EWS #21: Human relationships, marriage, love, sex, celibacy and Yoga (5)
Feb 02, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. The past four talks have been extremely important to all who are contemplating or actively in search of a spiritual life. But even more, Sraddhalu has covered the role of human relationships, marriage, the onslaught of sexual references in our society today, and much more. So today, we have two more hours in two separate times to cover even more on this very important subject, especially for young people, but relative to everyone. Namaste.
Sraddhalu (0:02:25):
Namaste. I am glad that this theme has been brought up in our discussion because there is so much misunderstanding out there and because of that so much guilt, so much internal division of consciousness, unnecessary internal struggles and conflicts, especially among people who have grown up in families where there is a strong spiritual inclination where perhaps their parents or uncles or relatives are connected closely with the ashram and so they have reference to writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother frequently in their life, but all the letters of Sri Aurobindo relating to human relationships and particularly to sex are about a very strict self-control, celibacy and even in human relationships the letters will say things like, 'no you will not unnecessarily speak to x or y or z'. Not realising that these letters were written to sadhaks in the early period of the ashram, in the 30s, up to the 30s, until the families with their children came. And these sadhaks were all selected for the purpose of an intense, concentrated tapasya. And only when they were ready for that, they were brought into this space, or allowed to come into this space. And they were from the very first word of go, into that intensity of tapas, for which the exclusive focus of mind, life and even the physical actions on the Divine Mother, even the exclusive sense of non-possession of anything and of knowing all your possessions to be hers, was so important. It was literally meant to be the nucleus or the cradle of the new race or the new consciousness for which this kind of concentrated base was necessary. Those letters were not written to normal people or people with an aspiration but who have not reached that stage of concentrated tapasya. And so the result has been practically that most of these young people grow up with some sense of guilt, especially with regard to their romantic and sexual desires and a lot of the mixture that comes from the ascetic spirituality which cuts up life. First it makes spiritual life and non-spiritual life and so you are in one or the other and once you have made that false division and Mother is very strong about this. In one of her statements she says even that one of the reasons for which Sri Aurobindo came upon earth was to remove this false division to show that all life is one, there is no spiritual life versus non-spiritual life. And so once this division has been made then obviously you either belong to the spiritual or the non-spiritual. If you belong to the spiritual, you must be entirely celibate otherwise you are not spiritual. And many of them not only have strong emotional needs, needs for companionship, they experience romantic attractions, they experience sexual desires, they don't know how to do this because it's an artificial division and I've seen people in life having very happy families, but let's say one of the persons in the partnership has a strong spiritual inclination and is always in a state of guilt about the fact that he has sexual relations with his partner. And what do you do about that because it all comes from a misunderstanding.
Narad (00:06:14):
I know an old sadhaka who told me that Mother said one thing to her, express but never repress. Very interesting. That she should not repress because that builds up.
Sraddhalu (00:06:35):
And sometimes these desires or urges being so deeply rooted in nature can be so intense as to drive a person almost mad. And you find that happening sometimes among people, especially those who take to the more monastic lives, they go through very difficult passages for a few years and either they successfully suppress the impulse in which case they end up with a kind of an unbalanced personality or they live always in fear of the impulse rising and so they need to live in some kind of a partitioning from life, there are even religious traditions where the males are of course in position of authority, they will not meet women among their devotees face to face. They will even have a curtain, the women are behind the curtain, they will not see a woman. Now you can respect the tradition and its strict celibate laws, but if you look at it from a very practical or evolutionary standpoint, these are artificial divisions which may even appear to be perversions. And to live like that, blocked up, is not in any case the goal of the integral spirituality. And so what do you do? In one of our discussions when we spoke of the acceptance of the sexual desire or the romantic turn of emotions, one of the strong reactions from someone was that, but doesn't it mean indulgence? And so we make a distinction between indulgence and acceptance and even if it were indulgence, just for argument's sake, my response would be, alright, go ahead, how long can you indulge? Eventually the body will tire, eventually the emotions will get fed up, eventually the whole pointlessness of it is what lasts and then what do you have in your life or what do you have in your relationship? At some point you realise there are higher values or higher gradations of enjoyment of which this may have been a precursor or a transitional passage. So in our discussion last time we looked at how nature is trying to build from a very physical process, higher gradations not only of emotions and ideals, but also the possibility of love. And at first in the animal instinct she has to organise love purely through chemical and instinctive means. And so what we have is the sexual desire heavily mixed with love, but as the human being evolves the two become quite distinct. And it is possible for a human being today who is reasonably conscious to make a pretty clear distinction of this, if not for the fact that the whole media and society is constantly trying to conflate the two, to mix and confuse the two and so even in the American English vocabulary, to make love is a very physical sexual act and in the very framework of Western psychiatry and psychology the two are conflated to a degree that becomes almost impossible to separate and the Freudian turn of that understanding gives to the physical instinct of sex an exaggerated place. So we discussed some of the aspects of separation of these two things and you realise that the sexual act itself has very little value if it did not fill with some love, some affection, some sense of intimacy, some sense of caring and sharing with the other. You remove those and the act is nothing but scratch a physical itch, and it's not different from an animal driven by an instinct and then the instinct is passed, it's over. The fact that it becomes meaningful is because it fills with something higher. And then as we grow in consciousness, what we distinguish is the physical pleasure aspect of it and the emotional fullness or satisfaction which comes with the love or intimacy. And the two may co-exist for a while but after a while the body tires of sensation or sensation becomes habitual which is the experience every teenager has, after their first few passionate encounters it plateaus out, which is the experience we have in all physical sensations even in food this food is so delicious you keep on eating it plateaus out and then it even becomes negative and the point comes for those who chase after pleasure that you need either more and more intense pleasure to have the same satisfaction which by which time the body breaks down or the nervous system becomes numb or you look for a higher grade of satisfaction. Just look at it very practically, the more we become conscious, the more rapidly this transition is made to a higher grade of satisfaction. And then what are you there as a couple for? Companionship, caring, sharing, love. And these are the things which matter.
