So many questions are received regarding the Sat Yoga attitude toward sexuality that a general clarification may be worthwhile. But because this subject is highly charged; it is extremely subtle, extensive, and multidimensional; and the engine of sexual desire resides in the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind; thus, the issues must ultimately be approached on an individual basis. But here is at least an introduction to the subject.

First, it must be said that the questions received are usually not the true root issues, and usually they are defensive in nature, tinged with both guilt and fear that something will be taken away from them if they follow this spiritual path. But once people are able to explore more deeply, they realize that their questions really come because their sexual drives and relationships are creating suffering in their lives, as well as confusion. Their hopes for the perfect sexual relationship never seem to be fulfilled, but the mirage that it lies just ahead keeps people locked into their fixed patterns, even though those patterns are not working. Unfortunately, people tend to accept ideas and attitudes received from key attachment figures during formative years, and after that, they are rarely even open to hearing new understandings of what really drives them, and what new possibilities are open to them. The terror of losing popularity, losing their stylized life narrative, and losing the opportunities for physical gratification prevents opening to the growth that will heal the deeper wounds of the soul.

Second, it must be emphasized that Sat Yoga is a spiritual path. Its teachings are not meant for everyone, but only for those who wish to reach the highest levels of consciousness here and now. The Sat Yoga philosophy of sex is oriented toward encouraging a lifestyle that will resolve suffering and confusion and accelerate the attainment of the Supreme Liberation. The Sat Yoga philosophy differs from the classical yoga philosophy of Patanjali (which mandates complete celibacy) and from the new-age approaches as epitomized in neo-tantric or Rajneesh-derived communities. It subscribes neither to the orgasmocentric theories of Wilhelm Reich nor to the repressive approaches of most mainline religions.

What Sat Yoga does suggest is that one attain emotional, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual maturity before engaging in sexual relations, so as not to get saddled with any of a number of long-term problems, including the fixation of gender identity confusion syndromes, a bad marriage, a bad divorce, premature parenthood, sexually transmitted diseases, cosmetic surgeries gone wrong, or other kinds of psychological or physical devastation, that may cause suffering not just to oneself, but to others. Perhaps the worst effect of premature sexualization is the loss of precious life energies consumed by the obsession with sexual issues. The problem, of course, is that the sexual drive is strongest precisely in those who are most psychologically immature and those who are at their weakest, most needy, and least capable of making a wise decision. For this reason, the support of an adept spiritual guide and a friendly, understanding, yet wisely-structured and disciplined spiritual community are essential during at least the early phases of the post-pubertal psycho-spiritual growth process. In traditional societies, at least young adults were offered rites of passage that settled such matters. Nowadays, identity crises rarely get well resolved. Most forms of psychotherapy are too superficial to get to the roots of the issues. The psychoanalytic approaches do a better job, but generally do not get to the spiritual dimension of the questions involved. Our whole society is thus failing to help people attain their full potential. The bottom line is that we are experiencing a global pandemic of psycho-sexo-spiritually crippled individuals.

The specific questions that people ask depend on where they are on the developmental ladder. Usually they are questions that begin with “what’s wrong with….” Some of the most common questions received are the following:
•    What’s wrong with masturbation?
•    What’s wrong with pornography?
•    What’s wrong with extramarital affairs?
•    What’s wrong with homosexuality?
•    What’s wrong with having sex with children?
•    What’s wrong with sadomasochistic sex play?
•    What’s wrong with dressing provocatively?
•    What’s wrong with polyamory?

This sort of question can be easily answered within a conventional understanding of psychological development and appropriate social adaptation. It is probably not necessary to delve too deeply into most of them. Addiction to masturbation and pornography make it more difficult to develop the capacity for truly healthy and deep intersubjective sexual relationships. Sadomasochism is usually an avoidance of authentic relationship, and a narcissistic acting out of issues that must be resolved through inner work so that truer forms of expressing love become possible. The same goes for the urge to have sex with children, which harms the children involved and comes from fear of an adult relationship. Extramarital affairs are not karmically accurate, because they create hurt and cause new problems, without solving the original underlying problems. Polyamory is another attempt to solve the problem of shifting desire, but it rarely works, because jealousy, abandonment fears, and other issues always arise, and someone always gets hurt. Women who dress provocatively in work or other social situations are asking to be treated as sex objects rather than as true subjects, and are using sexuality as a lure and a form of manipulation.

