NO REMEDY
Part Two: The Complications of Sadhana
THE WAY OF DIVINE COMMUNION
On Sexuality
(1) The confinement of sexuality to conscious play in
relationship (rather than its spurious indulgence or its
suppression, which, in both cases, is a private,
non-relational, exclusive exercise) creates a condition
under which you may observe and surrender your tendencies
relative to the force of sexuality, even to the force of
life itself
(2) Orgasm is the principle when seeking is pursued in
the form of sexuality. Because the ordinary man lives with a
sense of opposition or separation, interpreting life not as
enjoyment but as obsessive desire, he seeks release. He
looks for a momentary release through the contemplation of a
distraction, a fascination powerful enough to absorb him.
When his search is conducted through the functional path of
sexuality, release is sought through orgasm via fascination
with sexual objects which he (or she) defines and feels in
his own body or that of another. Physically, he distracts
himself in the whole “sex-game-promiscuity” number. He
empties and breaks the circle of energy, by using orgasm to
create the status of relief or emptiness, emptied of the
motivating sense of desire. Sex for the usual man is not
founded in enjoyment but desire. Thus, it attains momentary
emptiness, or release from desire (or release from the
energy sufficient to feel desire, which is pressure created
by contraction), rather than constant or prolonged
enjoyment, whose characteristic is fullness
(3) Dilemma is the sense of obstructed enjoyment or
attenuated happiness. Our reaction to felt dilemma is
desire, the search. And the search is always toward the
attainment of the goal of release from desire itself in a
restored sense of enjoyment. But the enjoyment attained or
acquired by seeking is gotten by emptying, suppressing, or
transcending the life-functions, the mechanism of desire.
Therefore, it is enjoyment of a negative or exclusive kind,
in which Truth is not realized as Consciousness but
identified with some change of state
(4) Celibacy is another way to dramatize this whole
problem of sexuality approached from the point of view of
dilemma. Sexuality represents a problem to most individuals.
Therefore, it is ultimately not enjoyable, not fun, not
intimate and relational, but private and separative, so that
celibacy seems to represent an alternative to both sexuality
and self-indulgence. It is generally assumed as a way of
getting free of sexuality, and it is experienced as a
complex and even neurotic self-confinement, resulting in
separation. No one wants to be celibate. It is natural to be
sexual. But the failure of sexual life and life itself makes
celibacy seem like a real alternative
(5) In addition to celibacy and self-indulgence, there
are all sorts of sophisticated structures of seeking built
around the principle of sexuality. There are all sorts of
schemes for psychiatric and transcendent realization via
sexuality by means of suppression, manipulation, or
sublimation of the sex-force. But for one who is living in
Satsang, which is prior Enjoyment, life has become conscious
enjoyment, and there is no exclusive or fixed attention on
either sexuality or orgasm as remedy. In such a case,
sexuality evens out, and naturally falls into a condition
which is enjoyable, natural, and simple, without
self-consciousness. Ultimately, in the maturing devotee,
sexuality becomes a “yoga,” a form of conscious
conductivity, a Divine Event. All of this arises naturally,
spontaneously, when attention is drawn into the condition of
relationship itself and is not exclusively fixated on
sexuality or the phenomena of release
(6) For those in the Ashram, seeking via sexuality is as
inappropriate as all other forms of the search. A true
sexual relationship or relational realization of sexuality
will develop over a period of time in its natural,
appropriate form if one is otherwise founded in the true
Principle of sadhana which is Satsang
(7) Masturbation is a solitary activity. It is a
representation in graphic form of the avoidance of
relationship through sexuality, and should not be indulged
but understood as an urge. The compulsive desire comes from
confinement to vital contraction, or vital shock, the living
of obstruction. If there is no contraction, no avoidance,
masturbation is not felt to be a need. Then the conductivity
of life is constant, and the play of sexuality is generated
entirely and only as a play in specific relationship with
another. If as a devotee this implies no orgasms for a year
or more, because no partner has appeared, then merely
understand and surrender the power of this function
(8) No one in the Ashram should indulge the preference
for no-sex and the strategy of celibacy. That is not
necessary for spiritual life. It is only a mechanical or
functional attainment at best and has no necessary
relationship to Truth. The life-process is a structure of
polarization in an order descending and ascending. Each
organism must master its polarization to what is
functionally below it, establish and intensify its
polarization to what is functionally above it, and realize
or maintain its polarization with what is functionally at
its own level. Thus, we must remain sexual beings in
relationship, while at the same time we enjoy true
functional relationship with what is apparently above and
below. This is the law of function. If we abandon it, we at
least become obsolete in the areas wherein we abandon it.
