Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Question: Punditji, talk to us about the significance of celibacy in our life.
Sri Sri: Celibacy is a happening. When your awareness is so deeply rooted in the Being and Being is permeating everywhere, and when the thrilling joy and love is coming from every pore and cell of your body, a natural phenomenon that you call “celibacy” happens. The bliss in you is like the peak of the sex experience. When that stays with you as an electric current all the time in your body, you don’t feel the body as a physical heavy body. It is light like a flower. It is like space, like air. When you get very spacey, you don’t do anything. You don’t feel the body because you are so immersed in joy. Then celibacy happens. It is not a practice that one does. It is a spontaneous happening, when love has flowered so much in our life.

It is one energy which, in the lowest centre of our body, manifests as sex energy as well as creative energy. See, when you are very creative, if you are going for an examination or are involved in a large business, those days, thoughts of sex don’t cross your mind. You work, you go to sleep and you work, because that particular activity occupies your mind so much. When you are very creative, the sex energy is transformed. People who are obsessed with sex are less creative. The one energy comes as either procreative or creative energy.

When the energy moves further up, to the second centre of your body, beauty and the arts are enlivened. The same energy turns into arrogance and jealousy. One energy has these two aspects, either as beauty, arts and appreciation or as jealousy and arrogance. They are not two different energies.

Have you observed a tendency with beauty? We see beauty and we want to possess it. You may see a nice crystal chandelier and say “Oh, I want it.” You bring it home. Do you enjoy looking at it everyday? No. Again when you go out, you see other types of chandeliers, which attract your attention. Most of you have beautiful paintings at home. Do you look at them everyday and enjoy them? You seldom do that. You may say you enjoy showing them to guests. Do you really enjoy them? No.

Your tendency is – when you see beauty, you want to possess it. In the process of possessing it, you make it ugly. When you see a beautiful boy or a beautiful girl, you want to possess, you want to love them so much that you make it hard for them to breathe. This is happening! People are suffocated by love! And people are hurt by love! You can’t get hurt if there is no love. If you love somebody and they don’t smile at you or are busy, you get deeply hurt. You don’t get hurt by somebody whom you don’t love. Hurt is a part of love. And you don’t want to accept that. You just want people to love and say goody-goody things and smile. All these modulations of the mind open up and change with observation. To me, celibacy is a gift that comes to you. It is a happening.

The word celibate means ‘married to God’. That means God has possessed you so much, has so fully entered into each cell, that there is no space left for anything else. Celibate means to be married to the spirit. Having seen over and over again, for lifetimes, what sex is, you move a step further and become immersed into That, divinity, that love which Is.

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