Vital Bodily Fluids

On First Hearing About the Prostate

Only Amanda could get me to go to Fairfield, Iowa, in winter. I was scheduled to go to a gorgeous hot springs in California for my next six-week meditation retreat, but Amanda pleaded with me to meet her in Iowa because the scheduling worked better for her. So there we were at Maharishi International University, formerly Parson's College, in Fairfield, Iowa, for a six-week meditation course. In winter, and snow was blowing around.

In the afternoons, we would make out in my room, and have fantastic sex. One day, after particularly frisky sex, and Amanda had left to go to her asanas and meditation practice, the guy in the dorm room next door came over to talk to me.

"I hear through the walls, you guys having sex," he said.
"Oh, I'm sorry," I said. "We'll try to be more quiet. We get a little wild, I know."
"I just want you to know, I approve."
"Oh, thanks," I said, not getting it, "I hope we don't make too much noise."
"No problem," he said, "It makes me happy to know that someone is having a good time and keeping their prostate gland in good health."
"Prostate gland?" I said. This was the first time I had ever heard of a prostate gland. I was only about 24, and this was 1974. People weren't talking about prostates much in 1974.

He told me a little about what the prostate gland is, and then he said, "I have been having recurrent prostatitis since I came here to MIU last year. The teachers tell us to not have sex, to keep the energy inside and use it for enlightenment. But I have been getting terrible prostate infections. Peeing blood, and burning pain. I went to the doctor in town, in Fairfield, and he told me that he had been seeing a lot of cases of prostatitis. He said that basically, my semen was all clogged from not having orgasms, and that I had it so bad, it would not be enough to just take antibiotics. I had to get a girlfriend and start having sex. Vigorous sex. I said to him, why don't I just masturbate? He said, it wasn't enough to just masturbate, either. I needed the pumping, really get the juices flowing. Get fresh sperm flowing through there."

"The doctor told me that this is known as 'boot camp syndrome,' and doctors who treat soldiers on Army bases encounter it. You get all these young men together, theye are in the prime of their sperm-producing life, and they don't have the time and a private place to masturbate, so they hold it in, and the sperm backs up and they get terrible prostate infections. In the past, prostatitis was called 'The Monk's Disease,' because monks were famous for it, like miners are famous for lung disease."

The Monk's Disease

A couple of years ago, I looked up "The Monk's Disease" on the internet and was led to the Prostatitis FAQ.

"A fourth theory, based on the fact that prostatitis was once known as 'the monk's disease,' is that a sudden reduction in the average number of ejaculations per time period or a complete stoppage of ejaculations can lead to old prostatic secretions hardening and forming clogs. As monks were also prone to long vigils the reflux theory may also have some support here. Recent information is that new recruits into the armed forces are prone to prostatitis. Whether this is because the sudden enforced celibacy and lack of privacy (making masturbation difficult) causes the problem or whether the sudden opportunity to visit ladies of the evening when given a pass into town increases the chance of infection is not known."

It turns out that there are several other meanings of "The Monk's Disease."

Another meaning of "The Monk's Disease," according to some of the sites discussing celibacy and the priesthood, was the "well-known hankering" monks had for the assholes of their altar boys, and the prostatitis they would get from anal sex. This was, some say, common knowledge in the middle ages. It is only recently, with the huge number of molestation cases that have come out, that we have details about some of the sex between Catholic priests and the boys they have sex with.

And yet another meaning of "The Monk's Disease" is depression resulting from the unendurable tedium of life in the monastery.

Need That Continent Populated? Give Me a Few Days

The thing about men is that nature has created them to be ready to impregnate any woman who seems willing, at any time it is called for. And nature keeps men ready, just in case. The average man produces a couple of hundred million sperm every day. His body produces enough sperm daily to populate a large country, or give him a week, and he'll produce enough sperm to impregnate all the women in Asia. Give him a month, and his testicles will produce enough to impregnate all the women on Earth, if only there were a way to get the sperm distributed.

It is as if men are always lactating, but it's not milk that oozes out, it's another life-giving substance. This causes some problems. But as far as Nature is concerned, the big problem to be solved is always, how to preserve a species, all that genetic brilliance that took billions of years to evolve. It's a smaller problem, what to do with all that sperm. If men are always lactating., and the fluids build up and need to be released, then deal with it.