We saw last time also Mother's advice to the first couple that she got married in Sri Aurobindo's room. And she spoke of uniting the material interests in the physical consciousness, united in sensations and tastes and aesthetics and then in one's deeper feelings, mutual affection and tenderness and we saw up to here most human beings will accept to unite, the moment you move to the next level- harmonise your thoughts, make them complementary, the question would be why? Why would you want to do that? I'm quite happy being what I am, the way I'm thinking. And when it goes further to the psychic center or the spiritual summit and the uniting in soul or spirit, why would you want to unite? Aren't you content with what you are? And here I want to touch upon the impulse for unity which nature has embedded in the idealism of romance. We touched upon this in earlier discussions when we saw how the higher forms of animals mate for life, they pair for life. But there is something else here which is more interesting to see. In the first romantic urge in a couple, it's almost as if you want to live for the other, you want to give yourself to the other, somehow you feel you will come together and join and be forever together. That sense of the ideal of some kind of a union is really what nature is trying to point to for her later evolution. But already it means you have outgrown the physical cruder sensation and self-satisfaction which is the early stages of sexual attraction. But here is the interesting thing, you must experience this idealism in your higher parts. You cannot experience it in your lower parts because there you cannot. But in these higher parts, they should be sufficiently free from the lower to be able to fulfil it. But still the question, why the idea of union? And here we come to a very deep principle, this principle of polarity which we experience between the male and the female. And on some level nature uses that polarity as a point of attraction between the two. But that is still at the instinctive and at the level of the physical and vital energies. The moment you move higher, it does not have the same compelling polarity of attraction, but it acquires a sense of complementarity of thought or approach or something which is more difficult to describe, the feminine mind or consciousness as distinct from the masculine mind or consciousness. Have each such a different approach to life or to a certain situation that it almost seems as if you are not whole unless you encompass both. And so the instinct to unite is really an instinct to find your completeness. You started with an aspect exaggerated in consciousness, more masculine or more feminine and you are trying to reach out to the other which you feel instinctively you cannot have in your own completion. And so in joining with the other you will find that completion. Once you move a little further in evolution and the instinct of physical attraction or even the vital attraction has pretty much passed, you begin to realise that that which you were attracted to in the other eventually must grow into your consciousness. You must develop both facets in your own consciousness although you may choose to be more settled in one of these more masculine or more feminine in your overall turn, if you do not develop the other side, it's almost like a lack, a missing part.
Narad (0:15:41):
That's Mother's force.
