Choosing Celibacy
(or Brahmacharya)

by Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D.

Continued from Part I

5) You want to develop a deepening sense of intimacy with your partner.

"If you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine in my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all others.... And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...."

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. "Please -- tame me!" he said.

So often, however, the impatient desire for more intimacy is what obscures the subtle phenomena of intimacy presently alive, as, sadly, the little prince responded to his fox:

"I want to (tame you), very much," the little prince replied. "But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand."

To which the fox responded in parting:

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

The art of seeing with one's heart is what tantric sublimation is all about.

6) You are troubled by the difficulties in love relationships and wonder how tantric sublimation and psychology might help.

If you are not currently in a love relationship, the practice of solitary sublimation can give your life a satisfying fullness of emotionality, commitment, and passion typically thought available only to coupled people. Thus, your longings for a partner can be freed of the desperation that being alone sometimes breeds. Instead, should you meet someone you are truly interested in, your longings will have a welcoming freshness.

Since tantric sublimation is a transformative art, its approach to difficult emotions is far more paradoxical and poetic than most conventional and popular psychologies of love. Instead of a vocabulary of semidiagnostic terms, like codependency, emotional wounding, or fears of abandonment and commitment, tantric terms like viyoga -- the union that lives in even the most painful struggles -- grasp the ambiguity inherent in erotic difficulties.

Thus, you will learn about the hidden rectifying powers within apology and forgiveness, how to miss someone romantically instead of thinking of yourself as abandoned, how to protect "the awe of great possibilities" from being misinterpreted as fears of commitment. Fear and awe are close cousins in erotic matters, and it is an ironic tragedy that the same awesomeness that inspires feelings of total possibilities in the beginning of love and family life will claustrophobically close down possibilities when misunderstood as fear.

In this more intimate world, we encounter the paradoxical and lesser-known erotic passions of joys that seem too good to be true, of being ourselves more than we ever thought, even as we awaken to other possibilities that seem too tragic to be endured. We uncover the too common irony that sometimes it becomes easier to fight over personality issues and mundane problems than to get all choked up with one's gratitude. We spare each other our gratitudes, for the ensuing intimacy is more than we can readily bear.

7) You wonder if your marriage can be enhanced in certain ways by a period of celibacy.

Marriage exists because we need the time of a lifetime to bring forth more completely the deeply hidden potentialities that begin to emerge when people are in love with each other. Commitment is merely the natural and immediate response to perceived, yet hidden, possibilities. Commitment is the sustained and suspenseful allurement of mystery.

For example, newlyweds will argue over the color to paint a certain room to camouflage the awesome and perhaps unbelievable experience of knowing and feeling that they are actually creating a home in which they will live, share, create life, and die. In tantra, money problems, household chores, and parenting responsibilities must all be placed in a larger context of living. For older couples, the tantric perspective can reveal a long-developing passion that attains its climax only after a lifetime of sharing.

Phyllis, fifty-eight, and Jason, sixty-two, have been married for thirty years. Their lives have been busy with dual careers and family life. "Too busy for a mid-life crisis," says Jason. Yes, they have been committed to each other for over thirty years, but their commitment has been to expectations, and their satisfaction has been in attaining them. Uncertainty was something to allay with plans and success and has never been a gateway to the trepid and alluring awe of the unknown future. Since they are "almost celibate", they turn to the philosophy and practice of tantric sublimation. During their newly learned eye-contact meditations, they share their amazement at what now comes out of hiding from behind the daily routines of thirty years: They are giving each other their lives and receiving the same as well.

In uncovering erotic rhythms longer than sex-desire, tantra reveals an organic basis for lifelong monogamy known as "the householder's path", commitment allured onward by the fullness of a lifetime.

8) You find the various artificial methods of contraception to be undesirable, and you wonder if there are "other ways" to make love.

When Wilhelm Reich was formulating his basic principles of sexual liberation for fertile heterosexuals, he concluded that, since sex was necessary thrice weekly, contraception was "absolutely necessary for sexual health". Within the conventional biological model of sex, this may be true. Yet this solution is not as utopian as Reich and the rest of us had hoped -- as our abortion rates and problems with contraception can attest.

Kristin Luker's abortion research in Taking Chances concluded that unintended pregnancies weren't best explained as "contraceptive failures" but as a kind of sexually enflamed willingness to "take a chance, just this once". Fertility just slips slyly through the cracks of sex, not through our irresponsibility but because of the exhilarating power of erotic mystery.

Contraception, unintended pregnancy, and abortion, and the debates surrounding them, are rendered obsolete for the tantric celibate. Conceptions, when they occur, are always sought rather than being varyingly regretted side effects of sexual intercourse. And, as R. D. Laing (1970) noted in reference to the significance of being a welcomed conception, "The difference between being welcome and unwelcome... is all the difference in the world".

Furthermore, if we had intercourse only when we were hoping to conceive, we might recover the actual experience of procreation. Rob, forty, describes his surprise of "discovering" that sex is also the procreative process:

The sublimative way of erotic expression could also be particularly useful to teenagers, whose sexual curiosity forever outsmarts even the most well-schooled efforts of our sex/contraception education. Originally, the term brahmacharya referred to preadolescence through young adulthood, when, in the wake of genital puberty, we learn and grow at a rapid pace. An open-minded teenager might find brahmacharya very fulfilling, rather than being one more nagging parental injunction against which to rebel. 

9) You have been celibate for some time now, and you are wondering what might be going on in you as a result.

Having a vocabulary to apply to your celibate experiences can be most helpful, especially in a culture where celibacy is generally understood as an absence of experiences. Yoga gives you a detailed mapping of the subtle physiology of sublimation that grounds its processes and unique arousals in the body. The many physical and meditative practices help you to derive the greatest benefits from your celibate time.

If you have been celibate for some time, the mere publication of this book (Eros, Consciousness, and Kundalini)  may be important to you. I remember that in my third year of practice I could readily identify with many of the pains common to any minority -- sexual or otherwise. People might not accept a person's being gay, but they now at least admit that homosexuality exists. Most people don't think that a viable sublimation can exist, which can be a uniquely difficult social pressure to be exposed to.

10) You wonder why celibacy and spirituality are stereotypical bedfellows; you wonder in general about the spiritual significance of sex and tantric celibacy.

Throughout history, many people have become celibate spontaneously, not as a cultivated practice to become a better, happier person or couple but as a consequence of self-realization. If you are always feeling love, then you always feel as though you are making love. Sex becomes rather redundant.

Tantric sublimation begins with the feelings a person currently experiences and helps trace them toward greater subtlety. At some point, even the subtlest feelings come to an absolute limit, and one will need a leap of faith into the spiritual aspects of human life, a leap into unverifiable truths that our faith knows to be true anyway. There one is awed by how endlessly real God is and how refinedly innocent are all the passions of innocence. This unparalleled awe has, for thousands of years, remained the spiritual possibility of which brahmacharya is only an outward sign.

This article was excerpted from the book Eros, Consciousness, and Kundalini: Deepening Sensuality through Tantric Celibacy and Spiritual Intimacy, © 1999 by Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Inner Traditions International. www.innertraditions.com.

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About The Author

STUART SOVATSKY, PH.D., has been a practitioner of kundalini yoga for twenty-four years and is the director of two psychotherapy clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former presenter at the World Congress on Sexology in India and the International Kundalini Research Network, he teaches at JFK University and the California Institute of Integral Studies. You can contact the author at stuartcs@jps.net or visit his website at www.jps.net/stuartcs.

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