Yogic Life and Sex
07/05/10 22:08 Filed in: Yoga
This post is in response to a question asked on Facebook by one of our friends regarding sex, and as I wrote it, I thought that it would make a nice article:
"I have a funny Vedic question for you and Regis. What makes it ok for a vedic to have a sexual partnership? Not sure if my new vedic friend knows how it could be ok, so that he won't degrade his ultimate evolution?"
Tantra=Sex?
This also got me to thinking about what the West regards as tantra, which is thought to be akin to “sexual yoga”. A simpler yogic explanation is: mantra (sacred sounds/syllables) + yantra (sacred designs/geometry)= tantra. It is something which is fairly abstract and misunderstood to be sexual, because tantra is found in the union between the male and female energies. Looking at a Lingham is a good way to see a representation of a tantric concept, because it’s a male/female representation, designed to remind you of the unitive nature of the universe. It’s generative because of a misunderstanding and all sexual union arises from it through a basic ignorance of it’s higher, more inclusive principle at work.
Sexual Imagery on Hindu Temples
The above sculpture is found on the outside of a Hindu Sun Temple in South India. Not understanding that it’s representing a superficial aspect of human life, one could think that because these sculptures are found on the OUTSIDE of the temple, that they are therefore MORE IMPORTANT. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are on the outside because they are less important. When you visit these temples, observe how the more subtle and therefore powerful slowly is revealed as you draw closer to the centre of the temple itself, where often you will find a statue, or in some cases, nothing at all.
Understanding the nature of sex against a backdrop of Hindu thought will help tremendously, as one key aspect of the Hindu culture is that reproduction and family life is a main spiritual agreement with God. In Hindu thinking, there are four aims of life (purusarthas), and they are seen in many different contexts. You will see them described slightly differently, depending on the perspective of the speaker. To address the variety of viewpoints shown here and in Vedic thought in general, I like to think of them as planets with a gravitational pull on us, affecting many moons of our psycho-archetypes.
Four Aims of Life
Kama (pleasure, enjoyment)
Artha (security, material concerns)
Dharma (right living, moral life in society)
Moksha (desire for liberation)
Four Phases of Life
In Western Society:
hahaha!
In Eastern Society:
Against these Four Aims, the Four Phases of Life are set, and you can easily see how they are related and support each other:
Brahmacharya Ashrama : Youth, usually age 8 to 24; apprenticeship, studying in a guru-kula with a spiritual teacher, celibate
Grihastha Ashrama: Householder & married family life, usually age 25 to 50, raising children, working, etc.
Vanaprastha Ashrama: Children are grown, job has matured, one begins to phase one's self out of normal running of the family, giving over to children and begins to prepare for the final phase of life. Ages 50-65
Sanyasa Ashrama : One renounces worldly life to prepare for physical death or possible rebirth properly, detaches gradually from sense objects, family, and material objects. Given that spiritual life always focuses on how to detach from all worldly pursuits, it’s easy to see that this might include detachment from one’s wife also. However, often the wife would accompany the husband “into the forest” as it were. Even kings of old did this with their wives, clearing the way for the younger generation to succeed them. Ages 55-Death.
An excellent article on these four stages of life compared with castes is here.
Householder Life
One of these key archetypes is that of the Householder. In the context of householder life family is the main concern. Therefore, artha is security and gathering up those things to secure yourself and your family. In that same context, kama is seen as enjoyment of meals, music, talking between family and friends and yes, even sex with your wife. Then, the "kama" sutra is a series of scriptures devoted to this topic. Note that all this is considered in some way holy. In fact what is difficult to understand for the Western mind is that ALL life is to be spiritualized and understood in that context. In a family context dharma could be understood as fulfilling your role properly as a husband, father, parent, son, daughter, etc. and treating each of these as a relationship to God also. This is a beautiful way in which Hindu thought proceeds. Even a celibate devotee may have a relationship with his chosen form of God (Krishna, Rama, Durga, etc.) in any of those roles too!