Sraddhalu (0:15:42):
That is what she is pointing to when she is speaking of coming together to unite in your minds and your thoughts, make them complementary, share your intellectual preoccupations and discoveries, make your sphere of mental activity identical through widening and enrichment acquired by both. With or without both, the idea is your own consciousness must be able to encompass both aspects in its evolution. This may not happen in a single lifetime. So the more mature people are the ones in whom there has been enough work done across lifetimes to be able to develop this both masculine and feminine aspects of consciousness while still being largely rooted in that aspect which they have chosen. This points to something even higher. When we look at the next stage of evolution which Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental, because it is based on the supramental consciousness, and considering the species undergoing a physical change into that stage of evolution, whenever that takes place, the Mother's observation was the supramental being does not have sexual organs and yet it may be masculine or feminine. This is a very important distinction to make. The sexual organs are necessary in that early phase of physical evolution where nature had to drive you by primary instinctive pushes. The moment we have come into our own, even as mental beings, that becomes less relevant. When we move into a spiritual consciousness, the aspect of the masculine or feminine may still remain, but the mechanism of procreation will be on the basis of a higher faculty. And so, Sri Aurobindo has written a little bit about this, that they would have a different way of procreating. It's not so important now but the idea that there can be a masculine or feminine but without the organals is very important because it means that in the higher evolution these two will play distinct roles. Sri Aurobindo points to this in a phrasing which I am paraphrasing, that ‘the soul chooses to align more with the aspect of the Ishwara or the aspect of Ishwari'. And that means in the play this dual aspect is going to be used. In the most evolved beings the consciousness would be able to choose this or that simply by slanting itself in consciousness to express more of this or the other or even to be able to hold both, but for the purpose of the play there is this intended for the future of the duality. Nature uses this idea or this principle to form the first level of attraction.
If you step back now from the gross physical body and look at purely the vital body and the mental bodies, which are not so rooted in the biological procreative process, the vital body can literally separate itself or project a part of itself to form a new body. As can the mental body equally. What you see in bacteria, where a part of the body simply separates and then you have two bacteria. The split took place in the nucleus and then you had two forms. Our gross physical body cannot do this because it is too rigid. And so it has to create a replica of itself within the womb, throw it out and then the soul has to re-enter it. But in the vital level, the soul can gather material and form a body for itself. In the mental level, the soul similarly gathers material. So when it prepares for birth, it gathers mental substance, vital substance. It cannot gather physical substance. So there it has to enter into the physical procreative process. But now if you were to stop there and find a means by which it could similarly gather physical material or materialise substance it would not need sexual organs and at that point, that is the nature of the supramental being taking birth. But just up to there even in the vital body, there is no sexual organ. In the vital body, there is a sexual or energetic orientation more to the male or female or masculine and feminine. And from there when the physical body is formed as a template by nature evolving from below, she takes the vital body and out of it forms the physical body. So there is a perfect representation of the vital into the physical. But interestingly, in the foetus, in the first movement of the foetus' growth, there is no gender. The sexual organs are exactly the same, the machinery of sex is the same. And then at some point certain hormones kick in and it shifts one way to become male or shifts another way to become female. Now when you look at the whole process, it's fascinating that they are identical. One to one there is a correspondence between the complexity of the organs. Even more interesting, there is a term in mathematics called topological invariance. That means you can take an object and if it is malleable you can stretch it, as long as you don't make a new hole or a new joint, it is equivalent topologically. So you take a doughnut, you can shape it into a teacup, they are topologically equivalent. If you take the male sexual organs, the female sexual organs, they are topologically identical. Literally you could take this and shape it that way without making any break or any change. It means in the vital body it is the same energetic imprint that is used shaped this way to become the male organs, shaped that way to become the female organs but there is a one to one correspondence between these.
Narad (0:21:38):
Shri Aurobindo says though that generally the sex remains the same. I mean it may change once occasionally, but female will be reborn as female.
Sraddhalu (0:21:52):
Yes, and he explains that the soul in the initial emergence into its own identity may experiment to see which line of development it wants to specialise in. So it may take birth in a male body, then a female body, go back and forth until it pretty much settles on which direction it is aligned to and then stay with that thereafter all through for its development and transition to the other sex only for specific purposes, either to experience certain things or for developing certain faculties.
Narad (0:22:28):
I would like to go back to a rather sensitive topic, and that is how the youth get out of the repression. And it gets into lust, and it gets into multiple partners. And I think that needs to be addressed also.
Sraddhalu (0:22:54):
Yes, the most important thing is in the transition from the animal instinct to desire driven love to the more emotional love to the still higher refined grade of love. In the transition to become conscious first of the distinction between pleasure, enjoyment and intimacy and love. Now pleasure is entirely at the level of the physical sensations and has always a limited span always leads to exhaustion. If you move from there to the sense of satisfaction of emotions or affections that's already something more lasting, intimacy becomes more deep and love is what makes it complete, but all these are blurred, mixed in the very first early impulses. And I gave this example last time what is it that drives you to make the choice of the selection of the partner, would you accept if the partner was perfectly matching for you but you felt no attraction or you had another option where you feel strong attraction but no match and most people today would move towards attraction rather than something which is more likely to last. This is the reason why the early marriages rarely last because the basis of the choice was passion which is primarily vital-physical, we felt a strong energetic pull and it was so strong it felt as if this is going to last forever and this is the most important thing and when it does you are left with nothing, what are you here together for, you have nothing else in common. So when they go, second marriage which is soon after, you are still not mature enough and the third marriage becomes more stable, generally that's the pattern you see. But if you waited long enough and you pass through that phase already your basis of choice would be different and if you become more mature and you are living more in your emotions and thoughts rather than the physical passion, your perspective has widened. You may include a physical attraction surely but the other things will already be more important in your selection. So first is to become conscious of these different gradations within us and the pulls and pushes which take place on these. And as you become conscious, they automatically tend to sift out and separate. And then depending on which is your priority, which is the level you are more living in, your choices will become clear. I have seen some of the most successful marriages being often organised by somebody else who made the choice and then the couple met the first time and they were waiting for sparks to happen, no sparks, they went back and then spontaneously both of them independently said I would like to meet the other again. So the man tells his parents, 'I'll meet her again', she says, 'I want to meet him again', they meet a second time and then they feel a confirmation. Now they are already reasonably conscious people and they were in their early 20s in India and they knew and that was it and it led to a reasonably stable marriage. Of course you have differences of understanding and communication, which is the mental part which nobody wants to work upon to harmonise.
