“Sensuality”: why do you feel sensual, sexual? You feel sexual because you accumulate energy, unused energy, and you don’t know what to do with it. So, naturally, at the first center of sex, it accumulates. And you don’t know any other centers, and you don’t know how it can flow upwards.
It is like you have got an airplane, but you don’t know what it is so you search into it, and then you think, “It has wheels, so must be a sort of vehicle.” So you yoke horses to it and use it as a bullock cart. It can be used. Then someday, by accident, you discover that bullocks are not needed. It has a certain engine in it, so you use it as a motor car. Then you go deeper and deeper in search. Then you wonder why these wings? Then one day you use it as it should be used – as an airplane.
When you move inside you, you discover many things. But if you don’t move, then there is only sexuality. You gather energy, then what to do with it? You don’t know anything that you can fly upwards. You become a bullock cart: sex is behaving like a bullock cart. You gather energy. You eat food, you drink water, energy is created, energy is there; if you don’t use it, you will go mad. Then the energy goes round and round within you. It makes you crazy. You have to do something. If you don’t do something, you will go crazy; you will explode. Sex is the easiest safety valve – energy moves back into nature.
This is foolish because the energy comes from nature. You eat food: it is eating nature. You drink water; it is drinking nature. You take a sunbath; it is eating sun. Continuously, you are eating nature, and then you throw it out back to nature. The whole thing seems to be baseless, useless, with no meaning. What is the use of it? Then you become lethargic.
The energy must go higher. You must become a transformer: through you nature must become supernature; only then there is meaning, significance. Through you matter must become mind; mind must become supermind. Through you nature must reach to the supernature: the lowest must become the highest. Only then there is a significance – a felt significance.
Then your life has a deep, deep significance. You are not worthless; you are not like dirt. You are a god. When you have moved through; you the nature to – the super-nature, you have become a god. Patanjali is a god. You become a Master of Masters.
But, ordinarily, sensuality means that energy gathers, and you have to throw it out. You don’t know what to do with it. First you gather it: first you go on seeking for food; doing much effort to earn bread. Then you absorb the bread and create energy, because sex energy is the most refined energy in your body, the most refined. And then you throw it out, and then you again go in the circle.
It is a vicious circle. When you throw it out, the body needs energy. You eat, collect, throw: how can you feel that you have some meaning? You seem to be in a rut leading nowhere. How will Aum help? How meditating on it will help? Once you start meditating on Aum, other centers start functioning.
When the energy flows, inside you becomes a circle. Then sex center is not the only center which is functioning. Your whole body becomes a circle. From the sex center it rises to the second, to the third, fourth, fifth, seventh center; then again sixth, fifth, fourth, third, second, first. It becomes an inner circle and it passes other centers.
Just because energy is accumulated, it rises high: the level of energy goes high, just like a dam: the water goes on coming from the river, and the dam is not allowing it to go out. The water rises high, and other centers, other chakras in your body, start opening – because when the energy flows, they become dynamic forces, dynamos. They start functioning.
It is as if a waterfall and a dynamo start functioning; the waterfall is dry and the dynamo cannot start. When the energy flows upwards, your highest chakras start working, functioning. This is how Aum helps. It makes you calm, collected, one. Energy rises high; sensuality disappears. Sex becomes meaningless, childish, not yet gone, but becomes childish. You don’t feel sensual; you don’t have an urge for it.
It is still there. If you are not careful, it will take your grip again. You can fall, because this is not the ultimate happening. You are not yet crystalized but a glimpse has happened that the energy can give you inner ecstatic states. And sex is the lowest ecstasy. Higher ecstasies are possible. When the higher becomes possible, the lower disappears automatically. You need not renounce it. If you renounce, then your energy is not moving high. If the energy is moving high, there is no need to renounce. It simply becomes useless. It simply drops by itself. Non-functioning it becomes delusion.
As you are, psychoanalysts say that if you stop dreaming you will go mad. Dreams are needed because in your state of mind delusions are needed. Delusions, deceptions, illusions, dreams are needed because you are sleepy, and in sleep, dreams are a necessity.
They have been experimenting in America, that if you are not allowed for seven days to dream, immediately you start a delusion trip: with open eyes you start seeing things which are not. You start talking to persons which are not, you start seeing visions. You are mad. Just seven days of no dreaming, and you become delusionary. Hallucinations start happening. Your dreams are a catharsis – an inbuilt catharsis, so every night you delude yourself. By the morning you are a little sober, but by the evening again you have gathered much energy. In the night you have to dream and throw it out.
This happens to drivers, and many accidents happen because of this. In the night, accidents happen near about four, four o’clock in the morning, because the driver has been driving the whole night. He has not been dreaming; now the dream energy accumulates. And with open eyes he is driving and he starts seeing illusions. “The road is straight,” he says. “There is nobody: no truck is coming.” With open eyes he goes into a truck. Or he sees a truck coming, and just to avoid it – and there was no truck – just to avoid it, he crashes against a tree.
