Desire can
lead us to overindulgence, to betrayal, and to misery. You can recognize desire as simply another element of
life (like your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations) and choose
to act on your desires or not.
Just as we are sometimes taught that pleasure is a sinful path to
follow, so are we warned of the terrible power of desire. Desire can
lead us to overindulgence, to betrayal, and to misery.
“The
abstinent run away from what they desire, but carry their desires with
them. When a man enters reality, he leaves his desires behind him,” so
says Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.i You can interpret this to mean
that an awakened person no longer has any desire, or you can understand
that it means he is not governed by desire. Desire exists, but in
making his choices, he does not do so based on desire. He leaves desire
behind.
You can recognize desire as simply another element of
life (like your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations) and choose
to act on your desires or not. You don’t have to suppress them, but you
know that you are not your desires and therefore are not ruled by them.
You are not at the mercy of your passions.
On the contrary,
desire provides motivation. Realizing the true desires of your heart is
one of the great pleasures in life. Desire is fuel for healthy living.
The freedoms of desire include:
Desire for spiritual awakening
Desire that supports you manifesting your vision
Desire that supports fulfilling your purpose in your life
Desire as passion and pleasure.
The
trap comes when you feel you must act on the desires you feel,
particularly sexual desire. If you feel horny, you have to do something
about it. Conversely, if you have no sexual desire, then you have no
reason to engage in sexual activity. Conflict in relationships can
occur when one partner has more sexual desire than the other. The
lustier partner might pester the other for more sexual activity and, if
it isn’t forthcoming, might seek sexual satisfaction outside the
relationship, feeling quite justified in doing so.
Desire is energy, fuel for life.
If,
however, you can recognize desire as energy, just as emotions are, you
can decide how to use that energy based on all your freedoms. Sexual
energy is simply another form of life force energy. By perceiving
desire as fuel for action, you can transform and use it for the highest
self-actualization. Just as energy can be converted into matter and
matter into energy, so too can you transform sexual desire into
something else, such as emotional connection or creative inspiration.
This
is not suppression of your desires; it is transformation embedded in
freedom. Such knowledge allows you to open without reservation into
intimate emotional connection with more than just your chosen spouse.
It allows you to touch others with love, tenderness, and compassion
without fearing it will lead to inappropriate sexual touching.
Knowing
that you can transform sexual desire into emotional connection also
empowers you to convert emotional connection into sexual passion,
thereby overcoming problems of mismatches in sex drive. It can enable
you to maintain a fulfilling sexual life to any age, despite hormonal
changes that reduce libido, such as the decline of testosterone. You
can begin lovemaking, you can even initiate it, without already being
aroused. Skilled lovers who are emotionally open and energetically
connected, with conscious mental focus and attunement to their bodies,
know that passion will awaken as lovemaking progresses. Lovemaking
becomes more than just a release of sexual tension, it becomes a
meditation.
Tantric, Taoist, and Egyptian sacred sex practices
regard lovers’ sexual union as a physical expression of the highest
consciousness in which all Four Freedoms integrate seamlessly. For
example, Tantras are commentaries on the dialogues between the Hindu
god Shiva and his consort Shakti, the masculine and feminine aspects of
the same deity. When they make love, they merge as one and all life
flows from their sacred embrace. “All the Universe is the play of
Sakti-Siva. Sakti is Siva, and Siva is Sakti.”
Yoga means union.
Tantric yoga is a direct route to the unity of being, a realization of
God-consciousness. As Tantric and Chan (Chinese Zen) master Daniel
Odier says, “Pure happiness is the non-differentiation between the
tantric practitioner and the universe….”iii In this awakened state of
illumination, ordinary sex is elevated to the level of sublime
spiritual bliss, something far beyond the simple pursuit of pleasure or
enhanced orgasms. According to the teachings of Chan master Houei-hai,
“If you create duality, that’s ordinary passion. Sacred passion springs
from an absence of all duality.”
