EWS #20: Human relationships, marriage, love, sex, celibacy and Yoga (4)

Jan 23, 2019

Topics:

Narad (0:00:00):
Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. We have had three parts on human relationships, marriage, sex, and the elevation that is necessary in the future. Now we go to part 4. Please begin.

Sraddhalu (0:01:19):
There was a question from you, please can you repeat it? From Luma?

Audience (0:01:24):
You just read Mother's words about sexual impulse in humanity and how to not indulge that impulse and where is the line between raising above that and you know going about it and you can misuse this verse as a sanction to do it.

Sraddhalu (0:01:49):
So somewhere in your very question what I hear is a sense that indulging in the sexual impulse or need why not say enjoyment, you are feeling guilty. And that's the whole point of the discussion that we had. That to think of it as something sinful, guilty, anti-spiritual would be an error. If you are at a stage of evolution where the need is strong, then I would say go ahead, fulfil it. If as a result it makes you a happier and better person, if as a result, it makes you more unhappy person and depressed, then avoid it. But if it makes you happier, certainly go ahead and fulfil it. Do not think of it as something that right now you have to start saying, oh I should not be indulging in it, so while I indulge I struggle, but I am always hoping that I will get off it. Then you are neither in neither and you will generally end up coming out miserable, feeling guilty. So I know a lot of people, who because of this strong association while they have a legitimate desire for sex, while during the sexual act they may on one part enjoy it but another part there is this whole guilt building up which they may forget momentarily but then it comes back and after the sexual act they have to go and shower and somehow distance themselves and cut off anything to do with their partner and they go through a huge guilt trip for the next few days and in that case then what is it about? You are making yourself more miserable by going through it but you cannot avoid it and you get into that ascetic trap where while indulging which you cannot avoid, you are worsening your internal state, putting yourself in guilt and suffering, which makes everything else in your life worse. So the correction really first to stop thinking of it as something which is cause for guilt or sin. If you find it enjoyable, please go ahead, enjoy it. If as a result of the passage through its enjoyment, you lose the interest and you find, well it's enjoyable but it doesn't take me far enough. I would rather now have something which is more worthwhile. Then you will begin to have the other worthwhile thing also and between the two eventually the other more worthwhile will grow in its worth and this will fade of its own. It may still be there at that point as a support for the itch that you need to relieve because it's a biological itch or instinct but the other things will take over which will raise the whole quality of your life and your relationship.

So the question is this, what is important for you? And if at this point the passionate physical component of the sex is important enough then you need to recognize that it is a legitimate requirement for you for a stage and it may last a few years but eventually it's going to tire and so don't worry about it unless you have taken a vow then you're in a very different track then you have taken an ascetic vow and you're part of a system which does not permit it then of course you have to follow that system but in the framework of let's say a general upward turn of your life, not just in self-development but in a spiritual term, I would say it has a legitimate place. Bring into it the deeper components which we have already read from the Mother's guidance, the deeper affection and love and intimacy and sharing, the sense of a deeper bond and unity, all of these which refine and uplift what would otherwise be just a very crude and coarse act.

Narad (0:05:43):
I have not heard you use the word lust once. And I feel in the world today, it's lust that's pouring upon people.

Sraddhalu (0:05:57):
Yes, and this needs a bit of an elaboration. I'm glad you brought this up. What is the primary driver of the sexual instinct? Procreation in nature. If you observe the pattern of procreation, it is cyclic in nature. In the female, there is an association with the lunar cycle. Every month, there is a cycle in which the fertility peaks twice in a month until the egg is lost and the female goes through an emotional upset during that period. And all of this, nature uses as a device to compel some kind of an act of sex so that she may be fertilised. In the male though, there is a similar cycle, it's not monthly, it is an annual cycle, it's tied to the solar cycle. And there are people who live a life which is reasonably celibate or which may even be totally celibate if they're following that kind of a practice. But in an annual cycle, suddenly there's a burst of strong sexual desire and then it settles. And that is the time when nature is picking, if it is aligned with the female, the two align. Interestingly, the way it is timed in nature's instinct is, if you had a conception at that point, the child would be born in the best season just after winter when spring starts, when it is most comfortable and most safe. Interesting. So the timing of the peaking in nature is aligned to her own larger cycles. So you have to recognize that these impulses are part of a much larger universal rhythms of which we individuals are little, let's say puppets. So she will throw in an urge, here I need a few more children, poof, and urge comes and there is a burst of children born. Literally, there is a war, poof, just after that burst of children. Why? Now you may say, oh people, the survival instinct. No, people don't think. It is nature pushing an impulse. She's seeing ‘now there are going to be a series of deaths, I need to make up for it’ and poof, she puts a burst there.