Say that there is a hallway in a monastery with ten rooms along it, one of them may contain a monk who has never wanted to have sex, is disgusted by sex. The next three rooms contain monks who are having sex with each other every couple of nights, but are ashamed of it. Going down the hall we find a monk who specializes in breaking in the novices. That's his special calling, seducing or raping the new recruits. The next monk over masturbates in shame as he hears the panting going on next door. We don't want to hear about this, but it occasionally shows up in the papers.

So you never know what is going on in the rooms of a meditation course, or the cells in a monastery. It's one of history's great secrets. The churches and monasteries have been safe spots for people wanting to take refuge from the kind of sex married people have. And we only know a tiny bit about what monks actually are like.

Conserve Your Vital Bodily Fluids

In the movie Dr. Strangelove, one of the subthemes was the idea to conserve your Vital Bodily Fluids, i.e. your sperm, and not succomb to the Communist seduction. This idea, that if you lose your sperm, you lose your whole spiritual essence, is so pervasive among the Asian monastic traditions as to be an encrusted neurosis. It is accepted without question. And the truth of it is verified again and again, as each young man, having set his will against sex, succombs to the temptation of a boner, jacks off, and feels guilty and drained.



I missed the day in meditation school where they told us to be celibate – no one I respected ever told me that, so I just let the general idea of celibacy exist over there in yogi-land, along with sitting in full lotus and living on air. But for many people I knew, the idea got implanted deep. I had a mild aversion to the idea of celibacy, actually, because the people who spoke of it tended to have a grey pallor, as if they were vampires who only came out at night.

Jonas, a good friend of mine, used to find yoga texts and Hindu scriptures to read, and he'd mark the pages that would say things like, "A man can have an ejaculation once every 28 days and not deplete his Ojas too severly. More than that and he is depleting his precious, irreplacable spiritual essence, and is on the path to degeneration, devolution, disease and insanity."

I said, "Jonas, reading that stuff is a formula for driving yourself nuts. We are TM teachers. Those texts aren't even in our tradition."

He said, "No, they are. This is the stuff Maharishi doesn't want regular people to read."

The other parts of these texts would discuss mantras, pranayama techniques, and advanced states of enlightenment, quoting liberally from the Vedas, so they seemed authoritative. Jonas took them to heart. But of course, being 23, he masturbated a lot and had girlfriends, he just felt exceptionaly dirty and guity over it. He was raised Catholic.

Unfortunately, he used our meditation training to amplify his Catholic guilt. Once, when he was just starting to orgasm with a girlfriend, he saw the face of the guru scowling at him, and he froze in fear, he said. The whole experience was ruined, and he felt cursed.

Just now I typed "ojas celibacy sex drains" into google. Here is a random sampling of Precious Bodily Fluids ranting:

"Once there was a gardener. He spent all his time, energy and wealth in developing a floral garden. In the garden varieties of multi-coloured flowers were grown. He gathered the flowers and extracted a wonderful perfume. And what did he do next ? He poured the perfume into a sewer. Don't you think that only the gardener is foolish? Most of us are like the stupid gardener. The semen accumulated in the body over a period of 15 to 20 years upto our early youth, plus what we go on collecting in cycles of 30 to 40 days that could have been transmuted into Ojas to give bodily strength, vigour and radiance, is dissipated for enjoying fleeting sexual gratification. Thus many of us are not less stupid than the gardener of the story. Certainly the gardener would have not repeated the mischievous action after knowing his folly through someone's instructions, but the people are repeating their folly of sex-indulgence over and over again (even after getting instructions from scriptures and saints). For a momentary pleasure a person falls a prey to the sexual act blindly driven by passion.After the heat of the passion has subsided, a person feels drained of all energies. The energy that is wasted during one sexual intercourse, tantamounts to the energy that is spent in physical labour for 10 days or the energy that is utilised in mental work for three days. Still one repeats the same folly without realising that it does not provide lasting happiness. On the contrary it results in terrible harm to health and wastes the precious vital fluid accumulated over a period of 30 to 40 days."

To tell you the truth, I have never seen much truth in these anti-sex rantings of the yogis. And the opposite seems to be true – so many of my friends who take these teachings to heart and try to be celibate seem devitalized, drained, and robotic. Without life, without zest.

