Panth Prem Ko Atpato #1

My beloved Atman!
Misunderstandings arise only around what is essential. About what is futile, there is never any confusion. The more meaningful a thing is, the more misunderstanding it evokes. The reason is simple: whatever is trivial lies within our grasp; whatever is truly significant crosses beyond our understanding — the matter moves ahead of us. Speak of the earth and there is no confusion; speak of the sky and confusion begins. The higher the matter, the more inevitable the mis-understanding. Because we can only catch what is where we are; we can only understand what we can understand. When we try to understand what is beyond us, confusion is born.

Sex lies within man’s understanding; Brahmacharya lies completely outside it. So whatever meaning one gives to Brahmacharya will, in one way or another, be sex-centered. Whatever meaning he gives will be centered on sex — and from there the misunderstanding begins. Brahmacharya has no relation to sex — none at all. Yes, as a result of Brahmacharya, effects certainly appear in the realm of sex.

Two things must be understood. First: in the mind of man — not only man, in the mind of all creatures; perhaps not only creatures, but in plants, trees, vegetation as well — whatever is known as pleasure is bound up with sex. And naturally, to whatever pleasure is bound, there pain is bound too. So the highest fantasy and longing for pleasure is centered in sex — and so is the deepest sorrow.

Whenever a greater bliss is spoken of, our measuring rod is the pleasure of sex; we weigh with that. It has even come into our heads that those who attain that Bliss find sex disappearing from their lives altogether. Our only measure for supreme pleasure, for Ananda, for Moksha — call it what you will — is to imagine it as the pleasure of endless, endless copulations. Scriptures even say such things — that there is the joy of infinite copulations!

So we measure as we can. If someone speaks to us of Moksha, of Ananda, of Brahman, by what shall we measure? Our only measurement is the pleasure we have known — and we multiply that. Just as a frog of the well, when told of the ocean, will measure by the well: How big is your ocean? Twice my well? Ten times? Fifty times? Tell that frog the well is no measure for the ocean, and he will disbelieve you: Such a thing cannot be! However vast it may be, it must be measurable by the well. For the largest thing in his world is bounded by the well. So the little trickles of pleasure known to our minds are all related to sex.

Hence, whenever there is talk of Moksha, of Brahman, of Ananda, if we probe the mind, we will find ourselves multiplying the pleasure of sex: more, yet more; many times more; infinitely more — but still, that. Yet with sex there is also pain; after every peak of pleasure the abyss of pain is inevitable. As mountains come with valleys — a mountain cannot rise without creating a valley — so with every pleasure its valley of sorrow is bound. When pleasure climbs to a peak, immediately a trough is formed alongside. And one cannot remain in an extreme for long; when you return, you fall into the hollow.

So sex carries pleasure, and sex carries sorrow. Therefore when someone speaks to us of supreme bliss, we employ a device: we multiply the pleasure of sex infinitely, and we cut off the pain entirely — there, there is no sorrow at all.

This is our natural capacity. Further, we have also observed that a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna, a Christ — those who speak of this Bliss — in their lives sex is altogether absent. So a second notion joins itself to our minds: if sex disappears, this Bliss may be attained. From here the confusion starts. We set about suppressing sex; cutting it off; erasing it.

Our entire confused idea of Brahmacharya has become sex-repression. Its meaning has become: push it down, erase it, cut it off, finish it. For we have seen that in the lives where that Bliss happened, sex was absent. So if we create that absence, Brahmacharya will arrive. This is faulty logic. In truth, when that Bliss descends, the pleasure of sex falls away — not because sex is to be cut, but because such supreme joy is found that who will bother with a well when one has found the ocean? If the frog arrives in the ocean and refuses to return to the well, it is not that he is renouncing the well; he cannot renounce the ocean — therefore he does not go back to the well.

This must be understood well. But the frogs of the well will say: He has renounced the well. If we renounce the well, we too will reach the ocean. Reaching the ocean, the well is naturally left — there is no point in returning. But by leaving the well, the ocean is not attained. It may happen that, having abandoned the well, you only writhe upon the hot stones, and nothing else. The well is lost — and the ocean is not found. Simply being outside the well is not the ocean. Once outside, the well’s water will certainly be lost. Thus sex, in our minds, is indulgence — and Brahmacharya is renunciation. This is mistaken.

In my vision, Brahmacharya is supreme enjoyment; and when supreme enjoyment comes, ordinary indulgence falls away. The misunderstanding arises because Brahmacharya has been made into renunciation — leave the well. The frog leaves the well and stands outside, but there the noon scorches. Tapascharya happens; austerity burns. His very being thirsts for the well. Every fiber cries, “Let us go back!” Yet in the hope, in the greed, that whoever attains the ocean must leave the well, he endures this suffering — writhing upon the parapet of the well, eyes shut, crying, dying of thirst, yet enduring in the hope that leaving the well will bring the ocean.

