When a man approaches his wife, he should have a sacred feeling, as if he were going to a temple. And when a wife goes to her husband, she should be full of the reverence one has nearing God. In the moments of sex, lovers pass through coitus, and that stage is very near to the temple of God, to where he is manifest in creative formlessness.
My conjecture is that man had his first luminous glimpse of samadhi during the experience of intercourse. Only in the moments of coitus did man realize that it was possible to feel such profound love, to experience such illuminating bliss. And those who meditated on this truth in the right frame of mind, those who meditated on the phenomenon of sex, of intercourse, came to the conclusion that in the moments of climax the mind becomes empty of thoughts. All thoughts drain out at that moment. And this emptiness of mind, this void, this vacuum, this freezing of the mind, is the cause of the shower of divine joy.
Having unraveled the secret up to this point, man dug further. If the mind could be freed of thoughts, if the thought-ripples of consciousness could be stilled by some other process, he reasoned, he could attain to pure bliss! And from this developed the system of yoga, from this came meditation and prayer. This new approach proved that even without coitus the consciousness could be stilled, and thoughts evaporated. Man discovered that the delight of amazing proportions obtained during an act of intercourse could also be obtained without it.
By the nature of the process, an act of coitus can only be momentary because it involves the consummation of a flow of energy. To the pure joy, to the perfect love, to the beautiful solace in which a yogi exists all the time, a couple only reaches for a moment or so. But, basically, there is no difference between them. He who said that the vishyanand and the brahmanand, that the one who indulges his senses and the one who indulges in God are brothers, has stated an inadvertent truth. Both come from the same womb. The only difference is the distance between earth and sky.
At this stage I wish to give you the first principle. If you want to know the elemental truth about love, the first requisite is to accept the sacredness of sex, to accept the divinity of sex in the same way you accept God’s existence – with an open heart. And the more fully you accept sex with an open heart and mind, the freer you will be of it. But the more you suppress it the more you will become bound to it, like that farmer who became a slave to his clothes. The measure of your acceptance is the measure of your deliverance. The total acceptance of life, of all that is natural in life, of all that is God-given in life, will lead you to the highest realms of divinity – to heights that are unknown, to heights that are sublime. I call that acceptance, theism. And that faith in the God-given is the door to liberation.
I regard those precepts which keep man from accepting that which is natural in life and in the divine scheme as atheism.” Oppose this; suppress that. The natural is sinful, bad, lustful. Leave this; leave that.” All this constitutes atheism, as I understand it. Those who preach renunciation are atheists. Accept life in its pure and natural form and thrive on the fullness of it. The fullness itself will elevate you, step by step. And this very same acceptance of sex will uplift you to serene heights you had not imagined possible. If sex is coal, the day is certain to come when it shows itself as diamonds. And that is the first principle.
The second fundamental thing I want to tell you is about something that has, by now, become hardened within us by civilization, culture and religion. And that is the ego, the consciousness that” I am”. The nature of the sex energy goads it to flow towards love, but the hurdle of” I” has fenced it in like a wall and so love cannot flow. The” I” is very powerful, in bad as well as in good people, in the unholy as well as in the holy. Bad people may assert the ”I” in many ways, but good people also drum the ”I” loudly: they want to go to heaven; they want to be delivered; they have renounced the world; they have built temples; they do not sin; they want to do this; they want to do that. But that” I”, that guiding signal, is ever present.
The stronger a person’s ego is, the harder it is for him to unite with anybody. The ego comes in between; the” I” asserts itself. It is a wall. It proclaims,” You are you and I am I.” And so even the most intimate experience does not bring people close to each other. The bodies may be near, but the people are far apart. So long as there is this” I” inside, this feeling of otherness cannot be avoided.
One day, Sartre said a wonderful thing:” The other is hell.” But he didn’t explain any further why the other was hell, or even why the other was the other. The other is the other because I am I, and while I am I, the world around is the other – different and apart, segregated – and there is no rapport.
As long as there is this feeling of separation, love cannot be known. Love is the experience of unity. The demolition of walls, the fusion of two energies is what the experience of love is. Love is the ecstasy when the walls between two people crumble down, when two lives meet, when two lives unite.
When such a harmony exists between two people, I call it love. And when it exists between one man and the masses, I call it communion with God. If you can become immersed with me in such an experience – so that all barriers melt, so that an osmosis takes place at the spiritual level – then that is love. And if such a unity happens between me and everyone else and I lose my identity in the All, then that attainment, that merging, is with God, with the Almighty, with the Omniscient, with the Universal Consciousness, with the Supreme or whatsoever you want to call it. And so, I say that love is the first step and that God is the last step – the finest and the final destination.