The Third Sex
Shown above as a half-man, half-woman diety named Ardhanarishwara (ardha means half), these individuals (and mythic icons) fulfill an important role in society. Mentioned in many places in Hindu thought, scriptures, etc. is the idea of a third sex. People of the third sex are also classified under a larger social category known as the “neutral gender.” Its members are called napumsaka, or “those who do not engage in procreation.” There are five different types of napumsaka people: (1) children; (2) the elderly; (3) the impotent; (4) the celibate, and (5) the third sex. They were all considered to be sexually neutral by Vedic definition and were protected and believed to bring good luck. As a distinct social category, members of the neutral gender did not engage in sexual reproduction. This non-reproductive category played an integral role in the balance of both human society and nature, similar to the way in which asexual bees play out their own particular roles in the operation of a hive. In Hinduism there are no accidents or errors, and everything in nature has a purpose, role, and reason for existence.
The Doshas or the Qualities of Nature
Fundamentally, one must understand the three gunas, or qualities of nature, and the four aims of life and how they combine together. Seen from a energetic standpoint, that of understanding the doshas: vata (air), pitta (fire), kappa (earth) found in Ayurvedic thought, and the subtle doshas: prana (energy), tejas (intellectual energy), and ojas (reserves), respectively; one can understand that restriction of sexual activity is to preserve one's energetic integrity.
To understand this, you must look at how spiritual devotee's spend their time. Aside from being inward focused more than other lifestyles it's largely spent in the pursuit of increasing one's prana or life force, especially at the beginning. Breathing exercises (prana- vital force, yama- control of) increase the relationship with the prana and increase it's flow. Tejas is the mental acuity or force behind intelligence or the mental fire in which understanding of mental topics are "digested". This is naturally similar to the pitta dosha whose energy is closely related to the digestion of food.
The "container" of the life force is found in ojas, however. A lack of ojas due to our typical Western lifestyle of "dispersal" doesn't help us in many ways, and can easily be understood to be weak in many Western aspirants. When one gets sick, one's ojas is low. When one has been working too hard (using prana), not sleeping or eating properly, one's ojas container can develop holes or cracks, allowing the prana to seep out, even while not in a current activity. Much of spiritual life is oriented toward preserving ojas, increasing it, and being aware of it's influence on us, so that we don't waste our energy needlessly.
So, if you think of prana as being air both increasing and flowing more strongly, you will need a container in which to hold this moving flow, like a balloon that must be strongly maintained to contain a large volume of air. The physical manifestation of ojas eventually becomes semen in men and eggs in women. Semen can be thought of like a distillation of ojas (the pinnacle of the subtle doshas) for the purpose of creating another life. It's literally a seed, and as we consume seeds and nuts for their great energy, so also our semen and eggs contain this great potential energy.
Energy and Sex
Dispersing this energy can create a life when having sex, but preserving it can turn that energy (over time) ultimately back into the mumukshu (spiritual aspirant with a burning desire for liberation) who preserves it. Indeed a burning desire is needed to withstand the amount of energy that is available to the person who restricts their sexual impulses consciously. Important to note here is that often restricting the sexual impulse is considered repressive. It is not this I speak of. It is specifically NOT restricting your impulses because they have become out of control in a repressive manner. It is a conscious restriction to achieve a desire that is greater than mere sex itself, a desire for unification with a larger Self.
Spiritual Focus
This mumukshutva "feeling" can overcome us during any of the four phases of life, however, and it's important to understand which you are currently in, before deciding to become celibate or not as a spiritual practice, considering the total context of the culture in which you live, etc. For Westerners, this can create a confusion as to how to proceed through when much of this Hindu thinking is not commonplace here.