There's another factor which is also not in our control, the fertility itself. Nature modulates the fertility in a species and in locations in the species in a mechanism which is still biologically not understood. I will give an example here. If you take the normal city and the population of dogs, you will find the population generally remains stable. Every now and then the municipality goes and culls the dogs. They catch stray dogs, put them in a shelter or kill them and immediately after there is an outburst of more dogs, more puppies born, until the level stabilises and then the fertility of the female drops and there are less puppies born. So when there are less dogs in the city, the female gives birth to more puppies. When there are enough dogs in the city, the female fertility drops and she gives birth to less puppies. Now what that means is exceptional. It means somewhere nature has a conscious or semiconscious power, is aware of the balance of dogs in the city, now generalise it to the forest, she is aware of the balance of the different species in their numbers, in their ages, now in this species too many have aged, there are not enough young and she increases the fertility inside the womb by a mechanism which is not understood by us. And suddenly they are giving more babies in a single pregnancy. It's amazing! And when you start recognizing these rhythms, you realise that we are just puppets. We are little toys for nature and she puts a burst here, burst there and then she says, alright, I want to mix these two values which are specialised and she gets people to now travel from one place to another, maybe for trade and suddenly fall in love with somebody who's from a different culture, religion, nationality and bond and produce a child, which now has these mixed genetic inheritances, psychological and cultural inheritances. And this started interestingly in the early 60s. I think that's when the Mother said that so far nature was specialising different human types and cultures and now she has decided to mix them all. And you see after that across the world people not only travelling freely but marrying across different cultures and boundaries.

Narad (0:10:52):
and races.

Sraddhalu (0:10:54):
yes race, yes. But the intermixture that's taking place is fascinating because what it's doing it creates great difficulty. Again it's not stable, it's not easy for such a pairing to last for the children to adjust to very different cultures but the result is an enormously enriched type, both genetic and psychological. Now all this is happening driven by nature's impulse. You may say lust is the term, is a coarser form of it, but it's just an impulse for nature. In the human consciousness it may take the form which is crude or refined because we are mental beings.

Audience (0:11:36):
Why in India population is so high and in other countries it is less? Is there any deeper meaning or significance of that? I am sorry.

Sraddhalu (0:11:46):
It is an important question because when you look in the background of this discussion, you see in Europe and in the US the fertility rapidly declining. Whereas in India, even in the Middle East, it is booming. It has not gone down and although there have been government attempts to control and reduce the population, the drive and the fertility are still very high. What you see is in Europe and I'm looking at just a few spaces in Europe as an extreme example because it makes more sense to see the extremes to understand. In many pockets in the cultures you see sexual exhaustion. They were taught to have more sex, more sex, more sex, to be happy, to be more healthy, to be this, to be that. The Freudian training, the psychotherapy, you went to your therapist, therapist says you are depressed, how is your relationship, are you having enough sex, go and have more sex. I don't have the drive, here you do this to increase your drive. And then what? You deplete. And there's been a kind of a civilizational depletion of the vitality of the civilization. We're going to talk about this when we come to the place celibacy has in conserving and intensifying vitality and energy, even higher mental and spiritual energy. But when you deplete physically, it does not get enough chance to lift the energy up. And the result is the civilizational creativity declines and with it the fertility declines and practically takes this form that people are so tired they say I don't feel like having children, I don't want to raise children, I don't want to have that responsibility and this is what you see in Europe, the choice to not have children comes in at this point. There's another reason which I will come to shortly but first recognize this, that they don't feel inclined to have children is something strange and who makes that choice? Not their minds, the impulse of nature. To push that, the impulse of nature has weakened. And for some reason, she has weakened in certain spaces.

