Success in attaining the objectives of any spiritual practice is based on achieving ‘one pointed concentration’. This means focusing the aspiration on the spiritual source and maintaining that focus without diverting energy and attention away to any other objective. The integral yoga, with its focus on the transformation of life on earth into a divine life, requires similar commitment.
As the individual takes up the spiritual practice of yoga, he begins to understand and appreciate the various parts of the being and the way they strive for attention and what they accept as their natural fulfillment. The vital nature is especially attracted to development of power and domination, wealth as well as sexual enjoyment. These represent therefore deeply embedded drives, instincts, urges and cravings that constantly distract the attention. The practice of Brahmacharya, which involves celibacy, in the deepest sense of removing any receptivity to the sexual energy in its expression through the lower vital nature, is enjoined on spiritual practitioners from many paths as a basic requirement founded in the knowledge of the deepest teachings of yoga and spirituality.
In the context of a spiritually-focused community, these forces can be especially disruptive, as they impact not just the individual practitioner but also others and the social environment in general. This occurs whether the actions are overt and take on a physical form, or whether they are occult through inner concentration and energetic practices.
The impact of sexual energy was observed some years ago by an individual who recounted a particular incident. He happened to be in a room with a number of people gathered together. A person entered the room who clearly carried an intense sexual vibration with him. He focused on a young woman on the other side of the room, a stranger to him, and she suddenly turned and noticed his gaze and intensity. She responded and they left to carry out their sexual practices. The vibration traveled without sound, touch or anything else, across the room and awakened the similar response in the other individual.
Certain higher forces cannot descend and stay in the consciousness if there is an admixture or misuse of that energy due to the expression of lower vital energies. There is leakage or even worse, an overall distortion of the energy that is trying to manifest the higher consciousness which can be destructive to both the individual and others in their spiritual practice and fulfillment.
Another incident was relayed about a person who went to Europe from India and who took on the guise of a Swami or Guru. He used this role to seduce young women and bring them, Rasputin-like, under his sexual spell. He then used them to gain control of young men who were tasked with working and bringing money with the implied reward of a sexual relationship with the woman designated to act upon that individual. Otherwise, he insisted on complete sexual abstinence in the group, so that he maintained full control over both the young women and the young men. This individual eventually was jailed for his crimes against minor children. Some of the individuals impacted by his actions never recovered from the trauma they suffered.
These incidents represent some of the ways that focus on sexual energies can impact a community or social setting, and they highlight the need, in such a setting of dedicated individuals, to ensure that this type of energy is not being disseminated and either distracting the individual sadhak from his concentration, nor impacting the general environment.
Clearly not every individual who is called to take up the path of yoga is able to, from the outset, gain full control over these energies. It is a process and it can develop in stages. Progress takes place on many levels and in many different aspects of the being. As Sri Krishna advises Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, no effort towards spiritual growth is ever ‘lost’.
Those few individuals who are called to dedicate their lives to the spiritual path, wholly and without any reservations, with full surrender, are especially advised to not allow any vital forces to intervene and distract or dilute the effort. They are like Milarepa who determined to achieve liberation in just one lifetime and who gave everything to achieve that objective.
Sri Aurobindo notes: “The whole principle of this Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother-Power all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine. In this Yoga, therefore, there can be no place for vital relations or interchanges with others; any such relation or interchange immediately ties down the soul to the lower consciousness and its lower nature, prevents the true and full union with the Divine and hampers both the ascent to the supramental Truth-consciousness and the descent of the supramental Ishwari Shakti. Still worse would it be if this interchange took the form of a sexual relation or a sexual enjoyment, even if kept free from any outward act; therefore these things are absolutely forbidden in the sadhana. It goes without saying that any physical act of the kind is not allowed; but also any subtler form is ruled out. It is only after becoming one with the supramental Divine that we can find our true spiritual relations with others in the Divine; in that higher unity this kind of gross lower vital movement can have no place.”
Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire — Food — Sex, pp. 70-71
Sri Aurobindo Studies 