It is when you reach a real desire for liberation from birth and death (mumukshutva) that sex recedes in the background with one's awareness of one's larger Self and eventually becomes simply unimportant. This difficulty in "receding" sex is related, as is easily seen, to food and in general the level of sensual desires one has trained into the mind through one's cultural influences. Our Western culture emphasizes personal, individual enjoyment above all else, perpetuating a mythological "frontier" idea in our minds which is simply irrelevant to modern life.
Brahmacharya (misunderstood to be celibacy)
Brahmacharya means literally "under the teaching of Brahma", the mythical 'creator' in Hindu thought. I think people misunderstand the idea of brahmacharya a lot. it is both a phase of life and an approach to spiritual life that recognizes the more subtle nature inherent in our eternal karmic makeup, and where the mind is aware of it, consciously chooses that above the genetic impulse naturally present in the physical body.
In more developed yogis, when one's mind is super-focused on the understanding of one's Self where one's energy and thought dissolves the small-"i" or "personality" into the vast ocean of the larger, "poorna" or fullness- the desire for sex simply becomes secondary and eventually unnecessary.
I have even experienced this myself when pursuing bicycle racing. My desire for sex eventually went to zero, as my focus was just somewhere else, and I sort of "forgot" about the need to have sex or pursue a sensual life at all.
What brahmacharya is, then, is a more right-focused turning away from sensual and material life into something which is more subtle, larger and therefore more "real". What could be better than total completeness compared with sex? Sex doesn't measure up at all in this respect.
Believing Our Way Out
Understand also that genetic impulses are NOT a solution to the karmic problem. Right thinking, according to Vedanta, is the only way to fix the first problem, the problem that got us into this karmic mess we are in now: misunderstanding ourselves to be separate from God.
Many people ask me: "what do I believe in?" I don't. I want to believe my way out of this problem. Sexual impulses ultimately don't assist one in gaining the understanding needed, unless pursued in a spiritual context with a partner who knows and understand the phases of life, and can see what phase of life you yourself are in. It's an important discussion to have.
Spiritual Life vs. Romantic Life
In the West, it can be difficult to find someone who will agree that there is a larger goal to be found in life than the romantic ideal of love between a couple. Neither sex is free of it's influence, either.
This idea is so embedded in our cultural references of songs, movies, music, and interpersonally that we may find ourselves pulled toward it, even where you can see a beautiful spiritually oriented person in front of you. Conflicts can arise between two people who understand love as attachment (which is what all Western culture tells you).
You can see from the phases of life that if a life is to be had according to these principles, it would take a tremendous amount of courage to face this cultural legacy as well as the interpersonal agreement to focus on larger more subtle ways of thinking and living.
Summary
In summary, if sex is to be seen in a larger, more reverential and detached manner in the Hindu way of thinking, then one must consider many subtle factors. While it can be a beautiful and challenging agreement to make with your partner to work toward these subtleties as a couple, using sex as an important reference point (like our culture does) makes little sense without the larger overall context in which to place it. I hope that I've effectively showed this context and answered some questions about it.
Books & Readings
Sex and Superconsciousness (Bhagavan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho) is a good book for sure to read about sex- probably the best book on that topic available, and clears up many misunderstandings had about Osho regarding sex. It's also a wonderful read about spirituality in general. Specifically, there is a beautiful heart-aching description of the nature of ego in that book that is worthy of a book or article by itself.
I read another one about Buddhism and sex (I forget the name) and from that book it would appear that the Buddha himself had to address ten thousand questions regarding this from his devotees, set up rules around it all and it's been a constant topic since then also.
What I would say is, since this is a more "vedic" question, is that you should read some articles from Swami Dayananda Saraswati or Swami Krishnananda.
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/disc/disc_23.html
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/sadh/sadh_07.html
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/disc/disc_76.html
I posted a link to many of Swami Dayananda's articles on my Wall recently, and here is that link: http://www.avgsatsang.org/hhpsds.html
I would read Swami Dayananda's work, as it's very very easy to understand him explain these subtle topics. Especially the one about Viveka- Discerning Realities, and Becoming a Complete Person both which talk about some aspects of the four aims of life.