[Narad] We haven't touched on arranged marriages yet.
[Sraddhalu] Yes. So the arranged marriages work better if there has been a maturity in the choice from the beginning. They don't work well when the parents are looking at other benefits, 'Oh that's a rich family' or 'this one's parents are influential', therefore you should marry. That doesn't work. But if they look at their comfort, then often it works out much better. But I still want to get to the idea that you have already within you the higher or deeper sensitivities. The key is to make a choice on the basis of that deeper sensitivity and not on the basis of an immediate superficial attraction. Can you make that? well, it depends on your upbringing. If from childhood you've been brought up to only focus upon your surface parts and the inner sensitivity has not been developed or if you've been through and you've been damaged by the early free sex teaching then you've lost the deeper sensitivity already. If you have protected yourself from that kind of a damage, then the inner sensitivity will guide you. The challenge is what do you do in a culture where the peer pressure is strong and if you go to the US, in many of the students and colleges, the sexual activity is so high and if one student is not involved in it, then they are criticised by the others and they go through the act simply to break the taboo, 'oh I have lost my virginity, so now I am normal'. What has happened is, today, what is normal has been made abnormal and the abnormal has been called as normal. So it is a difficult passage for young people today. It's, the same thing is happening in India. But at least if this, these thoughts and this awareness can be brought in, and this I would call the real spiritual sex education. Unfortunately what is given as sex education goes from the Freudian perspective and Western model that says you should have more sex from the moment the impulse comes, in America you see this in American Hollywood movies, the parents will tell the children you should masturbate, it's normal and if you're going to go on a date masturbate in advance so that you don't get too overwhelmed. And so the idea, to deplete the sexual energy from an early stage, is part of the culture. What do you do? It is very difficult for... But at least if this is brought into the awareness, and we will speak about celibacy shortly. If the value of celibacy is brought into awareness and the yogic approach or the spiritual approach to the sex education can be brought into context early enough, a lot of this confusion could be avoided.
Narad (0:29:34):
But the great danger now is the education of 7 and 8 year olds in America, probably in Europe also.
Sraddhalu (0:29:41):
Yes, and it has become so ugly, I am using this word consciously. In the UK, in London and in California in certain schools they teach children in kindergarten that they can choose their gender. They are asked to sexually stimulate each other and massage each other in order to understand the opposite sex and what it feels like and this is damaging. We have discussed this before how before the individuality is formed, any form of sexual expression breaks the form of the unit that is still developing. It is contrary to nature and it damages the individual growth. So we don't need to revisit that now. I want to pick up on this idea that the physical organs are formation of the energy body. But in the energy body it is the same structure which moves in one way to become the physical organs, moves in other way to become the male organs or the female organs. And this is very important and you have to understand it in the larger context. In the energy body, in the vital energy, in the vital body, literally a reshaping of the position of the energy arrangement makes you male or female. It's literally a shift like that. And that shift represents itself in the physical organs of the male, physical organs of the female. What this means is when the physical body is sufficiently plastic or transformed in supramental terms, the aspect of the energy being more masculine or feminine can shape itself and the body itself would be expressive of it, not needing physical organs of course for that, but still expressive in its form of masculinity or femininity. And this is a very interesting and important principle to recognize.