So what we take to be Brahmacharya is only sex-repression — standing forcibly outside the well of sex. Therefore the life of those who repress sex will wither from every side — empty, vacant, inert. Your so-called celibates have contributed nothing to the world. Their contribution is only this: they are writhing outside the well. And the other frogs, who cannot even do that much, fold their hands and touch their feet. Because of these bowing frogs, the ones outside cannot even jump back into the well. Honor, respect, sannyas, renunciation, tapas, austerity — all this becomes an obstacle. The well they cannot re-enter; the ocean is nowhere in sight. You cannot imagine their restlessness.

When sannyasins speak intimately with me, their restlessness is immense. Their only solace is that you honor them. The day you pull that solace away, you will see them all back in the well.

In my view, Brahmacharya is not a negative — not “leave sex,” not “suppress sex.” For me, Brahmacharya is the search for a greater bliss. And for that, nothing need be left. Yes, upon its arrival, much falls away. I always see it thus: if great wealth comes to you, small wealth is let go. Even space must be made! Your hands are filled with pebbles and you come upon a mine of diamonds — then your hands must be free. In that moment you won’t even know when the pebbles slipped away; the hands will open and the diamonds will be held. You will only know that your hands have closed around diamonds; you will not even know when the pebbles were dropped — no inner line will be drawn, no date noted. They will have fallen.

Therefore I call Brahmacharya a by-product of Samadhi. The quest for Samadhi is the essential thing. The quest for meditation is the essential thing. As meditation deepens, your descent into the ocean will begin. As you enter the ocean of Ananda, the longing for pleasure will thin — it belongs only to a sorrowful mind. It will wither. One day, when you are drowned in the ocean of bliss, if someone says: You have performed a great act — you left the well, you will simply laugh: I do not even know when the well was left. And you will say: The great act is yours — you remain in the well even though the ocean is so near. I am not doing a great thing. The great act is to stay in the well when the ocean is close and you could be in it, yet you choose the well.

So there are two kinds of people around us: those who lie in the well — deprived of the ocean, sunk in the well; and those who have left the well and stand outside — deprived of both the ocean and the well! Their pain is unbearable. We make their pain bearable — by honor, welcome, respect.

For me… therefore I do not speak separately of Brahmacharya at all. And the very word “Brahmacharya” says it has nothing to do with sex. It means: the conduct of Brahman, God-like behavior. The word carries no reference to sex. It says nothing of it. Brahmacharya means the way of those who have attained Brahman — who have experienced that supreme ocean, and because of that experience their thirst for droplets has fallen away. The question of one drop here and one drop there no longer remains; there is no accounting of drops.

I do not call such people renouncers; I call them supreme enjoyers. For there is no enjoyment greater than Brahmacharya; and none more a bhogi than the Paramatman. Conduct like His means: where only bliss remains, where from every edge and doorway bliss begins to rain. Now it rains so much — whom should one beg from, where should one go asking?

A second meaning of Brahmacharya is this: a bliss that arises from oneself. Abrahmacharya means: a pleasure or a bliss that we seek in the other. Sex is, fundamentally, the search for pleasure in the other — inevitably, in another person. Brahmacharya is the search for bliss within oneself. And the name of that search is meditation.

Hence I do not talk of Brahmacharya at all. My understanding is: let meditation grow, deepen, spread; Brahmacharya will come behind it. And it will come as enjoyment — as supreme enjoyment; not as renunciation. Yes, much will fall away with its coming — but like garbage it will drop. Like dry leaves falling from a tree. Because new leaves have arrived — very green leaves — and space must be made for them. Neither does the tree feel pain that leaves are falling, nor do the leaves know they are falling — they have already dried. And the tree, in the joy of the new leaves’ arrival, is dancing. Why would it keep accounts of dry leaves? They fall, they will fall quietly into the winds — no one will ever know of them.

And if we say to a tree laden with new leaves: You are a great renouncer! You have renounced so many leaves! The roads swirl with the leaves of your renunciation! It will reply: I know nothing of this. I am here, tasting the sap, dancing with the new leaves. Who keeps accounts of the old dry ones! But if leaves fall from a dry tree — where no new leaves come — then it will keep accounts. For after that only a stump will remain. It will count how many have fallen, how many fall each day: so many fasts today; so many in the last monsoon! Every day leaves are falling; nothing new is sprouting. He left the woman, left the home, left the wealth — he will tally each leaf. Nothing new germinates; the stump grows larger, dries more and more, and the leaves keep falling — he keeps throwing them down, and the scars remain.