Asian spirituality is thoroughly infected by neurotic "semen-conservation" fears. It's everywhere, a Kudzo of the mind. And I think there is a truth to it, but not the one the Hindu scriptures are saying. From observing many guys over the years, it seems to me that certain males, weakened by vegetarianism, unable to love, and fearful of commitment, really do feel drained by sex. They are unable to be there wholeheartedly. They are so conflicted over sex that they do not experience the divinity of it, the pure celebration.

So, I apologize to any and all Hindu gurus, self-appointed or not. But hey guys – turnaround is fair play. If you NEVER TALKED ABOUT SEX then I wouldn't talk about you and your neurosis about sex. But you do! So we "householders" have to deconstruct your pompous ideas that are cluttering up the mind-field of planet Earth and polluting everyone's spirituality.

Let's take a look at some basic monastic views
of sex:

from a Shivananda site:

"A Yoga practitioner directly perceives during his or her practice of Asana, Pranayama, abstraction, concentration and meditation, that sexual thoughts and acts quickly drain the vital energy, or Ojas. Thus Yoga practitioners who do not control the sexual instinct become hypocrites, wasting their time in the mere show of spiritual practices while the vital energy charged and stored pours out the holes in the leaking bucket of an undisciplined mind."

and also:
""This world is nothing but sex and ego. Ego is the chief thing. It is the basis. The sex is hanging on the ego. Sex and ego are the products of Avidya or ignorance. Man - master of his destiny - has lost his divine glory and has become a slave, a tool in the hands of sex and ego, on account of ignorance."
-Swami Sivananda."

Now, this is what one would expect a monk to say. And to give them points, I think they really believe it. Even when they are having sex with their disciples, even when the gurus and swamis demand that they be worshipped as incarnate gods, even when they demand they be chauferred around like stars, even when they demand that everyone grovel in the dirt before them, and abase themselves, and even when they use every bit of their willpower to make slaves out of everyone around them – they believe they are doing good, because this is traditional.

The swamis of the world seem totally unconcerned that what they claim as sacred truth is just their path – what monks are supposed to do. To preach this as universal truth is as ethical level as saying everyone should inject themselves with insulin. This is unskillful and anti-life. Although notice the wonderful hidden messages: come be my slave, serve my ego, and even, come be my sex slave.

I first became aware that there were teachings such as Sivananda's, above, in the early 1970's, when two guys from a nearby TM center were reading this kind of stuff. Jonas and his friend Steve were both living at a TM center, reading these books, and trying to be celibate, even though they were healthy, vital 23-year-old males. I don't know if it is related, but they both had some sort of mental breakdowns several years later and needed to be hospitalized.

Steve had been raised Catholic, and he approached spirituality as if it is a discipline imposed from above on an unruly animal. If he were a horse trainer, he would believe in beating the horse with whips, and if necessary, chains. I don't know if he ever experienced much of what TM is, because the whole essence of TM is to not impose anything. Over the years, he made a fortune, got married, had kids, kept driving himself crazy by inventing conflicts and oppressing himself with ideas from Hindu spirituality, and eventually really did drive himself nuts, and lost all his money, and lost his family, and requiring extended time in a mental hospital and long-term psychiatric medication.

And all of these ideas he kept reading about in Hindu spiritual books – sure the theories are fascinating: karma, reincarnation, Hindu astrology, Ayurvedic medicine, gurus, thousands of levels of heaven, hell, and purgatory – it is good as science fiction, but who is writing this stuff? Does it work? Does it apply to the here and now?

You never know why someone is writing something and you never know how they really live. When people proclaim celibacy, it only means that for some reason they want to present to the world that they are not having sex. They are creating an aura of the forbidden around sex, electrifying a taboo. And for some, this is irresistible.

Here is a rare case in which the veil of secrecy has lifted, and we get a glimpse of what actually goes on in ashrams.

From Ahmedabad Newsline:
http://cities.expressindia.com/
Tuesday , May 03, 2005

Accuses sadhus of sodomy, but he doesn’t want to leave mutt

Soumik Dey

SOKHDA (VADODARA), MAY 2: HE stood there trembling. Tears rolled down his cheeks when he pronounced his decision which left his relatives baffled and angry. Swami Harinayan, 24, who had earlier accused sadhus of the Sokhda Harinarayan Muth of sodomy, on Monday said he did not want to return home despite his allegations.