The second reason though, which is now directly caused by human beings, is the introduction of hormones without control, in the food and then artificially by choice. So here's something interesting that happens, the birth control pill that a woman takes is a hormone modifier essentially. What does it do? Well, it prevents pregnancy but what else does it do? It's a very interesting study. When a woman is shown pictures of men and asked to choose who she is most attracted to, her first instinct would be to someone who is strong, who will give to her the sense of protection, strength. And when she takes the pill, the pattern shifts. Now she will choose somebody who is more like a friend than a protector. She goes off the pill and again her choice shifts. Very interesting. So the pill is actually changing the social relationship and the basis of affinities in human relationships and the choices that we make without realising it. There is something even more insidious. The pill now, what happens to the hormone when it goes out through the urine is going into the water table. It is going through the filtration systems of the cities and after filtration, hormones are not removed. You only remove sedimentary particles and the same water now treated which goes back into the ecosystem contains the hormone which is reducing the fertility.

Into this is mixed the plastic that is leaching. Almost all the plastic that you throw out and which breaks down is leaching. The water you drink from a plastic bottle when it is transported, I don't know if you have seen this, they are in open trucks fully exposed to the sun. Sunlight falling on plastic begins the process of decomposition, leaching the plastic into the water and what is leaching is the mimic of the female hormone. It is estrogen mimic. You drink that water, you have effectively taken a mild dose of oestrogen, which will make males effeminate, which in women will similarly modify the hormonal balance and all the way down into the chain, effectively reducing overall, the fertility. Now all of this is happening purely by human causes. Now into this you throw things which people don't even realise. They are food that comes packed in plastic, which is microwave safe. You put it in the microwave, heat it and the plastic leaches again hormone mimic oestrogen in the food the oestrogen from plastic leaching now has gone through the water filtration system into the groundwater and into the lakes and come back to the US as an example you look at the lakes, they are clean but you measure oestrogen content in the waters, high. Practically it has led to a point in certain lakes the concentration of hormone has gone so high that male fish have female organs because of the oestrogen content. Now obviously this is hitting at the very basis of the survival instinct and the procreative mechanism in nature. If it's doing that to the fish in the extreme, it is doing something to human beings also.

So this is a good reason why biologically there is a shift in many spaces but that's not enough to explain that in many places people have lost the urge or the interest to procreate. So you will see for example in Europe many countries are actually giving incentives to young couples to have children because otherwise the population is depleting too fast and so they actually say if you have a child, as a state we will give you all these facilities and provide for all these things including free education. Why? Because it is falling too fast and these are alarming signs. But in India it is still growing because of the push that nature has made. Now what it would mean? There is a certain type in India which Sri Aurobindo refers to the Indian psyche and the psychological type and the physical type over many centuries is very finely balanced between the inner and the outer. These are Sri Aurobindo's words and he compares this to Europe of that period. Now again we are going back to the 19, let's say 1930s, okay. Compared to the European type of that period which he says is very coarse and insensitive. And all this discussion is in the context of people using channelling and mediumship as a way of accessing lower worlds.

Sraddhalu (0:19:10):

So when they did experiments in mediumship in Europe, some of those images and attempt to photograph materialisation etc. were published. Pavitra da took that to Sri Aurobindo and asked his opinion and Sri Aurobindo said this, that in Europe because they are still so crude and coarse in their sensitivity, it's okay, they are not too damaged. But if the same thing were to come to India, it would be disastrous. And why disastrous? Because he explains the Indian type is finely balanced between the inner and the outer. If you look at the future evolution, this kind which is finely balanced between the inner and outer is much more valuable for nature. In Europe, this has also been cultivated, lets say in the last 50 years. Between the coarser type and the finely balanced type in Europe, nature would want to preserve the finely balanced type and the coarser types, she has no more need for. She will need them still if they have strong biological energy and strength as a way of mixing with the more fine, subtle, sensitive types to produce the finely balanced type. But after that, the coarser part of the content has no use and there she weakens the impulse, pushes this impulse.