What we call Brahmacharya is a process of repressed sex. For me, Brahmacharya is God-realization; a developed state. With that realization comes transformation; everything changes. Unless we take Brahmacharya in this sense, we do great injustice to life. Because that wrong kind of Brahmacharya in our minds — prohibition, the negative — has created much filth. Those who leave the well and do not find the ocean, as I said, will go on condemning the well. This is inevitable. They are not condemning for your sake; they are repeating it to persuade their own minds. If they stop condemning for even ten minutes, there is the danger they will jump back into the well. So they will condemn it.

Morning and evening in temple and gurdwara they will explain that the well is filthy. They tell others less than they keep telling themselves, again and again; otherwise the danger of jumping in remains. If they find no listeners, none willing to learn from them — if someone says: Fine, we are happy in our well — you cannot know at what moment they might leap back!

Behind this trick, they go on condemning the well. By condemning, they break their own capacity to jump. You go on giving them honor, and honor satisfies the ego; once the ego is satisfied, to jump becomes difficult. By these two processes, what you might call repressive Brahmacharya survives and thrives. That man becomes distorted — and all those to whom he speaks are also perverted by him. Because while he condemns the well to those who remain in it, they do not reach the ocean; but the well becomes poisoned. Even the simple, cultured, natural way in which they might have lived becomes difficult. For this note of condemnation, sung by the frog perched on the parapet, infiltrates their minds. They cannot leave, and they cannot enjoy — their difficulty becomes immense.

Nietzsche said an extraordinary thing: the so-called religious tried to free people from sex; people were not freed, but sex became poisoned. No one became free of it, but the naturalness of sex became distorted, became ugly. Now a wife knows full well that the husband is a path to hell. If the husband is a road to hell, and the wife is a road to hell — how can the flower of love bloom between them? Impossible. Between one who drags us toward hell and ourselves, no flower of love can bloom. Whatever blooms there will be ugly.

A wife cannot respect her husband; say what you will — that he is God. A husband cannot respect his wife; say what you will — that she is his other half, his dharmapatni. Whatever you say, the attitude toward sex is poisoned; standing between them is the sense that it is sin, hell, sorrow, the root of all sin. And the entire relation of husband and wife is woven around that.

So marriage has become wholly ugly. And those who adopted a negative view of Brahmacharya — who made Brahmacharya into the condemnation of sex — have made it ugly. And those frogs sitting on the parapet of the well have generated a thousand distortions in their own minds — naturally so.

In my view, the definition of Brahmacharya needs to be changed from the roots. Its fundamental meaning remains: the attainment of life’s supreme bliss. Seek supreme bliss — do not speak of leaving. Yes, with the coming of supreme bliss, let fall what falls — it will fall.

And something more: as I said, whoever suppresses the mind or suppresses lust must understand that the very energy that is sex within us is the creative force. The very energy of sex is our creative power. A sex-suppressive community will not be creative; it will produce nothing. Because the energy from which creation happens has been set against creation. And once a people become hostile to sex, their entire morality becomes sex-centered.

If I say today that a certain man is characterless, no one thinks he must be a liar. The immediate thought is that there is some sexual irregularity. No one thinks he may break his word, or be unpunctual, or mix water in milk, or do black marketing, or evade taxes — these do not arise. As soon as we say characterless, the immediate idea is: some sexual fault. Character has become synonymous with sex. Hence there is such characterlessness in India. If a man merely manages not to lift his eyes toward another’s wife — though he may gaze with the mind, think in his heart — if he only manages to pass life with one wife, never allowing a feeling toward another’s wife, then whatever else he may do, he is not characterless.

In the West, or in those lands where character took a broader meaning, not so narrow a one, their morality blossomed in many forms; smaller matters, too, had to be taken into account. For us, one matter suffices: if a man somehow keeps sex out of his life, he becomes a Mahatma; nothing else is required. Enough that he sits somewhere with eyes closed and spends his life avoiding sex — he becomes our supreme object of worship. Strange indeed! How will such a person be creative? He will not.

Thus our morality has not taken the right dimensions. Therefore the rest of immorality runs on unhindered; it arouses no concern in us.

Something more: when we repress our energy, we become afraid to use it anywhere — anywhere. And all creation happens through that same energy. Hence, generally, a great painter, a great sculptor, a musician, a scientist, a philosopher — often, for him, sex becomes nonessential, effortlessly. Without difficulty. Because his creative power is being organized in one direction; there is no strain there. In this world, any man of talent can live naturally without sex — if his talent is focused, he has a current of energy flowing.

And another curious thing: if you create anything, a very deep satisfaction of sex is obtained — for the satisfaction of sex is, at root, the satisfaction of creating. Therefore women, in the world, have not done outer creation, because through giving birth their work is completed; the urge to create otherwise does not arise.

It is very amusing that all creative works belong to men, not to women. Even in cookery, the inventions are of men, not of women; at least there they should have been! But not even there. The deeper reason is that a woman’s capacity to create is fulfilled by giving birth; her creative mind is completed there. And the man? In giving birth, the man is only accidental; he has no long, indispensable role. After a moment, he is out.