That the moment you cross the physical threshold, it is really one framework having either a more masculine or more feminine leaning of the pattern of energy or thought. The sexual organs are a very limited part of a very early evolution and do not have much role thereafter. Again in the vital world, in the vital body or the mental body, you have an equivalent of the sexual act where the male and female bodies can come together, but it doesn't have the same character of the sex act and the physical body. There is a certain exchange of energy, a feeling of some communication, even of intermingling of energy and then you move apart again and it comes much closer to what the Mother is describing here of the sense of unity, union. And so all of this discussion I wanted to bring forward because of this ideal of union that, as we grow to be spiritual beings, the sense of closeness or unity of soul with soul is the reference. And the sense of union or coming together in joy, in love from soul to soul does not necessarily have a strong masculine or feminine requirement anymore, but the sense of coming together to bond or share has a spiritual value which can be experienced even in your life as a couple. It means a lot of work, it means these last two stages that the Mother speaks of to be worked upon and if you align yourself to the deeper ideal of nature, you have already within you the impulse to want to reach out, to unite or to have a deeper kind of intimacy and sharing, which is what brings to the romantic love, the true value. Shorn of this, romantic love becomes quite meaningless. Bring this back and it becomes this beautiful ideal and so on.
Sraddhalu (0:33:55):
So from here we come now to the concept of celibacy, and this is so important in today's culture. We looked last time at what is not celibacy, which is what you see in much of the western world, also now coming indirectly into India, that a person does not get married or does not have physical penetrative sex, but everything else is included and they call themselves celibate. No, that's not celibate. The very basic idea of celibacy is that you contain the sexual energy for a certain purpose. And so we come to the text of Sri Aurobindo which we began to explore last time and I want to go into this in some detail. Sri Aurobindo describes here the stages of transmutation of the substance that is contained in the body and we are going to look at it again from two or three perspectives. First we saw last time that the physical body itself, in the physical range of substance which is one of seven gradations of physical substance. Within that are seven grades. You have the bone which is the hard part, the muscle and the nervous system and so on, seven gradations of substance. Of this, the highest gradation is gathered in what is called the seminal liquid.
Now we will look at this also later, there is an equivalent in the female equally and there is a lot of misunderstanding about that and we will touch upon this shortly. But let's look at how the substance transmutes. So this retas grows into tejas. We saw that last time. Retas has the character which is of fluidity, it is of the grade of in the five elements, in the scheme of five elements, it has the grade of water. But Sri Aurobindo explains how the surplus which the body does not use is gathered and stored and if this is continued to be stored then it grows into the next degree, of Tejas, which is full of light, heat and electricity. Now the idea is already this substance has within it finer gradations. Think of it this way, when you eat a fruit there is the fibrous tissue, there is the juice and then there are finer grades which you do not see but which come in the form of flavours. If you eat an apple or a potato, if you hold your nose, close your nose and eat potato or apple, you can't distinguish one from the other. Try it out, very interesting. It's the smell which gives to the apple that fresh flavour which you do not find in the potato. That flavouring is material which belongs to the apple which is flying out, it's coming to your nose but it was material bound in the juice. Now the same apple dried you won't have that perfume, you don't have the flavour. It shows you that within the juicy part of the apple are finer grades of matter, so fine that in the very moment when you cut they begin to evaporate and spread. This gives you a sense of the finer gradation of substance. If you ate the apple with that freshness in it, you feel more fresh because that substance fills and spreads through your bloodstream. It's so fine in fact, if you take garlic, crush it and rub it on your feet barefoot, in a few minutes, within a minute, you'll be able to taste it on your tongue. Why? because the substance penetrated the skin, entered your bloodstream, spread through the bloodstream into the tongue and from inside, the taste appeared on the surface of the tongue.
Now, what substance is there which is so fine that it can rapidly penetrate through the skin, enter the bloodstream and spread and yet be caught by the taste or smell. It is the finest grade of substance which will be lost if you dry the garlic completely or if you store it in certain forms of pickle for example, where the finer grades are gone. It is that part which is lost most quickly. Now this gives you an idea that in the food there are finer grades which the body takes a long time to gather because there is so little of it. But it does gather and a lot of this is gathered into this Retas and from Retas it builds into this grade of the Tejas, Tapas. So the excess of Retas turns first into heat or Tapas which stimulates the whole system. Now what happens? You get this increase of what? Light, heat, electricity. That's how it feels internally. 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. Now we discussed this last time, 'powerful action and success', literally it is charisma, a glow which is felt in the aura, even on the skin. It takes the form in a young person that the skin glows. And this is something which people catch immediately, but is so difficult to describe. You look at a person and say, oh there is a glowing skin, well it's not what you applied. It's the substance which is now increased into your subtler gradations of the physical body, that is the subtle physical body and in that you have a glow which is made of the substance now built and energised into your system. It has a character of electricity. I mentioned last time, so I don't mind repeating at least in summary because it will help for the continuity here, that those who have this ability of moving objects by thought power for example or psycho-kinetic abilities or various psychic abilities, need this grade of substance or rather they use this grade of substance. When that is in plenty you can as if exercise your consciousness upon the environment or upon things more easily. Literally you can measure, when they concentrate to influence an object, the voltage in their ambient aura shoots up. This is an example, I don't think we discussed this last time, but Ingo Swann was one of those who was tested in the lab. So he's sitting and he's asked to concentrate and they have all these detectors and the voltage in the air around him, within a metre of him, shoots up to 300 and 400 volts. Electricity, literally physical electricity measurable. But it's happening from a subtle physical substance which has been gathered and contained. If you read his biographical notes, he was all the time attracted sexually to people. He seems to have a very loose life, but it's only because his body was generating large quantities of the sexual energy which makes for that kind of tendency, gives them a strong urge or impulse.
