Counterexamples
As above, the question is incomplete, lacking an actor, a subject. Who are we talking about? Does a rock, for example, find that celibacy is a needed support.
Are you talking about everyone. Are you speaking about me specifically?
No many other brothers and sisters have experienced so much benefit from purity and these others have suffered so much because of this.
Because regarding myself, I know a great deal and am the authority, and others ... For me, life is about discovery. Discovery is about exploring. Exploring is about your desires. You explore where your desires take you. In certain areas of our lives we stop exploring and stop learning. These areas the learning is frozen. What is stuck in our learning and in our thinking is often frozen in our possibilities, in our internal image of our possibilities, and our postural habits.
What happens, I think, is that certain assumptions that the person is holding with emotional associations creates a kind of tension, just like holding a brick in your hand. We use that language, tell someone you trust and take a load off your shoulders.
Someone who wants to grow more whole inside, feel open, free of conflict and cross-motivation, is, I think, someone spiritual. Or a man can be mature of integrity, yet lacking spirituality?
Is Celibacy necessary for my mental and emotional health?
Is Celibacy injurious to my mental and emotional health?
It is my explorations since leaving Gyan that have helped me expand personally, toward wholeness and fulfillment.
I will introduce two avenues of exploration,
swimming and
music before getting to the
celibacy/sexuality question.
Learning to bob and swim while breathing comfortably, the feeling of being able to do that has changed my life, to feel long and tall and free flowing in that liquid environment, and the confidence from discovering that I can learn. (The guy that taught my first steps ^W strokes is a founding member of an intentional community involved in practicing and teaching ecological, low-impact values for living. None of them drive cars, for example.)
In the water environment you cannot achieve by trying harder, you need to become free of the type of trying you do on land, with your feet on the ground.
There is a kind of rhythmic bobbing you can learn that allows you to breathe easily while spending sometime under water, some time with your face sufficiently exposed to inhale. Like a weight on a spring, you can rebound underwater and exhale, and rise out of the water, air rushes in as the jaw drops, ribs open and abdomen rounds, all an easy, relaxed process that feels effortless, profound, like it can go on forever.
BKs:
swimming is permissible if proper attire and decorum, unless it becomes a consuming interest
Music. Music is not just Maya, it is an entire world of possibilties for expression. Learning to play a little bit, to hear notes better, to really appreciate listening to people who are really on it:- some classical Indian musicians, sitar and tablas. The depth, genuineness, richness of it.
BKs:
music is big Maya
listening: permissible, no loud or body conscious.
practice: permissible unless it becomes consuming interest.
Music and swimming bring me into new environments, different relations with others, and with myself. Avenues central to my growth as a person is neglected, discounted or discouraged by the BKs.
Sexuality: Here is another avenue, central to my growth as a person, vilified by the BKs. Here are living counterexamples. People I found I could respect and relate to 100% with values and lifestyle dramatically and diammetrically not BK. Each counterexample opened me to possibilities. Another founding member of the community, Daniel, is a mad scientist, geologist, sculptor, inventor. I met them at their hippy dance evenings and vegetarian dinner parties at their home. I liked Daniel because I could talk to him about anything, including relationships and sexuality. As I accepted him and witnessed his acceptance of his own sexuality, I found that I began to become more open toward my own feeling, desires, responses.
One of the people I admire and a public example of healthy sexuality is Nina Hartley. Nina works in the adult movie business, which from the BK point of view, you know, thousands of deaths' karma for helping to get people's adrenal hormones all excited and swelling their erectile tissues.
A Zen writer interviews the Zen-steeped pornstar and sexual educator.
You see her videos and its quite obvious she enjoys what she does, seems vigorous, healthy, compassionate. Has not been destroyed by lust. A counterexample for another argument with a psychotherapist feminist who believes that only messed up people are drawn to the porn industry, and that such work is inherently degrading to women.