But whether we abandon or realize ourselves in the polarized
(positive-negative, male-female, descending-ascending,
active-passive, etc.) play of functions has nothing whatever
to do with Truth. Truth is not above, below, within, or
without. It is of a radical nature, the process of
Consciousness itself
(9) Sexual beings are polarized to their opposites. Thus,
we have the play of male and female in the form of various
personal and social roles. It is a creative play, and the
roles need not become fixed, but the polarization must
remain if life is to animate the human game. Therefore, in
general, homosexuality must be understood either as an
aberration, like masturbation, in which one turns on oneself
as an object (even ones own pleasure as an object) and so
avoids the complications of polarized behavior, or else as
an attempt to dramatize the role usually enjoyed by ones
natural polar opposite. In the latter case one flees ones
natural polar role because of some trauma or other that
makes ones natural role too frightening or ones natural or
polar opposite too threatening. One may be homosexual in
order to avoid ones enactment of the role of male or female,
or to dramatize the opposite role, or else to avoid sexual
contact with the polar opposite while still experiencing
sexual release through use of the secondary possibilities
offered by a partner of ones own sex
(10) Homosexuality, then, is essentially an aberrated
activity generated because of traumas related to the
fulfillment of natural and polarized sexual roles. It feeds
on vital shock. There may be occasional rare cases in which
an individual is not functionally polarized in the direction
of the natural sexual role to which he or she seems bodily
to be fitted. Such would be the case of one who is
organically developed in such a way as to be inclined toward
the fulfillment of the energy role of the apparently
opposite sex. Others may be so strongly identified with the
functional condition of a subtler and oppositely polarized
state (in some dimension above, such as the etheric) that
they tend to take on mannerisms and the qualities and urges
of the opposite role on the gross physical level. Thus,
there are rare cases of genuine homosexuality, in which the
natural polarization of sexual play is engaged but by
individuals of the same apparent sex, or of the opposite sex
(but the roles played by each may be the apparent opposite
of their visible gender)
(11) Nevertheless, it is not suggested that homosexuals
in the Ashram abandon their sexual life, since homosexuality
does not represent any greater obstruction to a harmonious
and functional life than the ordinary narcissistic sexuality
of heterosexuals. But the same discipline is given to all.
The homosexual must begin to surrender the urges and
resistances represented by his or her sexuality in a
relationship with a single partner, based upon the same
conditions as are described for a heterosexual
relationship
(12) In general, the urge to homosexuality should be
simply understood, like masturbation, and the self-degrading
or weakening fear at its core undone, so that the play of
sexuality may be released into its natural form of
polarity
(13) Our human realization requires passage through the
discipline of psycho-physical polarization, and, therefore,
it also requires sexual mastery in the form of sexual
fulfillment. One who does sadhana under the conditions of
his sexuality and essentially polarized functional nature
discovers that even sexuality is self-transcending. Union is
equanimity (not stasis, emptiness, solidity, rigidity, or
immobility, but resonance, harmony, and intensity). Such
equanimity is the meaning of the traditional term “samadhi.”
The orgasm, like any other specific attainment, is at best
temporary realization of fulfillment or equanimity (whereas,
in general, it is usually only the experience of temporary
stasis, emptiness, or non-desire). But one who is sensitive
to his own process of existence sees that equanimity, or
union, is his condition always and already. Equanimity is
not the condition realized upon release or the fulfillment
of a desire. Rather, it is the prior condition of all
relationship. It is the quality of enjoyment or happiness
itself
(14) Some exercise themselves sexually, according to the
principle of desire (search in dilemma), in order to attain
samadhi, or equanimity, or union. Therefore, they make the
way of self-exploitation and orgasm appear to be a way to
God (just as others make the way of non-self-exploitation
and sexual sublimation or retention of sex-force appear to
be a way to God). But it is clear in the case of real
understanding that samadhi, equanimity, or union is the very
and prior condition of all relationship. Therefore, samadhi,
equanimity, or union is not attained. It is not grasped by
manipulation of any functional energy or process, high or
low. Rather, it is realized to be always, already,
radically, and thus presently the case. Relationship itself
is the union. Existence itself is enjoyment or conscious and
unqualified happiness. Such is the knowledge of one who
understands, and in this understanding he is free of
dilemma, vital shock, seeking, the whole force of dramatized
desire, and the distractions of every kind of goal, high or
low.
(15) As long as vital shock, dilemma, and the theatre of
separate and separative self, mind, and desire remain as the
motivating core of an individuals life, he is expected to do
sadhana under conditions that serve the conscious process in
his own case. Therefore, devotees in the Ashram are expected
to maintain themselves sexually within the framework of an
essentially conventional and single heterosexual or, if need
be, homosexual relationship. All other forms of sexual play
would be, fundamentally, a dramatization in them, preventing
self-observation, insight, and conscious understanding
(16) It is only in the perfect devotee that it has become
clear that the realization of polarized life is not orgasm
(release and stasis or emptiness) but enjoyment (unqualified
relationship, equanimity, or unreasonable happiness).
Therefore, the perfect devotee may play the polarized and
even sexual game of human life with humor and in freedom.
And he does this without manipulating sex itself,
suppressing it in order to attain Truth (as release) or
exploiting it in order to attain release (as Truth). What is
either exploited or suppressed ceases to be a seat of
consciousness, and so it reappears in other or renewed
forms. Such is the karmic principle of rebirth. But what is
known in Truth becomes itself Divine (non-karmic) and no
longer binds. Such is the Principle of the human freedom of
the man of understanding.
