Namaskaram
A lot of you who might have entered the path of yoga or are practitioners of yoga or maybe have just picked up a book or two on yoga have probably come across this word called Brahmacharya. And does this mean celibacy? And so if you follow the path of yoga, Brahmacharya is definitely advised and prescribed. So does that mean that you have to be a celibate person in order to follow the path of yoga? So necessarily that would mean that yogis and yoginis cannot have children of course.
And cannot engage in sex within or outside marital relations. Is this true? Let's get into that for a moment. Brahmacharya is made up of two words Brahma and Acharya.
Brahma is the name of the creator. In my previous podcast on gods, symbols and meaning, I've explained that in Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism, God is not a literal object. It's a concept.
It's a symbol of a pattern of consciousness. Patterns of consciousness which are higher than the human consciousness. But which can be symbolically represented.
Now therefore Brahma is one of those gods in whom the power of creation through the mind exists. That means everything is a mind-created object of Brahma. Think about it.
Your mind, my mind, through which we experience everything. Our whole reality, our sense of self that I exist and that this world exists and that I have a place in this world and so on and so forth. All our memories, our feelings, our ongoing experience.
All of that is based on the mind. Created and recreated by the mind. I would like you to think about this for a moment.
That when you look at something, are your eyes seeing something? When you hear something, are your ears hearing? Not really, right? As light goes in into your eye, that light never enters your brain. So how does your brain actually see, right? Now of course you know that the light enters the retina etc and goes into the optic nerve where through biochemical reactions and so on electricity is generated, pulsed and those electric signals which go through the optic nerve into the audio-visual cortex of the brain are then magically turned into this thing called vision. It is brain's creation.
The brain is dark. There is no light within it. It is creating the idea of light, the idea of darkness, the idea of seen objects and colors.
Similarly for all our other senses, whether it is feeling through the skin, hearing through the ears, it is all creations of the mind. These creations of the mind are then compared to the memory complex within the mind and then a meaning is derived from this and the brain says I am now experiencing this. The I also of course comes from the brain.
It does not come from your skin cell. It does not come from your liver cell. It does not come from your eye or ear cell which do not have a feeling or a consciousness of I the way that you do as a human being, as a human consciousness which is in your brain.
So I am seeing this. I am hearing this. This is an illusion, an experience created within the brain.
Therefore you are your own Brahma. I am my own Brahma. Any being with a single neuron becomes its own Brahma.
Now if we understand this then we can follow the way of Brahma or Brahma Acharya. Achar means the way. So following the way of Brahma is Brahma Acharya.
What is the way of Brahma? The knowledge and acting with that knowledge that you are the creator of your own reality and your own experience. Therefore every single object that you can experience whether it's a real object out there or whether it's an object of imagination or whether it's an object of memory etc. These are all children of your mind.
They exist only in your mind. You can never transfer this experience to somebody else except through symbols like photographs, words, body language, signs. There is no direct way except through these symbols to pass on your experience of reality to somebody else because your experience of reality is unique to you.
You are your own Brahma. Now let us say that there is a person in front of me that I'm looking at. That person has been created by my mind within my mind as a personal unique experience.
Therefore it is my mental child. If I were to have sex with this mental child, this is a kind of mental incest. Secondly it is a double lie because not only am I not being aware that this is an illusion, an experience created within my own mind that I am doing this actively, but I am also unaware of the illusion of desire created towards this self created object of mind. The old adage 'Beauty lies in the eye of the Beholder', succinctly explains the illusion of beauty, unique in each one of us.
But we are not aware of this. We actually believe in this person as something that exists outside us, apart from our consciousness, our self and therefore an object we can touch, embrace, love. So there is no 'other' or othering if you understand the secret of Brahma.
There is only one complete self and that self is not you or me. It is just a very abstract consciousness within which everything sentient exists as a pattern of consciousness. Patterns within a giant consciousness. Like waves in the Sea, each is unique, but non-separate from the one Ocean.
That is the way to look at yourself as Brahma. That is the way of Brahmacharya and it is not in any way literally to be taken as celibacy. If you do take it as celibacy then please also remember you cannot own anything. You cannot give up anything. You cannot die. You are immortal.
Why? Because all these objective and limited objects of experience, death, life, joy, sadness, sex, celibacy, food, water, all of these are limited. Why are they limited? Because food is not water, water is not food, sex is not celibacy, celibacy is not sex. So they're limited.
But consciousness is not limited. Brahma is that consciousness and you are a derivative of that Consciousness. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou Art That, as the Vedantas declare.
Knowing this is the way of Brahmacharya . It is a much higher idea of celibacy if you'd like to put it that way. It's non-contact with the illusion created by the mind. If you call that celibacy, that's fine. But that definitely is not the literal meaning of the word celibacy as we normally understand it.
As always I would be most curious to have your feedback on the above discussion. Do you agree and if not, please feel free to send in your objections.
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