So I will put it this way, Europe and these spaces where you see population dropping is undergoing a huge shift in nature's prioritisation of which types she wants to increase, which types she wants to reduce. These statements can be controversial, they can be misunderstood, but I am placing them in this larger context and I hope they will be understood in the right way but at the same time she's also creating this mix. Unfortunately in Europe, what has happened recently in the last four years is this mix that came in from Syria and North Africa but notice the types that came in are strong vital beings. Strong vitality, strong drives of a coarse type. It's not what Europe needed. Crime rates have gone up, etc. Of course in the balance, nature will use this also for her purpose to perhaps increase the strength, where there has been a depletion civilizationally what I spoke of earlier because of the sexual energy depleted, she has brought in fresh blood through this mechanism and perhaps that will balance it. But it's not the ideal situation. The ideal situation would have been a regeneration internally and turning to a refinement. But this is part of the problem which now Europe will have to solve. It could have been done much better. A lot of this also happened through the end of the colonial phase where from the east and west many transitions took place, mixtures. The biggest diaspora in the world incidentally is the Indian diaspora. A huge number of people were taken as slaves by the British, but the British Empire being pretty much across the world, they set up these slave camps everywhere on earth. And so anywhere you go you will find Indians going back a 100 years or 150 years, settled there. And I have always wondered what purpose that served in the larger play in nature and if the Indian settling there brought with them something of the refinement of this development of the Indian spiritual values, then it might be used by nature as a way of seeding those values into those spaces and that will be interesting to see in the long run. Does that answer your question? I am looking at it from many different angles, because there is never one simple, narrow answer to these things.

But we were discussing something else before that. What was it? Lust. Okay. So I come back to this idea that it is nature modulating in people the sexual drive. And lust is the coarse crude form of it, in an unrefined human, even in a semi-animal human. But as the human becomes more mentalized, less animal, then the lust may take more refined forms, less crude forms, of course to the extent that crudeness hides under the guise of civility. You may have a well-dressed person speaking all the right words, but still driven by the same coarse barbaric instincts, which was the basis for a lot of the wars that took place, for example, in Europe. But really the last is the coarse form. The refinement is what we have to look at. A lot of this is also complicated by pornography which has now become universally accessible. Anybody who has a mobile phone and the internet now has free access to pornography. It used to be that you had to pay money, get it, it came in the mail secretly and you know people would hide magazines under their beds for the children not to see it. This is all America in the 60s. But now you can do nothing to hide. Children are seeing it, they are exposed to it. Even in our school, I think I mentioned in an earlier discussion, I had children in my class at the age of 10 describing something they had seen and at a time when it means nothing to them, it's just something coarse. But exposed to it, they will only acquire a coarsening of their sensitivities. And so there has to be some mechanism, some way by which it can be, they can be protected. I see no way by which it can be prevented. It's already too late. But to sensitise them and just to make them recognize that this is ugliness and something crude, and simply by refining the deeper sensitivity. There's no other way. So I want to come to the discussion now of the place of celibacy and the nature of what is thrown out in the sexual act, the nature of the sexual energy and the role that celibacy can play in this. There is a lot of misunderstanding of celibacy itself. I'll start with what is not celibacy. I have a keen interest to see the trends in this space and I saw an article which popped up on my feed which said something like, I was a virgin till the age of 40. This is from an American magazine. I said, wow, this is something interesting, a very rare occasion. So I read what the fellow had to say and it turned out it was something which was semi-religious, his reason for not marrying. But what he described was he was masturbating, he was having sexual relations with clothes on basically just avoiding physical penetration.