"I have a funny Vedic question for you and Regis. What makes it ok for a vedic to have a sexual partnership? Not sure if my new vedic friend knows how it could be ok, so that he won't degrade his ultimate evolution?"
Tantra=Sex?
This also got me to thinking about what the West regards as tantra, which is thought to be akin to “sexual yoga”. A simpler yogic explanation is: mantra (sacred sounds/syllables) + yantra (sacred designs/geometry)= tantra. It is something which is fairly abstract and misunderstood to be sexual, because tantra is found in the union between the male and female energies. Looking at a Lingham is a good way to see a representation of a tantric concept, because it’s a male/female representation, designed to remind you of the unitive nature of the universe. It’s generative because of a misunderstanding and all sexual union arises from it through a basic ignorance of it’s higher, more inclusive principle at work.
Sexual Imagery on Hindu Temples
The above sculpture is found on the outside of a Hindu Sun Temple in South India. Not understanding that it’s representing a superficial aspect of human life, one could think that because these sculptures are found on the OUTSIDE of the temple, that they are therefore MORE IMPORTANT. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are on the outside because they are less important. When you visit these temples, observe how the more subtle and therefore powerful slowly is revealed as you draw closer to the centre of the temple itself, where often you will find a statue, or in some cases, nothing at all.
Understanding the nature of sex against a backdrop of Hindu thought will help tremendously, as one key aspect of the Hindu culture is that reproduction and family life is a main spiritual agreement with God. In Hindu thinking, there are four aims of life (purusarthas), and they are seen in many different contexts. You will see them described slightly differently, depending on the perspective of the speaker. To address the variety of viewpoints shown here and in Vedic thought in general, I like to think of them as planets with a gravitational pull on us, affecting many moons of our psycho-archetypes.
Four Aims of Life
Kama (pleasure, enjoyment)
Artha (security, material concerns)
Dharma (right living, moral life in society)
Moksha (desire for liberation)
Four Phases of Life
In Western Society:
hahaha!
In Eastern Society:
Against these Four Aims, the Four Phases of Life are set, and you can easily see how they are related and support each other:
Brahmacharya Ashrama : Youth, usually age 8 to 24; apprenticeship, studying in a guru-kula with a spiritual teacher, celibate
Grihastha Ashrama: Householder & married family life, usually age 25 to 50, raising children, working, etc.
Vanaprastha Ashrama: Children are grown, job has matured, one begins to phase one's self out of normal running of the family, giving over to children and begins to prepare for the final phase of life. Ages 50-65
Sanyasa Ashrama : One renounces worldly life to prepare for physical death or possible rebirth properly, detaches gradually from sense objects, family, and material objects. Given that spiritual life always focuses on how to detach from all worldly pursuits, it’s easy to see that this might include detachment from one’s wife also. However, often the wife would accompany the husband “into the forest” as it were. Even kings of old did this with their wives, clearing the way for the younger generation to succeed them. Ages 55-Death.
An excellent article on these four stages of life compared with castes is here.
Householder Life
One of these key archetypes is that of the Householder. In the context of householder life family is the main concern. Therefore, artha is security and gathering up those things to secure yourself and your family. In that same context, kama is seen as enjoyment of meals, music, talking between family and friends and yes, even sex with your wife. Then, the "kama" sutra is a series of scriptures devoted to this topic. Note that all this is considered in some way holy. In fact what is difficult to understand for the Western mind is that ALL life is to be spiritualized and understood in that context. In a family context dharma could be understood as fulfilling your role properly as a husband, father, parent, son, daughter, etc. and treating each of these as a relationship to God also. This is a beautiful way in which Hindu thought proceeds. Even a celibate devotee may have a relationship with his chosen form of God (Krishna, Rama, Durga, etc.) in any of those roles too!