Sraddhalu (0:41:20):
Sri Aurobindo writes about this in one of his letters when he is asked why is it many of these artists, many of the great artists have very loose lives, loose morals and he said there is a connection. The sexual energy which is in greater quantity makes them capable of this higher quantum of creativity. But if it is not contained properly it also leads to these types of aberrations of behaviour. So we are looking at something which is very important which is a physical tangible character of electricity and then heat and light. So the light is the charisma aspect, the electricity is an example I have given now, but it has a subtler kind of electricity. And then the heat, you literally experience in your body, a kind of a glow of heat and light when sufficiently built up, makes for increased vitality, but also increased power of the mind. It energises the vital body and even to that extent, the mental body. Those who have that kind of a contained energy you will find they can manage cold much more easily. Now this is not a reference because a lot of people can manage cold simply from habit the body adapts, but such people are able to manage cold in a dramatically extreme manner, they are able to walk in snow bare-bodied and feel nothing, in the large part because of the quantum of this internal heat which comes from this. So the next step Sri Aurobindo describes, secondly it turns to Tejas proper, light, the energy which is at the source of all knowledge and here comes that faculty in the mind now kicking in.
Again let's look at it biologically, the substance refined spreads upward in the system along the spine. The spinal fluid, the spinal cord is still the hub around which all the chakras are organised and right on top is the brain and right at the bottom at the base of the spine is the Kundalini. That's where also you have the sexual organs connected there. So it's as if the most physical material gathered is successively refined and as it grows in refinement it goes up levels. Now levels of consciousness are because they are broadly mapped into the physical body along the chakras. You have the sense as if it is rising but actually it's filling everything. You just feel it more activated in all these layers rising up and at the point where it hits your mind, you find your mind becoming more clear, more bright, more alert. Effectively amplifying all the powers, all the faculties of the mind. Now this factor was considered extremely important in the healthy development of the individuality. Just as in the early stages, the body is working to strengthen the basic bones and muscles, as it grows through the emotional being and the mind kicks in, in early teenage, this substance also is being built up in the mental body or touching, leaning towards the mental body from the physical to nourish and support its development and if you can conserve it and not waste it, then you will find you have more mental energy, more mental clarity, more mental power and as a student this is so critical. While your mind is in formation, you need to conserve this energy. Just as when your physical body is growing you cannot be bleeding every day giving blood donations, you won't have a healthy body growth. You do need the physical nourishment. So as the mind comes into its own you need this mental nourishment and the quality of food you eat is extremely important. Foods which have these higher gradations, such as fruits will go a long way to amplifying this grade of substance. So here he brings it to the level of knowledge.
Narad (0:45:26):
One, to touch on one thing, you could, it's probably the heat aspect, but I have a friend who is devoted to Mother. If she puts her hand above yours, the heat can almost burn your hand. It's so powerful. And she's not concentrating on anything. She's just doing it right there and it comes. Is that the same heat?
