Transcription & Editing: Vinod-Bihari Dasa (our Webmaster)
 
The topic for seminar is sensitive, but it is important that we have aproper understanding of what brahmacarya actually is because spirituallife rests on it.

The word itself will clarify:

Brahman means spiritual reality, and acaran means to practice, toact upon.  To act in order to be situated on the spiritual platform isbrahmacarya. The Greek definition is not really brahmacarya. Celibacyalone is not brahmacarya, which is actually a far broader concept.

..We are spirit souls. To become situated in that identity isbrahmacarya.  According to Srila Prabhupada’s teachings, even thehouseholders are brahmacaries. So ISKCON is a movement to make peoplebrahmacaris, man or woman, married or not, everyone should become abrahmacari. That’s why we decided to conduct this seminar on this topic.

..We have 2 identities: physical and spiritual. The body is materialand the soul spiritual. The body remains alive only as long as the soulis in the body. The soul keeps the body alive. When we say I, we meanthe soul. But we identify with our body, which is the source of ourbondage. The soul is the source of consciousness. When it is projectedthrough the nervous system, one thinks that one is the body and acts ina detrimental way to our spiritual identity.  He is a spiritual soul,but he identifies himself with matter and becomes materialized. When amosquito bites him, he thinks, “the mosquito is biting me.” When thebody feels pleasure, he identifies with it.

In Bhagavad Gita, Krsna describes the body as a dress that one putson and takes off. If you are wearing a dress and someone pinches yourdress, do you feel pain? The body, however, has an intricate nervoussystem which ends in the senses. The senses feel and send messages tothe brain which registers it. The sensation is carried on to the brainto be registered. Actually, the body is a lump of matter; it is thesoul which identifies with the body and its pains and pleasures, whichhe resents and appreciates respectively.

The lump of matter called body is subject to the desire for sensegratification, eating, sleeping, mating and defending. These are commonto the animals. They are very strong propensities. Now in winter, allthe animals are wondering, where is food?  Where is food?  Then sleep,then defending from calamities. Then maithun, mating, copulation.

These propensities are called animal propensities. Man is acivilized animal who lives in cities and villages in houses and defendswith nuclear weapons. The man is also doing the same way, but in acivilized way. Animals are controlled by nature’s arrangements when itcomes to mating whereas a man is free to copulate whenever he wants.

This freedom to mate any time he wants has been given to him to overcome the urge, not to indulge in it.

The urge is there by nature’s arrangement, a need for procreation tomaintain the situation. It is a very painful affair, so nature hasarranged pleasure. But the real purpose is allure people so thatprocreation can continue. That is the purpose of mating, or copulation.

Unfortunately, humans have given up the procreation aspect andengage in this process simply for some pleasure. Therefore it isimportant to remember the purpose of mating and not get deviated. Wemust become aware of the purpose of our spiritual practice.

Because of bad association, people are being drawn to this activity.

In the material world, for everything you have to pay a price.  Theprice is the loss of one’s vitality: Virya or shukra, or semen. What issemen? It is the essence of life energy which comes originally from thesoul. Matter in the form of food becomes transformed in differentelements of body, activated by the soul. The three most importantsystems in the body are the respiratory system, circulatory systemwhich pumps blood about seventy five times a minute, and digestionsystem, which burns the food and extracts the rasas, or juices, fromthe food which then transforms into seven different elements: 1. Rasas,2.Blood which tranforms into flesh, from which comes fat, from whichcomes bone, from which comes bone marrow, from which comes semen.

So the finest element is semen. It is the storehouse of vitalenergy. All vitality comes from this element. Therefore it is calledVirya, which means strength. Interesting, isn’it? The strength of a manrests in this vital energy which spreads throughout the body. Just likebutter is the essence of milk that is spread throughout milk and whenchurned it comes out, similarly, when someone becomes agitated bysexual desire, it comes out in the form of semen. What happens then?What about the milk when the butter is taken out? It becomes thin.Similarly, a man becomes devoid of vitality when he engages inunrestricted sex.

We can notice that all great men usually stay away from sexualindulgence. I was reading an article about the Olympic trainers tellingtheir athletes, “no sex for one month before your competition.”

Butter churned out of milk being similar to someone loosing one’s vitality through sexual indulgence is an important analogy.