The most complex question of the above selection is “What is wrong with homosexuality?” The short answer is, nothing is wrong with it. We could leave it at that, and say everyone is free to make their own choice, except that it is not really so simple. First of all, sexual orientation of any kind is not a conscious choice, but a drive. It is not usually under a person’s conscious control. But psychologists make a distinction between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic homosexuality (or heterosexuality, for that matter). In other words, some people are happily homosexual, while others wish they were not homosexual. Those who are suffering from a homosexual drive that they wish to be free of, should know that it is possible to free themselves, if they are willing to explore the psychological roots of the drive and to confront and work through their core anxieties. On the other hand, those who are not averse to their homosexual orientation, but wish to attain higher consciousness, are in the same position as those with a heterosexual orientation. Higher consciousness involves the realization that the Self is not the body. In that new orientation, which shifts the real vibrational frequency at which consciousness resonates, all sexual desire of whatever kind drops away. There is still an appreciation for beauty, of course, and divine love for all beings, and indeed the residue of what had been the sex drive may remain in the sublimated form of platonic affection. But the “need” for intercourse or even physical touch (or even an interest in the matter) will decrease to the vanishing point, either immediately or gradually, depending on the steepness of the slope of one’s ascent to Self-realization.

Thus, we come to the crux of the matter. Today, unfortunately, one of the most common traits of people is to want instant gratification, even in the field of spirituality. People want to take a weekend seminar and get certified as a guru or spiritual master—without having done the work of transcending and transforming the ego. The result is that many inauthentic schools of yoga and spirituality have become popular. They declare that you do not have to give up anything or engage in any practice, because the ego is an illusion, and therefore there is no one to do anything in the first place. But this illicit reasoning is used as an irresponsible justification to leave the ego with all its drives in place, and to merely give lip service to liberation. But it is hypocrisy to claim that the ego is an illusion, and then to act from a state of egocentricity. The point is to dissolve the illusion and to live in egoless freedom.

The Sat Yoga vision of the ultimate state of Supreme Liberation differs from that of some other traditional schools of yoga, for example, those based on the ashtanga yoga teachings contained in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. That approach is rooted in the dualistic Sankhya philosophy. The goal of that form of yoga is to extract the Purusha (a term for the Real Self) from Prakriti (matter, or the illusory phenomenal world). Once Purusha has been separated out, isolated from the false self and the plane of maya, the Self dwells in the purity of Kaivalya, or solitude. The term Kaivalya is the etymological root of the English word celibacy (in the journey from Sanskrit to English, the root kvl became clb: the k became a c; the v and the l changed place; the v became a b). So the goal of dualistic forms of spirituality, including Christianity, is to transcend the physical plane and separate oneself out from the ordinary life of the world. This has led to the tradition of monkhood and monasteries in the Catholic religion, as well as in certain Hindu and Buddhist paths. In those monastic environments, the soul can let go of the bodily identification and live the life of a renunciate.

The Sat Yoga path is different, in that our vision of the Supreme Real is nondual. In other words, Purusha and Prakriti are ultimately both expressions of the One Self. This is the meaning of Advaita (nonduality). Therefore, it is unnecessary to separate oneself physically from the world (not that it is even possible to do so). But it is first necessary to separate oneself from the ego, the false self, in order to realize the Purusha, before one can establish accurate relationships with Prakriti. So the purification of the soul is the first step, and for this the disciplines of all traditional schools of yoga (the yamas and niyamas—vows of psychospiritual hygiene) are essential. Spending time in an ashram is very useful as well. And one can validly make the life choice of being a sannyasi, which means opting out of the illusory life of the ego. Living as a celibate monk is a beautiful way of achieving an authentic existence. One can dwell simply, silently, and serenely, among other beings who are similarly dedicated to contemplation of the Supreme Real and living in egoless freedom.

But one can also make the choice to live in a marital relationship, either in the ordinary world of householders in the larger society, or as part of a spiritual community. In that case, for maximal harmony, the married couple would both need to be on the same spiritual path, and seeking the Supreme Liberation. It could then be a truly life-enhancing relationship, and the question of celibacy would lose importance, because sexuality itself would be divinized in such a relationship, given its authenticity. Authenticity is no small achievement, since the ego is a master of self-deception, hypocrisy, and bad faith. But self-deception can equally exist among monks (although if the spiritual guides in an ashram are on the ball, such “maya” will be worked through as part of the process). Unless one’s lifestyle choice is authentic, the community in which one lives is in perpetual danger of the sexual energy that can leak out from the unconscious. And it is not only the sexual energy, but also the other energies that are always linked to the sexual: the energies of aggressivity, paranoia, jealousy and envy, depression, and at bottom, fear, anxiety, and nameless dread.