Much research has been done into why so many accidents happen nearabout four. In fact, nearabout four, you dream too much. Four to five, six, you dream too much. That is dream time. You have slept well; now there is no need for sleep, you can dream. In the morning you dream, and that time if you don’t dream, are not allowed to dream you will create delusions. You will dream with open eyes.
Delusion means dreaming with open eyes, but everybody is dreaming that way. You see a woman and you think she is absolutely beautiful. That may not be the case. You may be projecting an illusion on her. You may be sexually starved. Then energy is there and you delude. After two days, three days, the woman looks ordinary. You think you have been deceived. Nobody is deceiving you; you yourself… But you deluded. Lovers delude each other. They dream with open eyes and then they are frustrated. Nobody is at fault, just your state.
Patanjali says delusion will disappear if you chant Aum with mindfulness. How it will happen? – Because delusion means a dreaming state, when you are lost. You are no more there: just the dream is there. If you meditate on Aum, you have created the sound of Aum and you are a witness, you are there. Your presence cannot allow any dream to happen. Whenever you are, there is no dream. Whenever there is a dream, you are not. You both cannot be together. If you are there, the dream will disappear. Or, you will have to disappear. Both together cannot be. Dream and awareness never meet. That’s why delusion disappears by witnessing the sound of Aum.
“Impotency”: impotency, is also there, continuously felt. You feel yourself helpless: that is, impotency. You feel you cannot do anything, you are worthless, of no use. You may pretend that you are somebody, but your pretension also shows that deep down you feel the nobodiness. You may pretend that you are very powerful, but your pretension is nothing but hiding.
Mulla Nasrudin entered a tavern with a sheet of paper in his hand and declared, “Here are the names of the people I can lick,” – hundred names. One man stood up: he was a tiny man; Mulla could have licked him. But he had two pistols around his belt. He came near with a pistol in his hand and he said, “Is my name also there?”
Mulla looked at him and said, “Yes.” The man said, “You cannot lick me.” Mulla said, “Are you sure?” The man said, “Absolutely sure. Look.” And he showed the pistol. Mulla said, “Then okay. I will cut your name out of the list.”
You can pretend that you are very powerful, but whenever you come in an encounter you start feeling the helplessness and the powerlessness. Man is impotent because only the whole can be potent – not man. The part cannot be potent. Only God is potent; man is impotent.
When you chant aumkar, Aum, for the first time you feel that you are no more an island. You become one part of the whole universal sound. For the first time you feel yourself potent, but now this potency need not be violent, need not be aggressive. In fact, a powerful man is never aggressive. Only impotent people become aggressive to prove themselves – that we are powerful.
… AND INSTABILITY ARE THE OBSTACLES THAT DISTRACT THE MIND: you start one thing and then stop – on and off – you start again and then off. Nothing is possible with this instability. One has to persevere, to go on digging the hole at the same spot continuously. If you leave your effort, your mind is such that after few days you will have to start from the ABC again; it rewinds itself, it unwinds itself. You do something for a few days, then you leave. You will be thrown back to your first day of doing – again ABC. Then you can do much without achieving anything. Aum will give you a taste.
Why do you start and stop? People come to me and they say they meditated for one year, then they stopped. And I ask them, “How were you feeling?” They say, “Very, very good we were feeling” – but then why did you stop? Nobody stops when somebody is feeling very, very good. And they say “We were very happy and then we stopped.” – it is impossible. If you were happy, how can you stop? Then they say, “Not exactly happy.”
But they are in trouble. They pretend even that they are happy. If you are happy in a certain thing, you continue. You stop only when it is a boring thing, a boredom, unhappiness. With Aum, Patanjali says, you will feel the first taste of dropping into the universal. That taste will become your happiness and instability will go. That’s why he says chanting Aum and witnessing it all obstacles drop.
ANGUISH, DESPAIR, TREMORS AND IRREGULAR BREATHING ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF A DISTRACTED MIND.
These are the symptoms. Anguish: always anxiety-ridden, always split, always an anxious mind, always sad, in despair, subtle tremors in the body energy, because when the body energy is not running in a circle you have subtle tremors, a trembling, fear and irregular breathing. Then your breathing cannot be rhythmic. It cannot be a song; it cannot be a harmony. An irregular breathing…
These are the symptoms of a distracted mind, and against these are the symptoms of a mind who is centered. The chanting of Aum will make you centered. Your breathing will become rhythmic. Your tremors in the body will disappear; you will not be nervous. Sadness will be replaced by a happy feeling, a joy, a subtle blissfulness on your face, for no reason at all. Simply happy you are: just being here you are happy; just breathing you are happy. You don’t demand much, and instead of anguish there will be bliss.
TO REMOVE THESE, MEDITATE ON ONE PRINCIPLE.
These symptoms of a distracted mind can be removed by meditating on one principle. That one principle is pranava-Aum, the universal sound.
Tags: Patanjali Yoga Sutra 9 Sensuality
