Isn’t the goal of Tantra to merge with another so that you know without a doubt you are one?
Merging is an exquisite experience that reflects truth, and yes, it is the teaching of true Tantra. But sexual activity is not needed for the recognition of non-separation between yourself and everything. The real meaning of Tantra is the recognition that true I is uninterrupted, pure, pristine, untouched consciousness and cannot, in truth, be interrupted by any perception, illusion, or appearance of other.
The problem with the concept of merging is that it presupposes there was, in reality, some separation to begin with. Merging, as sublime as it is, is already one step into the story of separation.
Sex can be beautiful. Touching can be beautiful. But when fulfillment is associated with some cause-and-effect concept of sex or touching, suffering is created. Then the physicality of sex is an obscuration to truth.
Deep longing for intimacy must be realized. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience this longing directly, with no action taken to satiate it. Then the longing can speak. Love can speak to itself.
True intimacy is endless. It has nothing to do even with human beings. It is an intimacy with the whole universe. This is the real meaning of Tantra, the true meaning of Tantra. It is an embrace of the universe with itself in all its horror and all its beauty—in love with that, intimate with that. This is self-love.
I have been confirming my sexuality at a deep level. I am trying to just let it be there and not act it out. You make it sound so easy, but for me it’s so intense.
Yes, it can be very intense.
I’ve been trying to contain it, and there is warfare going on inside me.
The point where it becomes quite easy is when you are actually, directly experiencing it. Yet the approach to that direct experience can seem very difficult because of the deep conditioning to do something with this enormous sexual force.
I have been seeing how much sexual desire is wrapped in my mind, and how much the thoughts whip it up.
You’re referring to fantasy. Some people, after realizing how much the mind is entangled in sex, are no longer interested in sex because they are no longer interested in feeding the mind. This is not true for everyone, of course.
Right! I’ve experienced that here in satsang. I can watch sexual thoughts come, and I can just dissolve them into that spaciousness. I can laugh at them and say, “No, I won’t go for that.”
I read somewhere that one of the qualities Papaji liked about you was your chasteness. For me, this is a first glimpse of what chasteness might be. Chasteness is a state of mind. It means to be open and unsoiled. It is not that sexuality is necessarily unchaste. Although some sexuality is very soiled and distorted, sexuality can also be pure and pristine.
I want to correct one thing you said, though, about dissolving sexual thoughts into spaciousness. You don’t need to dissolve them. If sexual thoughts are not fed, they dissolve effortlessly.
Obviously, an enormous mind-play spins around the dance of sexuality. Sex is where most people experience some kind of bliss, release, silence, or peace. In linking bliss, silence, and peace with the sexual act, a regeneration of struggle, tension, acquisition, and loss also occurs. Many people will say that sex is as good as it gets, and they are quite willing to perpetuate the sensual chase.
In the moment of sexual release, a bodily explosion occurs that cannot be contained, a revelation of nobody, no-thing, a vast peace. This is the end of the searching and the tension. The truth of what always is, is revealed. The problem arises when sexual intimacy is named as the source of this revelation. Sexual intimacy is not necessary for the discovery of the deepest intimacy, the discovery of peace with no cause.
If you are actually more interested in pristine, pure, immaculate peace than in what has been imagined will give you that peace, then as sexuality arises and dissolves, it points you toward that peace.
Sexual repression is another example of distortion in the hope of liberation. If repression worked, the group in India called the Nagas, who cut off their genitals so that they will not have to experience the sexual force, would all be enlightened, but they aren’t. They are eunuchs.
I am not an advocate for repression. However, in our Western culture in particular, we have worshipped sexual power. We have worshipped it, followed it, fed it, bowed to it, and ultimately been enslaved to this sexual tyrant. If you follow sexuality with thought and energy and devotion, you are following a limited god. When limited gods are worshipped, the devotees suffer.
The peace that is revealed in the moment after orgasm—where there is no you, no other, just vast limitless space—is already the truth of who you are. It is always and already present. You can immediately surrender to that vastness with no need of the sexual dance. Then you will not assume that somebody or some act is needed for fulfillment or bliss. All that is needed is to recognize who you already are. Experience that directly, and sexuality takes its rightful place as follower, not leader.
See through the sexual game, and you will recognize the source that sexual energy arises from and dissolves into. Then sexuality is in its rightful place. Then it is possible to be pure, to be chaste. Then it is possible for sex to not cause suffering.
Peace is not about acquiring other sexual experiences or other sexual partners. Peace is about realizing that you are already at peace. You are already fulfilled if you will but recognize the truth. Whether or not you ever have sex again, discover the truth of your nature and you are fulfilled.