Sraddhalu (0:45:50):
Well, some of that will be involved in it. But in this case, the person has a natural opening of the centre in the base, in the centre of the palm, through which their vitality pours out. Such people are natural healers. I'll share with you an incident. This is somebody who grew up as a student here in the ashram, became a teacher also later. He is no more here now. He narrated this. He was curious about the healing ability and he was talking to the Mother about it and Mother said, well some people have it, let me see if you have it. And she asked him to place his palms face up and she put her palm just above, several inches above his and he said within seconds his palms became so hot and then she said, 'yes, you have the ability'. So she activated the palm chakra, she activated it to see how much energy came and then she said okay and then she asked, 'do you want to develop it?', and fortunately he said no. And she said it was a wise decision. Because once you get into that whole business of healing others, it can be quite messy. Because you can equally pick up their illnesses. It takes you in a different direction of development. You must have a body which is very strong to be able to do that kind of thing. So, the source of knowledge comes from this Tejas proper becoming light inside the system, which you experience in the subtle body and which you can see in the subtle body. And thirdly, it turns to Vidyut or electricity, which is at the basis of all forceful action, whether intellectual or physical. This part is now very interesting. Forceful action, unlike the clarity of light which comes, the forceful action requires from a mental point of view to be able to powerfully direct your thoughts for a purpose. And on a physical level similarly when you do an act, when you take up a project, you can often make out if they have what it takes to go through. And it is this character which you experience. And it is a power in the mental body and equally has its corresponding physical grade. But the journey is not yet over. The substance undergoes further refinement. In the Vidyut again is involved the Ojas, the Prana Shakti, the primal energy which proceeds from Ether. So interestingly now, he has taken you through from the water level to the fire, Tapas level and into the electric, it's the domain of the Vayu, the wind substance and then now into the Etheric substance. So, this is the finest grade you can have as a substance. So the energy of life force and the primal energy, he says, the retas refining from jala to tapas, tejas and vidyut and from vidyut to ojas, fills the system with physical strength, energy and brain power and then in its last form of ojas rises to the brain and informs it with the primal energy which is the most refined form of matter and nearest to spirit. It is ojas that creates a spiritual force or veerya by which a man attains to spiritual knowledge, spiritual love and faith, spiritual strength. It follows that the more we can by brahmacharya increase the store of tapas, tejas, vidyut and ojas, the more we shall fill ourselves with utter energy for the works of the body, heart, mind and spirit. Now he is giving you the full spectrum. Body, heart, mind and spirit, all these are nourished from what begins as physical substance. And he gives to it a value that it allows you to bring spiritual force, spiritual knowledge, spiritual love and faith, spiritual strength. Now this is a huge statement to say that it has so much spiritual potency and that's the reason why in most yogic systems which work to develop these intensities for the spiritual action, the conservation of the energy is very important.
Now having said that, I want to go into this in some more detail because Sri Aurobindo gives the broad framework, does not return to it subsequently. But I want to give more detail because practically what does it mean? What does it give to you? What happens when you lose it? And how can you refill by other means? Because it is possible to refill top down even as it is possible to refill bottom up. So these are all massive implications for us in our spiritual practice even otherwise in our normal life. So first thing you see in the body when a person is not expending sexually and the material begins to gather, you find it goes through several stages of build up. It comes up and it grows into a certain intensity and if the person is not careful, that's around the time when he will feel a sexual urge rising. If he is able to hold off, it passes and then now the material builds to now the next level and again about a week down, it builds into sexual urge, if he holds it passes and builds to the next level and so on according to certain traditions in the Ayurvedic tradition there is this idea that the full transmutation of the substance to its highest grade of Ojas it takes about 42 days. It's interesting that I saw this same idea in certain practices in Japan. I was with a group that was a Buddhist practising group and for their higher priest community, they used to have, most of them were married by the way, but for their training they used to have a program in which they would be in isolation, they would have to be celibate during that period, they would go through certain practices but for 42 days. At the end of which they reach a certain new level of breakthrough in their consciousness. But the idea that the gradations go through degrees and at each degree of transmutation before it transmutes there is the instinctive urge to throw it out. If you withhold, then you go into the next grade and so on.
Narad (00:52:53):
Last time we discussed the coitus interruptus, left hand tantra. Does it spill out even when there is no ejection?
Sraddhalu (00:53:02):
Yes, if you recall Sri Aurobindo says that even it has to be, it can be thrown out in its gross form, but in thought also in subtle form. And because the material is so subtle, it is already energising a vital body and mental body so it's easy to spill it out on that level. Though its biggest spill is when you throw it out physically because then the grades of transmutation do not have the basis anymore, they very quickly lapse. So what happens then physically, biologically we notice there is a heightening of all the senses. So anybody who's been celibate for a few weeks, you'll find after a while all the senses begin to become more intense, more bright, more clear. The sense of joy in the body, sensations and the body's being increases up to a point. That's the time when also to enter into a sexual act is most pleasurable because all your senses are heightened. Once you have passed through the act everything rapidly dulls down within a few days. During the act it seems to be bright so when people look at it they think oh the act gave me that brightness. No, the act was when you spilt out that brightness and you enjoyed it so to say in an exaggerated form and then what you spilt out was lost, your system rapidly declined. In these very things which increased, all your senses become dull, your taste faculties, your sight, everything slightly dims. Now when you're very young, because your vitality is still high, the variation is not so obvious, but with age it becomes much more obvious. But what you do notice, when there is excessive expenditure, then the down is quite strong. And one of the forms the down takes is you feel not only depleted, but you feel unhappy, you feel even depressed. People don't realize that this follows the high of the sexual act.