Sraddhalu (0:26:24):
This has nothing to do with celibacy, from the Indian context at least. All he did was he did not get married and get into the complete physical act, short of that he did everything, there was no concept of conservation of sexual energy. So that's not it. Similarly I saw another article which was about someone maybe around the age of 30, saying that I protected my virginity until the age of 30 because I was looking for the right man to marry and so on. This is from a woman. Again reading it, I discovered she did everything else short of physical penetration, but all sexuality was part of her. The concept of celibate in the West is very different from what we speak of it from the yogic framework or in the Indian context. For them celibate means you just did not do the last step of physical penetration which could have got you pregnant. Short of that, anything else is acceptable.
[Narad] This was the idea in the church, true celibacy..
[Sraddhalu] Yes, yes, the meaning of celibacy has been completely lost. In the church, the concept was even in its origin it had a spiritual idea, but it took on a very coarse form that you don't have the sexual act, but you don't have sexual thoughts, or when you become a nun, you are married to Christ and you have sex with Christ, or the equivalent in spiritual terms. So it was again very confused. So coming to the yogic concept, and it has nothing to do with morality, nothing to do with concept of sin, it is not a question of good or bad. It's only a practical recognition that your body is gathering energy for a particular purpose and that concentrated energy can take two different directions. In the procreative act, that energy is thrown out for the purpose of procreation but if it is not thrown out for the purpose of procreation it takes its second direction which is to intensify the energy and vitality for good health and for still higher faculties of the emotions and the mind and even potentially spirit. But it is basically energy gathered in the body for the purpose of the body's growth and well-being. But when it comes to the procreation, well, it is the same component because it is concentrated energy. So the word semen, even in the English language, a seminal work, a seminal text is a text that gathers a large number of knowledge into a very concentrated, intensified, focused expression. And that's really what the body is doing.

From an Ayurvedic perspective, the process is described like this, that when you eat food, out of the food that you eat, one seventh of it goes into the bloodstream to become your blood. Out of the blood, one seventh of it concentrated now goes to become, I don't remember now the sequence, the bone marrow, one seventh of it goes to become further, further, further through seven steps of refinement, each of which is one seventh of the previous. So effectively one forty ninth, you get finally the seminal fluid which is conserved in the body and which is also used for the procreative act. Now this 7 7 has a symbolic number but it has also a approximate physical content. The 7 I'll explain in this way, remember the map in the integral yoga of seven planes of existence based on seven principles?  In matter, Sri Aurobindo says, are seven finer grades of matter of which we know only the densest physical. There are subtle physical gradations of seven degrees which are all material but are invisible to a physical sight which is only belonging to the physical in the physical. Then there is the vital in the physical and so on, seven gradations. And you can actually enter into those worlds which are subtle physical. The experience would be that you can actually touch with the same physical tangibility, but it will look somehow different from the gross physical reality. And you would not be able to recognize whether you are in this or that world, until you see something really odd, which is not possible in the gross physical world. Then you'll say, ah ha, I'm in that world. So it happens to people when they go out of the body, into the subtle physical worlds, sometimes they're so convinced that they've woken up and are in the physical body, that they don't realise that they are still in a dream state in the subtle physical world. And in that they can go further into one more step in the dream, again in the subtle physical world and be quite lost about where they actually are, unless there is a very deep psychic sensitivity which feels the vibes and says, ah, something is not okay, this is not the gross physical yet. Otherwise they can think they are awake. It is on this concept and these experiences that the movie called Inception is based. And when they are in the dream state, they don't know if they have woken up or not and they have to use a special device to recognize that. So, what it tells you is, in your physical body itself therefore, seven gradations of substance are possible, which are still physical. They belong to the subtle physical part, but out of that subtle physical part, the part which is gross physical, this body tissue, within it has further seven gradations. So the bone being the densest, representing the most material of the material matter, remember it is third degree of refinement of the levels, matter within matter within matter, that's the bone, and then out of that the mind element is your muscle, then out of that the mine element is your nervous system and finer grades. If you continue that finer gradation what is the grade of substance that you have and the last is the seminal substance. Now imagine what that means. It represents at the level of materiality the finest gradation of evolved substance that the body is capable of containing or developing, which has potentially within it the ability to resonate with higher grades of consciousness. Resonate, I use the word very carefully. Look at it this way, your bone is the least sensitive. The life energy in it also is not seen in the bone substance. Inside the bone marrow of course you have something very important. That's where life is literally generated or condensed and held. That's where the bone protects it. Inside the spine is your most valuable nervous system tissue. But the bone is the most crude, the most dull, resistant material. In the muscle you have something which is more active, kinetic. In the nervous system, look at the degree of sensitivity in the brain, you can easily destabilise it with a little bit of emotion which clouds it or chemicals in your bloodstream which can knock you unconscious or put you in certain altered states and you go further steps beyond that. Where is that material used? So if you see the rationale of it, the highest grades of consciousness are used in the brain and the higher parts of the nervous system and then gathered into the centres which are the centres for the hormones and centres for the emotional processes, the ganglial centres concentration which are the chakras, that's where they are used. And in the brain, which is the primary repository for the development of the mind, this substance makes possible the higher faculties of the mind to operate inside the brain. There is always this question which science struggles with. What in your brain is actually thinking or seeing? And you can describe the electrical signals but they are not in themselves thought. The yoga answer is, the thought is in your subtle body, in your mental body. And then the question is what of the mental body is able to move physically the nervous system of your brain to trigger electrical signals or how your brain electrical signals are registered in your mental body. There must be something which mediates between these and that is these gradations of substance. Now nature takes a long time to build them and when they are sufficiently built, it allows a very intense access to these higher faculties of the mind. Denser gradation allows it to spread into the vitality of your body and the vital energy and supporting the vital body, the pranamaya sharira and its operations in the gross physical. Just as the mental body has to mediate with the physical brain, the vital body has to mediate also with your nervous system and the body tissue itself. And that is the grade of substance used for that.