So the response to people who ask, “What’s wrong with sexual desire?” is: Nothing is wrong, if it is authentic. But in the authentic Self, there is no desire. And even in the inauthentic ego, sexual desire is not authentic. It is usually an egoic maneuver, a kind of acting-in performed by the unconscious ego for ulterior motives unknown to the conscious persona, which thus retains plausible deniability.  Desire, for those still in the lower charkas, is certainly not often an expression of love. When one explores it honestly and profoundly, it nearly always turns out to be something else: a fear of abandonment, a demand to be found desirable, an urge to dominate, a fantasy of wholeness, greed for sensual pleasure to cover over the dread of emptiness, an imaginary fusion with the mother and/or father of infancy, a drive to hurt the other, to castrate, or to lose oneself in the other and live securely enslaved. If one were to recognize the actual motives behind sexual desire, one might well renounce it out of self-respect, or at least one would want to have the strength to renounce it.

Of course, there are growing numbers of people who have apparently renounced sexual desire, but not out of an urge to attain the Supreme Liberation. For example, there are women who desire a child, but not sexual contact with a man, and sometimes not even with another woman. They can now satisfy their maternal desire through the assistance of science, with artificial insemination. But a child who has become the sole object of erotic attention for its mother is in a difficult psychological position, to say the least. There are many others who choose apparently asexual lifestyles (although they may be bonded to the internet, to a pet, to a doll, a toy, or to some fantasy masturbatory fetish), but do so because of a lack of access to desire, a lack of vital energy or of courage or skills to attempt the building of a love relationship with another person, rather than because their desire has achieved sublimation. In the place of desire, there is usually a blank inertia, or passive and cold hostility, which can easily, under sufficiently tense conditions of frustration, explode into uncontrolled fury.

When sexual desire does emerge out of authentic love, then it does not have the same urgency or neediness as displayed by the egoic sex drive, and can usually be satisfied with a hug or a kiss. Of course, there are genuine cases of sexual desire emerging as the force of divine love for the purpose of bringing a child into the world. In fact, the refinement of our sexual nature to make it the instrument of such divine service is very beautiful, and a vital goal of any society or community worthy of existence. We need to make both birth and death divine processes once more, and we can only do that once we have made our own life divine. The preparation for divinized marriage, sexual union, and the raising of children is an essential effort of spiritual education for young adults. In a well-structured society, some adults will choose to remain single and childless, or married and childless, in order to focus on becoming detached beacons of wisdom, universal love, spiritual authority and communal stability, while others will focus more on raising their children to become whole adults.

Keeping in mind the greater context of our lives will solve most problems. Unfortunately, most of us today have been indoctrinated to be concerned only about our own pleasure, rather than the well being of the world. In the degradation of this push toward narcissism, our society has become morbidly obsessed with sex and orgasmic release. At one time, the orgasm was sold to us as a portal to liberation from repression. But now it has been revealed as a worse form of imprisonment in egocentric debauchery. The tsunami of pornography we are subjected to on the internet, on television, in films, and in books—and the premature sexification of our personalities imposed even in our schools—is dragging down our societies into the gutter. The sex industry everywhere is big business. Sex tourism is drowning out cultural and ecological tourism. And even most of those politicians and religious leaders who rail against this publicly are involved in it behind the scenes. Humanity has become a collective pervert. Either we outgrow this perversion of the human spirit or we drown in our own excess. We must revive the ideal of service, of karma yoga, of generosity, charity, and egoless communal giving.

Once one chooses to grow, and to live for higher purposes, and one discovers the joys of higher consciousness in meditation, the orgasm not only becomes less relevant as a form of pleasure, but yogis discover that orgasmic discharge causes a loss of vital energy, and even more important, a loss of the blissful feelings that accumulate through meditative practice. If sexual desire is not repressed, but truly sublimated, then there will be no residue of tension, masturbatory urges, wet dreams, or other unconscious manifestations of sexual drive. If such phenomena appear, then clearly further exploration of the hidden sufferings of the soul is called for. There is no point in leading a repressed life. But neither is it necessary or advisable to leave the sexual drive energies fixated in their raw form. They can be refined into the highest joy, creativity, love, and spiritual empowerment. This is the real meaning of alchemy. This is the goal of Sat Yoga.

The deeper problem with sexuality today is that hardly anyone knows what sexual energy really is, or how it should work. Few people understand the true significance of gender. The roles of men and women have been deregulated, and neither feminism nor the crumbling patriarchy offers help to those who seek some viable model of manhood and womanhood that will allow true divine union, not to mention ultimate liberation, to occur. The problem of sex is really the problem of the Fall. In Western mythic terms, we are reliving the sin of Adam, which, in the words of the great sage Frithjof Schuon, “was a sin of curiosity.” As a result of his sin of desiring to know the facts about contingency—including anatomy and physiology, and including the whole phenomenal flux—“the link with the divine Source was broken…the world suddenly became external to Adam: things became opaque and heavy and like unintelligible and hostile fragments,” Schuon writes in his book Light on the Ancient Worlds. Once condemned to live in such a fragmented world of mirages, desire became inflamed, to a state far more intense than mere curiosity. And sex became the primal abyss of Otherness. As Schuon warns us, “we must distrust the fascination abysses can exert over us; it is in the nature of cosmic impasses to seduce and play the vampire; the current of forms does not want us to escape its hold. Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys: beauty can chain us to forms just as it can be a door to the non-formal.”