For thousands of years there were hundreds of tribes on earth who did not believe that children are born of copulation. It was very difficult to conceive it because the child comes nine months later; to connect cause and effect across nine months arose very late. So the man seemed altogether meaningless; he had no important part. But the woman was indispensable — carrying the child for nine months, nurturing, then raising. In all this her creative mind becomes fulfilled.

What then is the man to do? Adler, who understood this well, said: Men created other things as a substitute, to prove we are not inferior to women. Man felt an inferiority — he could not give birth; woman gives birth, man does not. So he made statues, he built houses, he created the Taj Mahal, he will go to the moon; he will discover science, he will write scriptures. He is answering the woman: We too create. And whoever creates thus finds that the intensity of sex in him diminishes.

Another amusing point: as soon as a woman becomes a mother, her intensity toward sex wanes; then she drags it like a burden. It is no longer pleasant for her. I have known thousands of women intimately in their inner minds; I have not yet found a woman very juicy in sex. Once motherhood dawns, her relish for sex begins to slacken; thereafter she carries it as a burden. Because her creative work is complete — she has brought something into the world.

Those who turned Brahmacharya into the condemnation of sex also closed the doors of creation, and set the whole capacity into inner conflict. What could have been created outwardly was wasted in inner warfare. Therefore in our lands there are millions of sannyasis, for thousands of years. These sannyasis could have achieved such work that the whole world would stand in our debt. We have arranged everything for the sannyasi: no worries, no anxieties; no need to build a house, to run a shop. We have kept millions utterly free. Had they pursued science, had they explored art, our land would have become the most generous giver on earth. But they could do nothing — because you handed them one colossal task: fight sex! That work is so big it consumes their lives. The sannyasi spends all his time fighting the woman — his war is only that, twenty-four hours a day.

A third thing is worth noting: wherever sex is opposed, enmity toward beauty appears. For beauty is deeply related to sex. The aesthetic sense diminishes; when it diminishes, life becomes very drab. The teaching of Brahmacharya in our land has made life terribly dreary. It has created such a state that the more a man makes his life insipid, the more worshipful he becomes! The dirtier and uglier he becomes, the more venerable! If he does not bathe or brush his teeth, he becomes a great sage. If he sits in the latrine and eats there, he becomes a Paramhansa. Our sense of beauty has been stolen.

And note as well: wherever sex is opposed, the appetite to live joyously weakens; a suicidal mind is born. Sex, very deeply, is the forward surge of the infinite life that spreads all around. If enmity toward sex begins, enmity toward life begins; life-negation sets in. Then a burdened and self-destructive tendency arises.

What we call a sannyasi, in my reckoning, is only slow suicide — gradual, bit by bit. He lacks the courage to die at once; he kills himself piecemeal. Then he remains as a dead man. And we devotees around him go on inspecting carefully whether any sign of life remains. Is he taking any relish in food? Ruined — if any relish appears! Any relish in clothing? Any sign of love for life anywhere? Is he laughing too freely with some woman? Finished! We test him from every side.

So our whole society has become an imprisonment: a few prisoners called sannyasis and Mahatmas; and the rest of us are wardens. And when it is established that he takes no relish in life, then we touch his feet. Now it is certain — the man is truly finished!

All this is diseased, generating a very deep sickness. I keep thinking that if religion is to survive in the world, it will have to be life-affirmative — accepting life, and more than accepting, rejoicing in it. A religion that can laugh, dance, love, and celebrate — only that will live. Otherwise, the religion that killed people — all those people together are killing that religion now. It cannot be saved; it has tormented enough, tortured enough.

And so you will be surprised to see: ordinarily ascetics and renouncers are idiots. They lack what we call intelligence. Generally, they are unintelligent — it is a condition, because without dullness it is hard to continue such foolishness. Questions would arise: What are you doing? What is happening? One with a bandage on his mouth; another performing some absurdity. For this, idiocy is needed; a bit of a wooden mind is necessary. If we tested the IQ of our sannyasis, it would come out lower than that of any other group. And they have no need for intelligence; none at all. Intelligence is for doing, for seeking, for creating — and they have none of that to do. They stand like prisoners wrapped in chains of their own making. For that, the barest minimum of intelligence suffices.

This condition should be broken as quickly as possible. I keep thinking — it may be our good fortune — that a new class of sannyasin be created in this land: one who can dance, sing, laugh; who can taste all the flavors of life, and yet be on the pilgrimage toward the experience of supreme bliss. On that pilgrimage there is no conflict, no enmity with this rejoicing.

Such a conception of Brahmacharya — one that includes all and seeks bliss — makes sense to me. The mentality of negation makes no sense at all.