Sraddhalu (0:36:14):

Sri Aurobindo describes this stages of the refinement which are traditionally described in this way. The metaphysical theory, he says is this, 'that the fundamental physical unit is the retas’, which is the seminal substance physically as we see it, ‘in which tejas, the heat and light and electricity in a man is involved and hidden. All energy is latent in the retas that is the semen. This energy energy may be either expended physically or conserved'. Now comes the interesting thing, 'All passion, lust, desire wastes the energy by pouring it either in the gross form or a sublimated subtler form out of the body'. He is not talking about sex. He is talking about passion. You get angry. You feel a strong lustful desire. You may not have any sexual relation physically, but just that impulse of lust, what does it do? Remember what we discussed earlier, the breaking of the shell of the aura, spilling the gathered concentrated energy. So all passion, lust, desire. Now desire is in a very general way, the moment I crave something and I have a strong desire, there is a part of my energy reaching out and I may throw out some of this energy. So gross form of course is through the physical spilling through the sex act or otherwise, but the sublimated subtle form also can lose it. I'll give you an example and all of us can relate to this. You had a strong burst of anger. What happens immediately after? You feel a low. What's the character of the low? Your energy is low and your happiness has also dropped. I'm going to point to this factor much more later and we will see what it really means in terms of the sexual act. Immorality in act, throws it out in the gross form, immorality in thought, in the subtle form. In either case there is a waste and unchastity is of the mind and speech as well as of the body. When you speak in gossip, notice what happens. You just had gossip, at that time there was a bit of an excitement. It's a coarse grade of excitement and then it subsides, you come back and suddenly you feel depleted, something is missing, you have lost energy, especially if you have developed within you a concentration of the higher grades of energy, you feel you wasted it in the speech. Loose talk again has a way of draining energy. I found in a lot of people who have strong physical, let's say sexual energy, but conserve it physically by not entering in physical relations are unable to conserve it and it spills out in speech. It's the same energy that they are losing.

