—in order to succeed in producing a new man, it is necessary that you accept sex, that you come to know sex fully, that you understand and transcend sex.

It is only by acquiring real knowledge about something that you can rise above it. In fact, knowledge is transcendence. By rushing to condemn and renounce sex, you are only being sucked further and deeper into it, possibly for lifetimes, till you acquire knowledge about it and transcend it. Do not rush—adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience—and arrive at the right attitude about sex, first and foremost, by not being against it.

If, from the very beginning, you take an attitude against sex, you will needlessly get involved in a fight that does not lead you anywhere. You will get involved in a fight in which your defeat is certain. You cannot defeat sexual energy because the endless cycle of life and the Divine are hidden in it.

You have to be grateful towards sex, you have to respect it. Sex should be respected because everything has happened out of it, and, everything is going to happen out of it. You have happened because of sex. Sex carries the whole blueprint of your destiny in your DNA. Everything natural is born out of sex. All life, all expression, all flowering is just sex energy. Sex is not something. Sex is everything.

One fact must be acknowledged and accepted—you are born out of sex. You and all other living beings came into existence because of the practice of sex. Your origin is sexual energy. You are filled with the energy of sex. The energy of life itself is the energy of sex. But you have been wasting this energy due to its wrong diversion at the behest of self-proclaimed custodians (thekedaars), moral police and pseudo-gurus.

These oppressive leaders have kept you encased in ignorance for centuries—as a result, you have become more debased, more perverted. You are totally losing it and becoming totally neurotic because of your ignorance of sex.

The blame should not be on those who reflect and meditate on the subject of sex, but at the door of the so-called preachers of morals and religion. Sex is normal, but its perversion can be traced to these pseudo-gurus and self-proclaimed custodians of your morals. But for them, you would have been freed from the ignorance of sex long ago. They have closed your eyes. They have covered you with a blanket of ignorance. They are squeezing your energy out of you with their moralistic bear hug. You must break free.

You must throw off the suffocating blanket of ignorance. You must open your eyes. It is simpler to suppress a thing rather than to accept it. They have committed a grave mistake by suppressing the basic truth of sex. And the result of this grave mistake has grown into a universal disease—perversion and pornography—by driving sex underground.

There are no pornographic cave paintings; simply because the cave people had a healthy, open and friendly relationship with sex. Sex did not occupy their minds all the time. They had no ascetics or gurus sermonizing to them. Pornography grew as ‘civilization’ grew. As ‘civilization’ grew, so did fanatic ascetics, whose sole achievement in terms of sex is that they succeeded in debasing and denigrating sex and driving it underground. Only when sex was repressed by the moralists, pseudo-gurus, ascetics, celibates, pirs, pundits and priests that pornography came about in their opposition.

The mind is pulled towards and hypnotized by the very thing it is trying to oppose. The ascetics and pseudo-gurus’ own minds have become more sexual, because of their opposition to sex. These people spreading untruths are your enemies—not sex. They wrongly preach, ‘Do not even think about sex, let alone discuss sex or reflect upon it.’ In order to know the truth, in order to talk about truth, it is first necessary to destroy and demolish those untruths, which have been imposed by these people on you as truths.

These people have purposely placed these major hurdles in your path. You must uproot these untruths and shun them as you had been taught to shun sex. These people themselves have strayed from the truth and taken you away from the truth and kept you from experiencing the truth.  Moments of truth only happen when you stop living what is untrue.

Read more: Sex & Yoga (Just Celebrate).

Ramanjit Garewal is a Master of yoga and has been teaching classical, traditional and the art of Hatha yoga for more than 20 years. He presently teaches at The Yoga House, a destination for the health conscious in Mumbai, India. His teachers have been: Life, Nature and the Universal Self present in all of us. Thirst, hunger, longing, to know the Self, to realize the Divine, by attaining kaivalya (liberation) have pulled him to yoga.

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Prepared by Soumyajeet Chattaraj/Edited by Tanya L. Markul

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