Desire—Food—Sex
Page-3
The
whole principle of this Yoga is to give oneself entirely
to the Divine alone and to nobody and nothing else, and
to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother-Power
all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity,
truth-consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine.
In this Yoga, therefore, there can be no place for vital
relations or interchanges with others; any such relation
or interchange immediately ties down the soul to the lower
consciousness and its lower nature, prevents the true and
full union with the Divine and hampers both the ascent to
the supramental Truth-consciousness and the descent of the
supramental Ishwari Shakti. Still worse would it be if this
interchange took the form of a sexual relation or a sexual
enjoyment, even if kept free from any outward act; therefore
these things are absolutely forbidden in the sadhana. It
goes without saying that any physical act of the kind is
not allowed; but also any subtler form is ruled out. It
is only after becoming one with the supramental Divine that
we can find our true spiritual relations with other in the
Divine; in that higher unity this kind of gross lower vital
movement can have no place.
To
master the sex-impulse,— to become so much master of
the sex-center that the sexual energy would be drawn upwards,
not thrown outwards and wasted— it is so indeed that
the force in the seed can be turned into a primal physical
energy supporting all the others, retas into ojas.
But no error can be more perilous than to accept the immixture
of the sexual desire and some kind of subtle satisfaction
of it and look on this as a part of the sadhana. It would
be the most effective way to head straight towards spiritual
downfall and throw into the atmosphere forces that would
block the supramental descent, bringing instead the descent
of adverse vital powers to disseminate disturbance and disaster.
This deviation must be absolutely thrown away, should it
try to occur and expunged from the consciousness, if the
Truth is to be brought down and the work is to be done.
It
is an error too to imagine that, although the physical sexual
action is to be abandoned, yet some inward reproduction
of it is part of the transformation of the sex-center. The
action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for
a particular purpose in the economy of the material creation
in the Ignorance. But the vital excitement that accompanies
it makes the most favourable opportunity and vibration in
the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces
and beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent
of the supramental Light. The pleasure attached to it is
a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda.
The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality
and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence,
its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with
the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love,
when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross
lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only
repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from
which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into
the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can
transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through
which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic
being, and cast away the lower vital error.
The
transformation of the sex-center and its energy is needed
for the physical siddhi; for this is the support in the
body of all the mental, vital and physical forces of the
nature. It has to be changed into a mass and a movement
of intimate Light, creative Power, pure divine Ananda. It
is only the bringing down of the supramental Light, Power
and Bliss into the center that can change it. As to the
working afterwards, it is the supramental Truth and the
creative vision and will of the Divine Mother that will
determine it. But it will be a working of the conscious
Truth, not of the Darkness and Ignorance to which sexual
desire and enjoyment belong; it will be a power of preservation
and free desireless radiation of the life-forces and not
of their throwing out and waste. Avoid the imagination that
the supramental life will be only a heightened satisfaction
of the desires of the vital and the body; nothing can be
a greater obstacle to the truth in its descent than this
hope of glorification of the animal in the human nature.
Mind wants the supramental state to be a confirmation of
its own cherished ideas and preconceptions; the vital wants
it to be a glorification of its own desires; the physical
wants it to be a rich prolongation of its own comforts and
pleasures and habits. If it were to be that, it would be
only an exaggerated and highly magnified consummation of
the animal and the human nature, not a transition from the
human into the Divine.
It
is dangerous to think of giving up "all barrier of
discrimination and defence against what is trying to descend"
upon you. Have you thought what this would mean if what
is descending is something not in consonance with the divine
Truth, perhaps even adverse? An adverse Power would ask
no better condition for getting control over the seeker.
It is only the Mother's force and the divine Truth that
one should admit without barriers. And even there one must
keep the power of discernment in order to detect anything
false and comes masquerading as the Mother's force and the
divine Truth, and keep too the power of rejection that will
throw away all mixture.
Keep
faith in your spiritual destiny, draw back from error and
open more the psychic being to the direct guidance of the
Mother's light and power. If the central will is sincere,
each recognition of a mistake can become a stepping-stone
to a truer movement and a higher progress.
-
Sri Aurobindo