His brother and uncle, who had been camping in Vadodara for the last four days to take his custody, alleged blackmail by muth sadhus and were considering legal action against authorities.

Hari Upadhyay who became Swami Harinayan on joining the muth, had earlier told his friend that he was being tortured and sodomised. He had also alleged that the sadhus led immoral lifestyles, talked about sex and viewed pornographic CDs.
Later, in a one-and-a-half-hour call to his brother, Swami Harinayan reportedly said he was on the brink of suicide due to the sadhus’ alleged actions. He had pleaded to be rescued, said his brother Dharmesh Upadhyay.

“My brother has never talked of suicide. What kind of sadhna is this? During his years in the muth, he never established contact with us. Why is he so weak and why don’t they allow us to treat him?” he asked.

But according to the muth, everthing was okay. “This is not unusual. Swami Harinayan is simply confused looking at the obstructions which one faces in the path of sadhna. That’s why he later called up his brother to say things are alright and no one should visit him,” said Tyag Vallabh Swami who initiated Hari into the sect three years ago as a college student.
“The boy wants to attain spiritual heights and has made a tyag of his family. We did not influence his decision. In fact, his family is pressurising him,” said Tyag Vallabh.

The muth skirted Dharmesh’s allegations that he was not allowed to meet Hari when he came down on receiving the distress call.

“They had promised to hand us over his custody. But they lied to us and brainwashed Hari,” alleged Dharmesh.
Hari met his relatives on Monday, escorted by seven to eight senior sadhus.

After the meeting, Hari told Expess Newsline, “They (relatives) are pressuring me and I am baffled. They are trying to distract me from my sadhna.”

On the validity of his charges, a trembling Harinayan said, “Even Gautam Buddha faced hurdles in his path to enlightenment. I am treated alright here.” Unable to even walk a few steps, he was then driven away in a car.
Sadhus had different answers on Hari’s condition. While one said he was suffering from a “psychiatric problem” the other said, “He was just dehydrated because of the heat,” adding that Hari was being provided proper treatment by the muth’s medics.

Harinayan’s uncle Pravin Oza who came from Mumbai, said, “Our mission has failed. It is obvious that our boys is in trouble. He just refuses to talk to us.”

On the family’s decision to take legal recourse, Oza said, “We tried to resolve the matter amicably without disturbing the muth’s peace and goodwill.” Dharmesh said, “We agreed to their conditions that Hari will not give up his saffron attire. We also offered to take home two sadhus as escorts for Hari.”

Tyag Vallabh said, “Hari is now a part of our family. It’s our responsibility. Relatives can see him in a week’s time when he is better.

Check Guruphiliac for the News!

Guruphiliac.org is a great site for news about gurus. It made for great headlines on the blog:

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Swami Sodomized By Sex-Crazed Sadhus

File under: Hands Where They Don't Belong

A freshly minted swami has found ashram life a little rough, as in rough sex—the unwanted kind. 24-year-old Swami Harinayan had accused the sadhus of the Sokhda Harinarayan Muth of torture and sodomy in a call he made to family members, pleading to be rescued. But after they arrived, Harinayan decided he'd rather stick it out with the sodomizing sadhus, leaving his family perplexed and accusing the ashram of blackmail and brainwashing.

Perhaps the Swami has found his true calling as a bottom for a bunch of dirty old men fronting as celibates. We imagine that once the initial shock of being molested by the "holy" men wore off and the Stockholm syndrome set in, it wouldn't be so bad for an individual predisposed to such activities. And who knows? Perhaps he can receive the truth by way of repeated meat injection. If not, he could always fall back on a career as a rent boy in the States. We hear that tasty 24-year-old ex-swamis are hott in the Castro right now.

Guruphiliac found the story through CultNews.com, which is also a useful site to find out about what is really happening

The point is, this kind of thing is not isolated. People have sex. Even if they are not supposed to. ESPECIALLY if they are not supposed to. The only people not having sex are married people, who are supposed to have sex.

It often takes 30 years for the story to come out, that a certain priest was molesting girls and/or boys, that the town preacher has been visiting prostitutes and is also the father of half a dozen children by various women in the congregation.