So you will often see people who are on, if you go to these places where couples go for their honeymoon, you will see because of the way they are dressed up, you will see that they are recently married, but they are having lots of problems. And it's not about the sex, it's certainly they have been depleted, and they are feeling low, they are feeling unhappy and they don't know why. Because marriage was supposed to be this happiness now for the rest of your life, and you just lost it, and you don't know why. So, one of the things which does happen, many people experience a huge fall emotionally. And they don't have in themselves the energy to sustain the joy or the brightness of an inner sense of joy or heightening of the sense of joie de vivre, joy of life. This is rebuilt with the celibacy again. Again it reaches a point you can spill it out or you can allow it to transmute further. There are those in whom there is so much that they don't experience a down for long. They regenerate much more quickly. But they have often very strong vitality, strong bodies and so on. That's not the case for everybody. The more mental types who are not physically rooted, they experience the loss much more strongly. This is the reason why you will see, if you go into the higher grades of universities, the types who get to that level are not often with very strong physical vitality. They are strong in their mental energy but because it is also easily lost if there are strong sexual urges, they don't seem to have much of a sexual life or what they have is very superficial. And it is interesting in America, if you go back 50 years, you had many more Americans, white Americans who were in the universities and as the sexual promiscuity became normal in college or school days, the number of Americans entering the higher universities is less. Instead you have more of the Indians and the Chinese who are growing up with a greater base of celibacy at least during student days. And so these are the types filling in those gaps for this reason. Because they have not allowed their higher faculties of mind to fully grow enough that they could fully bloom into those possibilities.
Having said this, there is something important also. Not only the emotions rise, but there is also a certain brightness of mind which grows where if you take a difficult text like Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine, you will read it and you'll understand it much more easily if you have this higher grade of energy and if this energy dulls then you will read it and you'll struggle. If you observe carefully what happens is as you're reading a sentence and it's a long sentence going across 5-6 lines or sometimes the whole page. Your mind is retaining the sense of the early part of the sentence as you read. It's accumulating the full concept but you don't have energy to retain the early parts, it fades when you don't have this high grade of substance. When the higher light is not there, you lose and you need to go back and re-read. And again you go back and re-read because you could not hold the full. In the studies we find, in the mind, typically they say the mind has a buffer of 7 words. So if you are reading a sentence, as you cross beyond the 7th word, you lose the remembrance of the exact word before and so you always need to read in snippets of 7 or you hold at best a concept. And this is the reason why most of modern writing, especially coming from the youth which is sexually depleted, has short sentences, does not have richness of vocabulary, they don't like to read difficult books, they cannot write long and complex structured sentences because everything has been dulled down in the mental faculties. If instead we had built in this higher mental energy, you find you don't have a limit of seven words. You have a much larger buffer. You can hold in effortless memory a much larger content.
Now I want to end with one example of this. Kapali Shastriyar was sitting at his home with a visitor, I believe from Chennai, and they were discussing certain things and the issue came up of the higher faculties of the mind and the man was asking Shastriyar, well what is this Medha which is one of the powers of the mind to have extraordinary memory and extraordinary power and Shastriyar waited and within a few minutes Panditji had gone for a walk on the beach road and he came back. So during that walk, in those days there was a public radio, so there would be a public announcement where the radio would play and the radio would start typically, 'this is all India radio, the news read by XYZ' and then. So Panditji had just come from a walk where the radio had been playing and Shastriyar said, do you want to see an example of Medha? The man said yes. He turned to Panditji and said, Okay, what was on the news today? Can you tell me word to word? And Panditji recited, “this is All India radio, the news read by X” and he recited literally the full content of, or as long as he asked him to continue, of the radio broadcast. Now this was done effortlessly. He was walking, he was not listening particularly, trying to remember. But the mind captures and holds because all of its faculties are lit up, filled with this nourishing light and energy and electricity. I can see why it is so important. In the early phase of student life, in the Indian tradition, it was called the Brahmacharya phase, meaning all the energies contained and directed towards realisation of Brahman or drawing nourishment from Brahman. Once the full formation of your mind and your higher faculties is complete you are now a rounded personality, you enter legitimately into family life, if that is the direction you choose or whatever form it takes. But this idea is so important for the youth today in schools, in colleges, in universities to become conscious that there is a great value to containing the sexual energy. Now, what it means practically may still vary person to person. For some it is important to build this higher faculty of the mind. For some they may not feel the need for it and they may choose to break away at an earlier stage. But to be conscious of the value of this and to make efforts to develop as far as possible all these higher faculties is extremely important. And this should be part of the yogic approach to sex education. In the next discussion I want to touch upon the spiritual implications of this which Sri Aurobindo refers to here. And also the possibility of regenerating this high grade of substance, but from above. And what it means to deplete and regenerate. And this will be an important discussion also.
Narad (01:02:41):
Very good. Namaste.