[Narad] So the tantric practice of sex without ejecting semen is only a very small aspect of this whole thing.
[Sraddhalu] Yes, in fact, even to call it tantric would be an error. It exists in many forms, in many traditions, but it is associated with tantra only because there is a particular path which is not even considered a mainstream path of tantra, called the left hand path. Now in the West, there is a lot of misunderstanding around this because, left hand path means the other would be right hand path. No, that's not true. There is Tantra and then there is a left hand path, which is considered in the Tantric tradition inferior and even a deviant path. Sri Aurobindo refers to it as the degraded survival of a deeper principle, which used to exist at one time, but that's a degraded form in which it has survived. But the original principle or approach behind it which was a deep truth has been lost.

So what is the Tantra about? Read any text of Tantra and you will see it is about awakening powers of nature by an act of some higher action or in service to a higher action. Essentially all tantric texts are texts of worship to the Shakti by which the Shakti awakens in you certain powers which effectively represent steps in your growth of consciousness in evolution. And the principal method of the tantra is conscious self-surrender to the divine Shakti. In its fallen condition, tantra is largely about getting powers by any mechanism. And in its lower frame, it is entering in relations with, not the divine Shakti, but with lower beings to get into some pact for magical powers and so on. But that's not Tantra. You go to any tradition which is in old families, it is all about worship of the Divine Mother. And the Sri Yantra, etc. are all physical, mechanical processes by which you worship the Divine Mother, invoke her presence. Period. There is no sex anywhere involved in this. In the left hand path, which is the deviant path, there is the idea that all the things which you fear, all the things which you reject can be overcome by facing them rather than running away from them. And it took again a deep truth but in a symbolic form using the twilight language and brought through this acceptance some breakthrough. Now in the very definition of that path, it is not for everybody, it is only for the heroic types. And that means what? You fear something, go and face your fear, go into the cremation ground, sit on a dead body, pretty crazy stuff if you look at it. If you have any deeper sensitivity of the soul or the psychic being, if you have any deeper refined emotion or thought, these appear so coarse, so crude and even perverse. But precisely that path says that society discards as perverse can also be made a means for liberation. And again the goal is liberation. By overcoming that which you fear, by indulging in the very thing which is wrong, you break through the sense of limitation and break out of limitations into the unlimited. That's the principle behind it.

Now this is very attractive in the West because one of the mechanisms is eating meat, fish, having sex, drinking alcohol and what is the fifth M? There are five M's[1]. I don't remember. But the idea is through these indulgences you will break through beyond the limits. But what's the symbolism and the path itself tells you that the sex here is symbol for union with the divine within. Eating meat is for in, I don't remember the exact mechanism but it has some similar symbolic element. I had looked at these things many years ago but it's not something which I found worth paying more attention to. So the memories have gone now. But the idea is they were also meant to be symbolic that the act of sex itself, if you followed the way the teaching goes, started with several hours of prayer, of worship to each other and then representing in a physical sexual act, the union of the divine masculine and feminine principles. If you actually go through the prayer, you actually go through the meditations, you go through the rituals, you don't have time or energy for the sexual desire and impulse to lead you. It becomes almost like a sacred ritual. But the path says that if you indulge in the sexual pleasure then you have missed the point and you have fallen and you'll never reach the goal. Now what's taught in the West? Tantra is prolonging sexual pleasure, prolonging sexual act, having sex without orgasm, without losing semen. It's a bit silly and even ridiculous if you actually look at the path strictly. If you look at the path itself, you can see it not only is extremely difficult, but it is a very roundabout and indirect way to get to something which is contrary to your natural turn of nature and even natural aspiration of the soul. So really speaking, none of these have much place in anybody who is serious about spirituality. It's very convenient for people who want to deceive themselves and the path itself warns you about self-deception in the path. So I suppose that would take care of this aspect of misunderstanding which is very common today.

