Video: Yoga & Sexuality

Posted in Blog by Eric Shaw

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR THIS VIDEO

 

This video is an out-take from a yoga history and philosophy lecture called “Why the Buddha Burns: Love and the Destruction of the Subtle Body” given June 18, 2011 at the Yoga Garden in San Francisco.

In it, I ground a discussion of yoga history and the subtle body in the challenge presented by the reality of karma, Samsara and rebirth and how that determines sexual choice.

When these concepts  became primary to Indian Culture in the first thousand years before the Common Era, the choice of becoming a householder or a yogi was a stark one.

In later centuries, the worldview was softened through three developments in yoga history:

1) India developed the philosophy of the Ashramas, or “phases of life,” which says there is a time in every life to go through sections that include both householder and yogi. In youth and in old age, one practiced yogic sadhana (austerities), but not in the middle (householder) phase.

2) India developed Bhakti and Karma Yoga approaches to salvation (as detailed in the Bhagavad Gita). These privileged householder status over yogi status and presented devotion and selfless work as more powerful options than yogic austerities.

3) India developed Tantra–in which realization was seen to be the birthright of both householders and yogis, i.e. both could become realized in this life for the sake of this life, i.e. not for the sake of a fortunate rebirth.

Notwithstanding these three, the path of the householder and yogi (Brahmana and Sramana) retain their critical weight as options in human consciousness. This is more true in Indian religio-spiritual systems than in the West. Since the time of the Renaissance, the West has been on a path of secularization.

Communist societies in the West and Asia have de-emphasized the path of the religious virtuoso further, for they are aggressively atheistic.

 

TAGS: Yoga History, Yoga Philosophy, Ardhanarishvara, Ashrama, Yogi, Householder, Modern Yoga History, The Subtle Body