Sex indulgence is strictly reserved for householders, and that onlyfor procreation. They must remember that the purpose of their gettingtogether is simply for the sake of procreation, not for anything else.If men and women, husband and wife, restrict sex to mere procreation,then that is brahmacarya. Therefore brahmacary doesn’t only meancelibate but to be situated on the spiritual platform.

What is this very very strong sex desire and most difficult hurdleto cross over? When we follow the four regs, after a while the threeother are easy to give up, but sex desire just increases! Therefore weshould be aware that it is the hardest struggle. It is the chain bywhich a living entity is chained to the material world. It is a prisonhouse named maithuna-agara, a prison of sex desire. As long as sexdesire is there in the heart, we will not be able to be free. It iscaused by maya, and the more we try to get free, the more she willtighten the shackle. It is said that before a living entity is about toleave this material nature, maya-devi herself comes and says, “why areyou leaving? Stay here and enjoy with me.” At that time, SanatanaGoswami recommends that one say, “please bless me that I can serve yourbrother.” Maya is Krsna ‘s sister. So we should always pray to her thatwe never deviate to the platform of sense gratification.

Ultimately, what is it? In our Vedic scriptures it is described thatalthough sex desire is there and is difficult to cross, it isultimately just an itch. If you scratch, you get pleasure. It is anitch-and-scratch
pleasure. It gives illusory pleasure and a real disastrous effect onone’s spiritual life. One must guard oneself from this pitfall.

Yogis try to suppress it. Suppression is not a solution. One mustovercome this desire by getting the higher taste. When the husband andwife get a child,their mutual attraction becomes centered on theirchild and the carnal desire disappears. Similarly, when a living entityloves Krsna , then it is easy for him to overcome sex desire by thehigher taste of love of Krsna which makes the whole businessdisgusting. To begin with it is disgusting, but nature has made itpleasurable out of necessity.

The first illusion is to think that we are our bodies. When weidentify with the body, the male body becomes attracted to a femalebody, and vice-versa.  But we are not this body! We are part-and-parcelof Krsna, connected to Him through love that brings us closer to Him.When love is projected to something in the material nature, it iscalled lust, not love. When this love is directed to Krsna , then onlyis it actually love, or devotion. The expression of love is in doingsomething for the pleasure of the object of love. That activity iscalled devotional service. The more we do for Krsna , the more our lovefor Him becomes intensified. It is reciprocal: a devotee loves Krsna ,and Krsna reciprocates multifold. That joy of reciprocation is what weall are really looking for.

We all are here to achieve that goal. And when we achieve it, thenall the sex life will become secondary business, as Yamunacarya pointedout when he said that his lips curl in distaste and he spits at thethought. Ultimately the thought will not even come to us. Today, wedon’t think of, for example, a sand castle that we always meditated onas a child. Similarly, as we grow up, we will forget sex desire.

The most important factor is for the men, being the aggressors, torespect women. Therefore Vedic injuction is for a man to respect awoman as a mother. In a society where they don’t know how to respectwomen, that society is useless. Today’s society is simply exploitingwomen. Whereas Srila Prabhupada has created a spiritual society wheremen will learn to give the highest respect to women. If we want awonderful society throughout the world, we have to establish thisspiritual culture. Thank you very much.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada.

Answer: there is no copulation in the spiritual world, but there isan exchange of love, but it is not expressed through copulation. So ourlove for Krsna in the spiritual world is perverted way here in the formof sex life. So there is union, but not sex. From this point we cannotunderstand.  For example, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu is Radha and Krsnatogether.  Theoretically, we can understand that when Radha and Krsnaembrace, they become Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. That personality has comedown to give us  the highest love, not sexual indulgence. Sunrise andsunset may look alike, but they are completely different.

Question: The Bhagavatam says that as time goes on, the sex desire goes away. But you said that the urge gets stronger.

Answer: Initially, one does not feel so strong for sex because themilk is already free from butter. But as the Virya gets more and more,the urge becomes stronger. But also when the love for Krsna increases,he feels such joy that he doesn’t feel for the sex urge.

Question: can sex desire come out in the form of other desires such as desire to eat too much.

Answer: Yes, therefore artificial repression is not what we prescribe; rather, we prescribe a natural process.