Sraddhalu (0:45:41):

But coming to the conservation of energy, it does not happen if you have sexual thought and sexual feeling and not have the spilling of the semen. Then you still have not fulfilled this criteria which Sri Aurobindo is describing because in mind and speech equally you are losing the energy in a subtle form. On the other hand, all self-control conserves the energy in the retas. Remember, this is still at a very basic level, physical. And conservation always brings with it increase because the body is continuously gathering for its purpose of nourishing the higher grades of substance. But the needs of the physical body are limited and the excess of energy must create a surplus which has to turn itself to some other use than the physical. And now comes the interesting part. According to the ancient theory, retas is jala or water full of light and heat and electricity, in one word of Tejas. So it's like the basic substance inside which the light heat electricity are contained. And when it is conserved, it transmutes gradually to reveal more and more of the light, heat and electricity. What that means we will shortly take up. The excess of retas turns first into heat or tapas, which stimulates the whole system. And it is for this reason that all forms of self-control and austerity are called Tapas or Tapasya because they generate the heat or stimulus which is a source of powerful action and success. Very interesting vocabulary. When you read it casually you will wonder what is he talking about powerful action and success. You mean conserving energy is going to give you success? I thought success depended on many other things of your skill and this is the thing which is very interesting here. When that energy grows, when it acquires this character of powerful vitality, it actually glows out into your aura. So the heat, light and electricity is not physical, it is in the subtle grade of substance that fills your aura. If you look at the aura of such a person, you will see it bright. And if in the subtle physical part of the aura, if the person is able to interact with an object, you can actually measure electrical signal. And the heat can also be felt physically but it is more as an internal heat of the condensed substance and light of the consciousness.

Now I am going to touch upon this briefly because at this stage you have not yet got to the spiritual grade but something extraordinary already begins to happen. Such a person is, remember radiating heat and light. When someone looks at him, you cannot see the aura but you can sense the heat and light and it's as if the person is more attractive than someone else who is depleted. What does it mean in practice, if I look at ten people none of us may see physically the aura but looking at those ten people suddenly this fellow stands out. Oh he has such a glow, something about him is very attractive. Charisma in another word. Most of the successful politicians, most of the successful film stars or public figures have to have the charisma. If they do not they cannot be successful in that field. They radiate something and the way the people feel it is radiating of a vitality. The basis on which the vitality can stay and the radiation takes place is this first transmutation. And so Sri Aurobindo uses the word here success. So when the person loses the energy suddenly it's as if the whole aura dims and the charismatic character suddenly weakens. But it's not entirely lost. You will see the problem with people who are successful in this way with strong charisma, often they also have strong drives and they tend to have also aberrant sexual tendencies. Precisely because within them the energy which is gathered is very strong, it builds for the charisma on one side but on the other side if they don't have that basic discipline or refinement of nature, then it can take a form which is crude and deviant in their sexual urges.

Sri Aurobindo refers to this also in some of his letters, where he describes how artists and creators of any kind, musicians, they have strong energy, which is when directed upwards becomes this creative energy, but because it is very strong in their system it also tends to have deviant sexual tendencies. And somebody says, oh but is it because they have deviant sexual tendencies that they have creativity? He says, no it's the reverse. It's the strong energy of the creativity which also when it's not contained in an unrefined body leads to this kind of deviation. But when they do conserve it can lead to enormously increased creativity and charisma which comes with it. So you will see in the Indian texts also, the yogic texts, they will say a person like this will have the radiation of a hundred suns and will be successful and conquering wherever he goes. A little bit of an exaggerated description, but it's about this which is a reality on the subtle level. Because they generate the heat or stimulus which is a source of powerful action and success. Secondly, it turns to Tejas proper, light and energy which is at the source of all knowledge. And thirdly, it turns into Vidyut or electricity which is at the basis of all forceful action whether intellectual or physical. And then after that, it becomes the primal energy of the ether which prepares you for the spiritual. So all this we will look at in detail next time. But as a quick recognition that these are all gradations of substance and their corresponding effective powers which exist in all of us when conserved and directed in a positive way, can enormously increase the quality of life. But the same energies turned downward would be expelled from the body and lost and would reduce the basis on which this higher quality of life could have otherwise developed.

[Narad] Thank you. Namaste.

[1] In vamachara or left handed path, the five Ms are: Madya (wine), Mamsa (meat), Matsya (fish), Mudra (grain), Maithuna (sexual intercourse).