Celibacy – In Gita Verse 8.11 Persons who are learned in the Vedas, who utter oṁ-kāra, and who are great sages in the renounced order enter into Brahman. Desiring such perfection, one practices celibacy. I shall now briefly explain to you this process by which one may attain salvation.
What Krishna says that a person who has not only studied but practiced in his action the vedas and when he says that who utters oṁ-kāra means with the practice of Vedas who became so silent that oṁ-kāra vibrates from his being.
When Krishna says – Desiring such perfection, one practices celibacy – means Transforming Lust with Awareness gives indescribable Bliss.
Passion creates many things in you. It creates fever, it makes you more unconscious – more unconscious than you already are. It drags you deeper into the mud. And with passion come hatred, illusion and desire – and then you are distracted from your nature. Your nature is poisoned, your innocence is poisoned. You lose all simplicity, all humbleness. Beware of the poisoning by passion. Be warm, be loving – that is a totally different phenomenon – but don’t be full of lust. Warmth is possible with your consciousness.
A Buddha is very warm, Jesus is very warm, very loving. Passion has disappeared. Passion has become transformed into compassion. Their compassion showers on you like flowers. Just as passion poisons you, compassion purifies you. Compassion is nectar if passion is poison.
The energy that is involved in passion can be released into compassion. Try, when you are angry, to be conscious, and you will be surprised – you are in for a great surprise. If you become conscious, anger disappears. And suddenly you have found a key, you have stumbled upon a secret. When sex dominates you and you are full of lust, close your eyes, sit silently and meditate on this energy that is surrounding you, this lust that is surrounding you like a cloud. Just watch it, see it. I am not saying be against it, because if you are against it you have already taken a standpoint.
Now you cannot watch. For watching, the necessary step, the most necessary, is not to take any prejudice, not to conclude beforehand. Just remain silently watchful, neither for nor against. And within minutes you will be surprised that that great storm of lust is over. And when the storm is over, the silence that is left behind is so profound, is so great, such a blessing that you may not have felt it ever.
No sexual experience can give you the beauty that will come if you watch your lust and through watchfulness the lust disappears. Then a silence comes to you which is virgin, which belongs to the beyond, which belongs to the other shore.
What is real celibacy, brahmacharya?
When love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love. Both are easy: it is perfectly easy to go unconscious in sex, to completely forget what is going on, to get intoxicated is easy. To control sex, to force it to stop, to prevent yourself is also easy. But in both you miss. The one who indulges misses; the celibate misses too. The real brahmacharya happens when you stand in the middle between these two, then you are only watching.
Then you will find that sex arises in the body and reverberates in the body; in the mind a shadow briefly falls and departs. You remain standing far away. How can sexual desire be in you? How can any desire be in you? You are nothing but the observer.
Kabir says: Repression is not Brahmacharya.
Repressing your desires and destroying your desires is not the way of celibacy, because if you repress your desires you will remain hung-up with them. Whatsoever is repressed, you have to repress it again and again and again, and whatsoever is repressed, you have to sit on it continuously; otherwise there is fear – if you move somewhere else, it may bubble up again. Repression can never bring freedom. Repression makes you a slave. Repress anything, and that will become your master.
Krishna says that pracing vedas means – Real awareness, which always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither.
The word Brahmacharya simply means living like a god, living with the experience of the Brahma, the absolute, living meditatively.
Also remember – Meditation, Real awareness, brings a kind of celibacy, but not vice versa.
A celibacy without meditation, without awareness is nothing but sexual repression. And your mind will become more and more sexual, so whenever you sit to meditate your mind will become full of fantasies, sexual fantasies.
Tags: Celibacy