The Third Sex
Shown above as a half-man, half-woman diety named Ardhanarishwara (ardha means half), these individuals (and mythic icons) fulfill an important role in society. Mentioned in many places in Hindu thought, scriptures, etc. is the idea of a third sex. People of the third sex are also classified under a larger social category known as the “neutral gender.” Its members are called napumsaka, or “those who do not engage in procreation.” There are five different types of napumsaka people: (1) children; (2) the elderly; (3) the impotent; (4) the celibate, and (5) the third sex. They were all considered to be sexually neutral by Vedic definition and were protected and believed to bring good luck. As a distinct social category, members of the neutral gender did not engage in sexual reproduction. This non-reproductive category played an integral role in the balance of both human society and nature, similar to the way in which asexual bees play out their own particular roles in the operation of a hive. In Hinduism there are no accidents or errors, and everything in nature has a purpose, role, and reason for existence.
The Doshas or the Qualities of Nature
Fundamentally, one must understand the three gunas, or qualities of nature, and the four aims of life and how they combine together. Seen from a energetic standpoint, that of understanding the doshas: vata (air), pitta (fire), kappa (earth) found in Ayurvedic thought, and the subtle doshas: prana (energy), tejas (intellectual energy), and ojas (reserves), respectively; one can understand that restriction of sexual activity is to preserve one's energetic integrity.
To understand this, you must look at how spiritual devotee's spend their time. Aside from being inward focused more than other lifestyles it's largely spent in the pursuit of increasing one's prana or life force, especially at the beginning. Breathing exercises (prana- vital force, yama- control of) increase the relationship with the prana and increase it's flow. Tejas is the mental acuity or force behind intelligence or the mental fire in which understanding of mental topics are "digested". This is naturally similar to the pitta dosha whose energy is closely related to the digestion of food.
The "container" of the life force is found in ojas, however. A lack of ojas due to our typical Western lifestyle of "dispersal" doesn't help us in many ways, and can easily be understood to be weak in many Western aspirants. When one gets sick, one's ojas is low. When one has been working too hard (using prana), not sleeping or eating properly, one's ojas container can develop holes or cracks, allowing the prana to seep out, even while not in a current activity. Much of spiritual life is oriented toward preserving ojas, increasing it, and being aware of it's influence on us, so that we don't waste our energy needlessly.
So, if you think of prana as being air both increasing and flowing more strongly, you will need a container in which to hold this moving flow, like a balloon that must be strongly maintained to contain a large volume of air. The physical manifestation of ojas eventually becomes semen in men and eggs in women. Semen can be thought of like a distillation of ojas (the pinnacle of the subtle doshas) for the purpose of creating another life. It's literally a seed, and as we consume seeds and nuts for their great energy, so also our semen and eggs contain this great potential energy.
Energy and Sex
Dispersing this energy can create a life when having sex, but preserving it can turn that energy (over time) ultimately back into the mumukshu (spiritual aspirant with a burning desire for liberation) who preserves it. Indeed a burning desire is needed to withstand the amount of energy that is available to the person who restricts their sexual impulses consciously. Important to note here is that often restricting the sexual impulse is considered repressive. It is not this I speak of. It is specifically NOT restricting your impulses because they have become out of control in a repressive manner. It is a conscious restriction to achieve a desire that is greater than mere sex itself, a desire for unification with a larger Self.
Spiritual Focus
This mumukshutva "feeling" can overcome us during any of the four phases of life, however, and it's important to understand which you are currently in, before deciding to become celibate or not as a spiritual practice, considering the total context of the culture in which you live, etc. For Westerners, this can create a confusion as to how to proceed through when much of this Hindu thinking is not commonplace here.
It is when you reach a real desire for liberation from birth and death (mumukshutva) that sex recedes in the background with one's awareness of one's larger Self and eventually becomes simply unimportant. This difficulty in "receding" sex is related, as is easily seen, to food and in general the level of sensual desires one has trained into the mind through one's cultural influences. Our Western culture emphasizes personal, individual enjoyment above all else, perpetuating a mythological "frontier" idea in our minds which is simply irrelevant to modern life.
