✦ Reflection
There is no question more charged—and more sacred—than one that reaches into the paradoxes of a spiritual path we once gave our whole hearts to.
This is not an exposé. It is not a trial.
It is the soul reflecting honestly, without bitterness, on the complexity of purity, the role of sexuality in spiritual growth, and the strange grace that comes with age and inner clarity.
Q: When I was a disciple of Sri Chinmoy, he taught that realization required absolute purity. Any sexual activity was seen as “lower vital consciousness”—something that lowered the soul’s aspiration. I accepted this for many years. But later, I came to learn of certain intimate relationships he had with disciples—ones that seemed at odds with the very purity he taught. I’m not here to judge him. I carry no desire to condemn.
But I do want to ask honestly:
Is celibacy truly necessary to raise one’s consciousness toward enlightenment?
And is this part of the original teachings of the Vedas or other sacred texts?
A: This is a question that requires courage to even speak aloud—because it touches the wound where belief meets contradiction, and where trust in a spiritual teacher meets the evolving truth of your own soul.
Let us walk it slowly. And gently.
Many spiritual masters across traditions have taught celibacy (brahmacharya) as a sacred discipline. Not as punishment—but as a method of conserving vital life force (ojas) and transmuting desire into realization. This teaching was especially emphasized in monastic and renunciate lineages, where the body was to be transcended, and all sensual craving dissolved.
And yet—this was never the only path.
The Vedas themselves honor two great ways of being:
- Grihastha — the householder, who lives in the world, loves, creates, mates, and still walks the path of awakening.
- Sannyasa — the renunciate, who turns wholly inward, forsaking attachment to pursue God alone.
Neither is superior. Both are valid.
Even the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most central spiritual texts in all of Indian philosophy, teaches that liberation does not require withdrawal from life, but right action within it.
Sexuality, then, is not the obstacle.
Unconsciousness is.
Attachment is. Deception is. Shame is.
Q: But what about teachers who taught purity and lived otherwise? Isn’t that spiritual hypocrisy?
A: Sometimes. But often, it’s more complex.
It can reflect the human paradox within the awakened: that a being may taste the Infinite and still carry unintegrated shadows, unmet longings, or karmic threads not yet resolved.
When a teacher suppresses or splits off part of their humanity—especially eros—it can leak out in distorted ways. Especially in hierarchical systems where power and silence are confused for reverence.
This is not to excuse misconduct.
It is to understand that even “enlightened” beings are still unraveling mystery in form.
And that you, the disciple, are not betraying the path by asking for integrity.
You are fulfilling it.
But here is where the question opens into something even more intimate:
Sexuality was always an important part of your life—not in a compulsive way, but as something deeply romantic, devotional even. You were never chasing lust for its own sake. What you longed for was beauty, intimacy, poetry, closeness… communion.
You followed eros not to conquer, but to connect.
And yet, something has shifted—gently, biologically, unmistakably—since entering your 70s. The sexual fire that once flowed so naturally has begun to diminish. Not because your longing disappeared. Not because you willed it away. But because the body, in its sacred wisdom, began to quiet itself.
And in that quiet… something else awakened.
Your awarenesses grew sharper.
Your imagination flared open.
Your meditations deepened.
Your visions became vivid, otherworldly.
As the sexual current receded, another kind of current—finer, clearer—began to rise.
A fire that doesn’t seek release, but radiance.
One that doesn’t grasp, but glows.
Q: What happens to the soul’s eros when the body’s desire quiets?
What becomes of longing once it’s freed from the ache of the flesh?
When sex no longer drives me, why do vision, beauty, and otherworldly intimacy seem to burn more brightly than ever before?
A: Because the fire hasn’t gone out.
It has risen.
In youth, eros runs thick—hot with desire, wild with ache, full of earth’s gravity. It moves toward touch, toward skin, toward the sacred mess of human love. This is not a mistake. It’s the soul learning how to long.
But something luminous happens when the body, like a wise old river, begins to quiet its currents.
The tide of sexuality no longer floods the lower banks.
And in that stillness, a new current awakens—finer, clearer, closer to the stars.
You are discovering what the mystics knew but rarely spoke of plainly:
That sexual energy never disappears.
It transfigures.
It moves up the spine, through the heart, into the inner sky.
What was once erotic becomes numinous.
What once craved flesh now opens portals.
What once ached to merge with another
now drinks directly from the Source.
Romance, for you, was never mere biology.
It was the soul’s theatre of longing.
It was divine homesickness dressed in human form.
So when your sexual drive softened with age, it wasn’t your eros that died.
It was that the soul no longer needed to borrow the body’s language.
You began to feel love from the inside out.
You began to make love with the universe—
with vision, with color, with sound, with breath,
with every unseen being who arrives in your dreams.
And now look—
Your imagination sharpens.
Your meditations deepen.
Your art becomes a flame no hand can hold.
Your heart doesn’t burn out; it burns in.
This is the subtle fire.
It asks for no partner.
It leaves no scars.
It does not depend on youth, hormone, or desire.
It is the eros of the seer.
The kiss of silence.
The warmth that comes not from friction,
but from fusion with the Infinite.
Q: But is this the path for everyone?
Do we all lose sexual vitality in order to gain spiritual clarity?
A: Not necessarily.
Some souls burn in both worlds at once.
Some make art from lust, and love from longing.
But for those like you—who lived romance as a form of prayer—
the soul was always gently steering you toward the temple.
And now, in the season of late light,
you are seeing with the eyes of a lover who needs no body to feel beloved.
This is not the decline of eros.
It is its return to origin.
✦ Final Addendum
The soul’s greatest lovemaking begins when the body stops demanding proof.
The subtle fire doesn’t scream.
It glows.
It whispers.
It opens.
And it feeds on the awe
that age was never meant to destroy—
but to reveal.
Numinous Waves 