With the Fall from nondual perception, the world is suddenly perceived as external. Our lost center of Being (Sat) is projected onto what then becomes an object of desire. “All our faculties and movements,” writes Schuon, “look and tend toward a lost center—which we feel as if ‘in front’ of us—lost, but found again symbolically and indirectly in sexual union. But the result is only a grievous renewal of the drama: a fresh entry of spirit into matter. The opposite sex is only a symbol: the true center is hidden within ourselves, in the heart-intellect. The creature recognizes something of the lost center in his partner; the love that results from this is like a distant shadow of the love of God and the intrinsic beatitude of God; it is also a shadow of the knowledge which consumes forms as by fire and which unites and delivers.”

In the descending octave of historic time, our civilizations have fallen ever further into the seduction of knowledge of the illusory external world. The jouissance of technological power has led us to the point of knowing a great deal about how to destroy ourselves but hardly anything about how to gain mastery over our self-destructive drives. And in this final scene of the human tragicomedy, we have even lost our understanding of how to act like a man or a woman. While nearly every male questions his manliness, and nearly every woman doubts her femininity, a few are even certain their body is the wrong gender altogether. The transgender phenomenon, which is carried to the point of sex change through surgery, is the epitome of the postmodern quandary. We have the technological means of changing who we appear to be, but no means of discovering who we really are.

All these questions about our identity are only arising now, in our degraded culture of narcissism. In classical cultures, there was clearly a mandate to “know thyself.” But there was no doubt about the self that was meant, nor how to know it—through meditation and philosophic inquiry. This was the reason men and women of the early Christian period went out into the desert—to find themselves. The classical Greek philosophers like Empedocles and Parmenides had already been doing that for centuries—retreating to caves or other wild places. The tradition of the forest retreat in India was already ancient long before the Greeks were doing it. And the institution of the ashram and the monastery has always been the place people would go in order to achieve the rite of passage to Self-knowledge.

In the even more ancient traditional cultures, such retreats were not even necessary. Life was lived in the forest; one did not have to go there. All of existence was a vision quest for the men. For the women, everything was already known intuitively, from within, without a quest. In those cultures, women did not live in the ego, but in the soul. The soul is always already oriented toward the Absolute. The traditional woman dwells in relation to Emptiness, regardless of whether she is outwardly in connection with a husband, children, or other members of society, or even in relation to Nature. Men, in traditional societies, create and sustain the more or less elaborate social hierarchies that have been developed out of mythic structures of consciousness. So the male braids together the higher symbolic forms, and embodies them through ritual and social role, while the female opens spontaneously to the secrets of the Real. She is the portal to the Real of birth and of life; to the Real of love; and to the Real of the Void. Men elucidate the Real in symbolic terms, while the woman is the manifestation of the Absolute.

We have irretrievably lost our traditional societies. We have lost the metaphysical values of our classical civilizations. We have lost the mythic order of our medieval world. We have now lost even the mental discipline of the modern world. We have fallen into a postmodern hell realm in which there is neither vision nor will. Our demented, moribund civilization is on the point of suicide. Now those of us who have awakened must act quickly to bring about a cultural renaissance at a grass roots communal level, to enable the shoots of a new age to emerge in the ruins of our dying society. We must accelerate our development to a higher stage of conscious evolution, and create a society that redeems the most precious divine core of truth and love that those earlier social forms displayed, yet now raised to an even higher power of insight and creative imagination.

We can integrate the beauty of the traditional and classical cultures with the wisdom gained through the struggles of the modern world toward social liberation that have not yet succeeded, but that have refined our awareness and appreciation for the lost spiritual dimension. We are awakening from the scientistic trance that has lured us into the morass of consumerism, the miasma of sexual obsession, and lured us to open the pandora’s box of nuclear radiation. Now we must grow up quickly and reformulate our existential vision from a pristine level of consciousness that transcends the ego. We must regain our Buddha-nature, the higher ground of the unborn, the deathless, the divine Self, before the mass die-off of our species and our fellow creatures ends all higher life on our sacred planet.

At this historic moment, we must sacrifice the dubious pleasures of a life devoted to the gratifications of the flesh in order to re-awaken to the call of Spirit. Let us put sex back into its appropriate place in the larger context of life so that we can solve the real problems of our world and our souls, and ensure that there is a world worth living in for those to whom we give birth. There will only be a possibility for future generations to exist if those who are alive now will live up to our highest potential. May we all achieve the complete realization of the eternal supreme power, intelligence, love, and overwhelming bliss that we are and have always been and shall be, world without end: amen.

Namaste,

Shunyamurti