People get very afraid of the thought of never having sex again. Liberating this thought cuts the bondage of the belief that without sex your life would be dead or meaningless. If you are bound to sex to provide your life with meaning, then life can be quite meaningless. Discover true meaning in what has no need of anything for its meaning, what has no need of name or form, no need of unnamed or unformed.
The revelation of not needing anything is the truth of your being. You have the potential to realize this for yourself, not just from hearing it said, but from directly discovering it within yourself. Then the tendencies of repressing or indulging no longer have the power to cause re-identification with suffering. They are only powerful prior to direct experience.
Repression is not freedom, but neither is what gets called expression. What gets called expression is usually some kind of childish acting out as a means to acquire pleasure. The treasure is revealed in neither repressing nor acting out. In nonaction, there is no work for the mind. In either repressing or acting out, there are the thoughts I am doing this, I am getting this, I am keeping this, I am avoiding this, I am ignoring this. With no mental movement toward or against, there is no work for the I-thought.
Give the mind no work, and see what remains. See for yourself. Investigate. Experiment. What have you got to lose? You can always go back to worshipping the god of sex. Our culture certainly supports it. Turn on the television, open a magazine, walk down the street, look at men’s, women’s, and even children’s fashions, and you see that sex is worshipped. You can always restimulate the sexual chakra if that is where your interest is. Just as an experiment, why not see what is deeper than that. See what has always been chaste, has always been pure, what cannot be defiled.
I spend a lot of my energy in the area of lust and the preoccupation with lust. I am also a gay man, and I have a lot of trouble with my sexuality and feeling good about myself.
Don’t even identify yourself as a man, much less a gay man. When a man recognizes he is not a man, this recognition is liberation.
In identification as a male body with particular hormones coursing through it, and with the onslaught of our cultural conditioning and stimulation, the usual course of action is to either hate or be devoted to that identification.
This holds true for any gender or any form of sexuality. Identification is the distraction. Come back to the beginning, before you were told, and before you believed, I am a man. When you roll back all your thought processes to before you even identified yourself as a person, what distraction do you find there?
There is no distraction.
Yes! And this is present every moment. Everything that follows is what you and your ancestors before you believed, read, or have been told. It gets factored into the DNA, and identification becomes the preprogrammed, usual course of action.
You are pure, undifferentiated consciousness. All name and form and sub-name and sub-form are secondary and ultimately irrelevant to that pure consciousness. If you identify with the secondary and irrelevant, there must be some suffering, because it is false identification. When you identify with the source of everything, there is no distraction with the false. The source is present every moment because it is unborn and therefore not subject to death.
Source has been named eternity or God or truth. Whatever names your culture has tried to put on it, eternal truth is untouched by any name. It is before name. You are that which is before name. Recognize yourself as who you are, and see that no seductive identification can give you that. Self-recognition of source is joy beyond belief. This recognition makes pleasure, sexual or otherwise, pale in comparison. There is nothing wrong with pleasure, but it simply does not touch the joy of realizing the source.
Now, with your attention on the fullness of source, before any distraction, see if anything is lacking here, if anything is needed.
Nothing is needed.
This revelation stops the momentum of all past desires. It is the sweetest irony. When you are willing to die to all distractions of desire, fulfillment is revealed.
Continue to discover what is before the first identification.
I have been accused of sinning because of my sexual actions. What is sin? Does it exist?
Sin means mistake, dire mistake. The original sin is the mistake that you are separate from God. All sins come from the original sin. In the play of the mind, there is horrible sinning. There is perpetuation of harm and suffering. In following the perception of separation as reality, fear, grasping, greed, and lust arise. When these are thwarted, hatred and rage arise. Sex often plays a major role in this familiar tragedy.
My sin was fornication.
If it causes suffering for yourself or others, then yes, it is a sin; it is a mistake.
Sometimes people take freedom to mean free license for the physical body. While there can be an experience of relative freedom for the body in terms of physical circumstance, there is no possibility of absolute freedom for the physical body. Stop searching for everlasting freedom with the body. The forces of nature imprison the physical body. There is no way out. The emotional body is imprisoned in feelings of “me, me, me.” The mental body is imprisoned in thoughts of “Why? Why? Why?” True freedom is not about freedom of body, mind, or emotion. It is about recognizing what is beyond and untouched by body, mind, and emotion.
If you are no longer identified with the body needing its freedoms, or the emotions needing their freedoms, or the mind needing its freedoms, then you realize absolute, everlasting freedom.