Brahmacharya (misunderstood to be celibacy)
Brahmacharya means literally "under the teaching of Brahma", the mythical 'creator' in Hindu thought. I think people misunderstand the idea of brahmacharya a lot. it is both a phase of life and an approach to spiritual life that recognizes the more subtle nature inherent in our eternal karmic makeup, and where the mind is aware of it, consciously chooses that above the genetic impulse naturally present in the physical body.
In more developed yogis, when one's mind is super-focused on the understanding of one's Self where one's energy and thought dissolves the small-"i" or "personality" into the vast ocean of the larger, "poorna" or fullness- the desire for sex simply becomes secondary and eventually unnecessary.
I have even experienced this myself when pursuing bicycle racing. My desire for sex eventually went to zero, as my focus was just somewhere else, and I sort of "forgot" about the need to have sex or pursue a sensual life at all.
What brahmacharya is, then, is a more right-focused turning away from sensual and material life into something which is more subtle, larger and therefore more "real". What could be better than total completeness compared with sex? Sex doesn't measure up at all in this respect.
Believing Our Way Out
Understand also that genetic impulses are NOT a solution to the karmic problem. Right thinking, according to Vedanta, is the only way to fix the first problem, the problem that got us into this karmic mess we are in now: misunderstanding ourselves to be separate from God.
Many people ask me: "what do I believe in?" I don't. I want to believe my way out of this problem. Sexual impulses ultimately don't assist one in gaining the understanding needed, unless pursued in a spiritual context with a partner who knows and understand the phases of life, and can see what phase of life you yourself are in. It's an important discussion to have.
Spiritual Life vs. Romantic Life
In the West, it can be difficult to find someone who will agree that there is a larger goal to be found in life than the romantic ideal of love between a couple. Neither sex is free of it's influence, either.
This idea is so embedded in our cultural references of songs, movies, music, and interpersonally that we may find ourselves pulled toward it, even where you can see a beautiful spiritually oriented person in front of you. Conflicts can arise between two people who understand love as attachment (which is what all Western culture tells you).
You can see from the phases of life that if a life is to be had according to these principles, it would take a tremendous amount of courage to face this cultural legacy as well as the interpersonal agreement to focus on larger more subtle ways of thinking and living.
Summary
In summary, if sex is to be seen in a larger, more reverential and detached manner in the Hindu way of thinking, then one must consider many subtle factors. While it can be a beautiful and challenging agreement to make with your partner to work toward these subtleties as a couple, using sex as an important reference point (like our culture does) makes little sense without the larger overall context in which to place it. I hope that I've effectively showed this context and answered some questions about it.
Books & Readings
Sex and Superconsciousness (Bhagavan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho) is a good book for sure to read about sex- probably the best book on that topic available, and clears up many misunderstandings had about Osho regarding sex. It's also a wonderful read about spirituality in general. Specifically, there is a beautiful heart-aching description of the nature of ego in that book that is worthy of a book or article by itself.
I read another one about Buddhism and sex (I forget the name) and from that book it would appear that the Buddha himself had to address ten thousand questions regarding this from his devotees, set up rules around it all and it's been a constant topic since then also.
What I would say is, since this is a more "vedic" question, is that you should read some articles from Swami Dayananda Saraswati or Swami Krishnananda.
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/disc/disc_23.html
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/sadh/sadh_07.html
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/disc/disc_76.html
I posted a link to many of Swami Dayananda's articles on my Wall recently, and here is that link: http://www.avgsatsang.org/hhpsds.html
I would read Swami Dayananda's work, as it's very very easy to understand him explain these subtle topics. Especially the one about Viveka- Discerning Realities, and Becoming a Complete Person both which talk about some aspects of the four aims of life.