Recently, I have been trying to discover all the ways in which I get pulled away from what I really want. I have a woman’s body, and she wants sex, she wants love, she wants chocolate, or whatever distraction. Observing all of this has brought an immediate recognition of how all things just come and go, all kinds of sensual pleasures, and so I have turned it all back in, asking, “What do I really want?” I want to feel bliss, love, joy, and a remembering that this is already here. It’s really beautiful because then there are still all the joys of sensual life but without the disappointment of being pulled away.
I would just make one caution. When you say “the joys of sensual life,” you designate sensual pleasure as the cause for joy. Causeless joy is within you, whether there is sensual stimulation or not. As long as you have any misunderstanding that joy is outside you in some object, then there is identification with body and sensuality and the outward activity of the mind. When you recognize that joy is within, untouched by anything, then you also realize that true joy has no need of sensual pleasure, and the mind ceases its outward activity.
All objects begin and end, and in that, there is usually some disappointment because they can’t be maintained.
The disappointment arises when they are given the title “That’s Where My Joy Is,” because this is a lie.
When I follow peace and bliss and feel calm within, suddenly a vibration starts in my whole being, and it is as if I’m walking around in an orgasmic experience that doesn’t end.
You recognize that what you want is here already. You recognize the futility in these habits of reaching for “it” out there in some object or some different activity. This recognition is maturity.
In certain lifetimes, sensual passions are very strong. Genetically, culturally, there may be very strong identification with passions. It is wonderful in a lifetime when this strength of passion is turned to passion for truth. Then there can be an ever-deepening realization of truth.
In the recognition of true passion, sexual neurosis is obliterated by sacred gratitude.
I’m finding that sex just doesn’t do it anymore. It doesn’t take me to that peaceful place where I’m feeling satisfied and happy. In fact, nothing’s doing it anymore.
Excellent. Now you don’t even have hope.
Sleep also doesn’t do it anymore.
As you say, nothing does it.
Isn’t there something that does it? I would pay any price for this.
Will you really pay any price? Because this is what it finally leads to. What price is willing to be paid?
My search has led me this far.
Sex led you so far. Sleep led you so far. Whatever else you had thought “did it” for you led you so far.
So where do I go from here?
What if you stop? What if you don’t reach for another experience? What if you are actually still? Not still so that you will get something—stillness to get something is not stillness. Really stop. Give up hope.
I am not asking that you pick up hopelessness in place of hope. Hopelessness is just the other side of hope. Give it all up. Are you willing to pay that price? I know your stories of what has brought you here so far, but now you are here, and here is too subtle for any vehicle that brought you here. You cannot drive any vehicle into here, however well it has served you. It is too gross.
You must be willing to pay everything. Give up your defeats. Give up your victories. Give up your worthlessness. Give up your arrogance. Give up your non-importance. Give up your importance. Give up what you know, and give up what you don’t know. This is the price required.
How?
By not picking any of it up, and if you pick any of it up, drop it immediately. Recognize that what you are giving up is only the poison of false identification.
That brings up a lot of fear inside.
Now that the protective barrier has been crushed, fear is revealed.
Where is the fear? Where do you perceive it?
From the core of the fear in your gut, see the reality of this fear. Not honoring where you imagine it to be, not honoring its boundary, not honoring its story—give up that honoring. Go into the core of this and see what it really is.
What do you find?
The fear of letting go of everything that I am.
Now you are honoring some story about this fear. Drop that. You have given that up, remember? Don’t take it back. Speak from the core of fear itself. Not some story about fear, not an evaluation of fear, not a definition of fear. Drop deeper than your commentary about fear. This commentary pays obeisance to fear as a god. It keeps fear imagined to be real. It keeps fear experienced as reality.
In other words, don’t intellectualize it so much?
That’s right. Do not intellectualize it at all. In this moment, at least, simply relax. Then you have the capacity to experience this that you have defined, this that you have analyzed, and this that you have been haunted by. I am asking you for one second to stop all mental activity, to be absolutely still. In that stillness, you are at the core of what was previously defined as fear. Since you perceive it somewhere in your belly, put your consciousness into the center of that, into the core of that.
I feel more fear, then the fear starts to go away.
Yes. Then feel even more fear. There must be a willingness to feel what has never been felt. I am not talking about the willingness to dramatize what has never been felt, or intellectualize what has never been felt, but to directly experience what has never been felt, to be willing to experience that more and more.
If I relax and feel what I’m feeling, it’s not so bad.
Not so bad is a good beginning. Now relax even more. Relax completely. Let go of everything. You need do nothing. Discover what is already here, what has always been here in the heart of the fear.
I feel at peace.
Yes. There is peace. You cannot do peace. Nothing can do that for you. Peace just is.
I have been observing that so much of sexual energy is in the mind. Once one relaxes into being, sex does not seem so important. I find this worrying, and maybe it’s just a fear of leaving the past behind.
You fear leaving your identification as a sexual being. Our whole society says that if you leave sex behind, you are nothing, and life is less rich. When you realize that you are already nothing, then yes, sex doesn’t seem so important!
If one acts from a place of no-mind, does sex also happen, or does sex need to be dropped before enlightenment?
Sexual desires arise. Sexual desires cease. If sexual desires arise again, sexual desires cease again. What is the big deal? It is really, inherently, not such a big deal. It has been made a big deal by our society and by our fears that if sex goes, it means the end of joy.
It’s not a question of dropping sex before enlightenment. That would be similar to the idea of dropping hunger or some other natural phenomenon before enlightenment. What must be dropped is false identification. Drop your identification as a sexual being. Return to original being. Then sex as phenomenon is no problem.
Can one be Zorba the Buddha, living totally in the world, enjoying all the pleasures and delights as an enlightened being, or do you perceive this as impossibility?
If you model yourself after anybody, there is big trouble. If you emulate a model, you then have an idea or an image of what enlightenment looks or acts like.
You can model the freedom and the surrender of both Zorba and Buddha, and you can then see how that manifests in this phenomenon you have named yourself. But if you look at the Buddha and think that enlightenment must mean no sex, or if you look at Zorba and think that freedom must mean a certain amount of sex, then you are missing the mark. These models cause the comparisons that feed further mind activity.
What if you do not look anywhere, for any model, and simply be as you are?
Beingness is primary. Sex is secondary. Recognize yourself as this that is primary, and let secondary be secondary. If you are not focused on sex as “should be” or “shouldn’t be,” you will see whether sex is appropriate, or if it is ever appropriate again. Then it is simply clear.
It was a real shock when I once heard you say, “Imagine never having sex again.” I could imagine dying in this instant rather than never having sex again.
Then for you this is dying. Do you see?
If you imagine that your sex is more important than your very life, then you are bound by sexual fixation. I am suggesting that you imagine the opposite polarity. Imagine your worst fear. If imagining that you will never have sex again is worse than death for you, then you have inadvertently stumbled onto the key for your freedom. Now I suggest that you imagine you will never again participate in the sexual act. Imagine yourself paralyzed, castrated, the sexual act impossible for you.
Imagine that you can never again do what you want to do. See how you have identified your body and your experiences as the source of fulfillment. When the body is identified as the source of fulfillment, then aging, hormonal changes, or whatever debilitating shifts of the body can cause great suffering.
Imagine and experience death—physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually. Imagine your worst fear. Let it come so that you can meet it, so that you can finally realize you are truly and completely fulfilled by the very nature of beingness. You are fulfillment itself. Consciously recognize yourself as this fulfillment.
For some people, sexual desire falls away after realization. For others, sexual desire may arise, but there is no desire to act on it ever again. For still others, sexual desire arises, and there is acting on it.
You cannot formulate the face of an enlightened being. There is no face. It is in the formulation of enlightenment, fulfillment, or even satisfaction that worrying and suffering arise.
See if there is some knot of identification tying the pleasure of sex together with fulfillment. True fulfillment is more profound than any pleasure.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not against sex. I am just simply not for it.
At a time in my life, I too worshipped sex. I understand this phenomenon of our subculture, this offshoot of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reaction to our parents’ generation’s repression of sex and denial of sexual joy.
I too pursued sex. I experienced great, deep pleasure, ecstasy, and merging, and I identified myself as the seeker of that. But through that identification, I also began to recognize, Wait a minute. However many times I experience merging, however many times I play the whole sexual dance, there is something missing here in my search for truth and fulfillment.
In the same way, I searched for myself in being identified as a mother. I searched for myself in being identified as a healer. Each time I had to see that there was something missing. Yes, there were great pleasures in all of those, certainly there was a sense of satisfaction, but there was still yearning that I couldn’t quite satisfy through any activity I knew.
That is when I said, “I want to be free. Whatever it takes, I will give it. Give up my job? ... Okay, job gone. Give up my identification as healer? ... Healer gone. Give up my identification as mother? ... Gone. Give up my identification as sexual being? ... Gone. Give up my identification as this body? ... Gone.”
What is revealed is what cannot be given up—the absolute truth of who you are. The truth that has been here all along, through the experience of being a baby, then a teenager, then an adult, as sexual being, parent, teacher, healer, even a person at all. By giving up all identification whatsoever, true fulfillment, waiting for your discovery all along, is realized, and it is a satisfaction beyond sexual satisfaction, as joyous as that may be. It is the satisfaction of needing nothing, of overflowing fulfillment in itself.