If you want to succeed in life, you'll need to make some sacrifices. It's as simple as that. Whatever your field - be it academics, sport, money, wellbeing or any other, sacrifice is needed.
So when the guidance from the coach on consciousness says make some sacrifices to bring out your best, then there's nothing unusual about that. The only thing that may be difficult to grasp is the kind of sacrifice required.
If you're keen to succeed in sport, for example, then you are required to sacrifice certain foodstuffs. You're recommended to work your muscles really hard, thus sacrificing rest and relaxation.
If you're trying to succeed at making money, then you'll need to spend 10000 hours studying technical analysis, finance, macroeconomics and more. You may have to sacrifice sleep as you study and spend time in the markets observing charts and looking for trade setups.
If it comes naturally because you love doing in by nature, then it's easy to do the needful and the sacrifices seem trivial or minor compared to the joy or future joy you are investing in. Often almost immediate benefits begin to accrue as you make progress in your field.
If it's not physical reward that trickles in early, then it's experiential reward that you gain, which adds to your knowledge and perhaps your character. And with patience and determination, along with more sacrifice, gradually you see the rewards of your efforts.
The same principle applies to those who pursue enlightenment, self-realization or consciousness awakening. You'll need to make some sacrifices to set the scene. One of those sacrifices is sex. This may sound old-fashioned because it is. It's ancient Wisdom from yoga masters of old.
Even a top athlete, like a boxer, will tell you that you should avoid sex for some days or weeks before a fight. This will sharpen your edge, preserve your energy and give you a physical advantage over someone who has lots of sex and loses their semen.
Semen retention (and breath control) is the oldest secret in the yoga tradition known to man. Which means you need to give up unregulated sex if you truly desire awakening of consciousness. Notice I don't say give up sex altogether, although there are yogis who do just that and live a life of celibacy in order to harness the libido and life energy for their yoga practice instead of wasting it on short term frivolous pursuit of pleasure.
Regulated sex means it's inside the commitment of marriage, and specifically for the procreation of children. That's the highest standard. Anything other than that shows that you're less aware of the science than you think, and that your sex desire has controlled your intelligence.
Today that high standard sounds overly difficult and that shows you just how far our civilization has fallen with time. Today hardly anyone can imagine the concept of practicing celibacy because modern society pushes us in the totally opposite direction.
However, in previous generations yoga schools trained kids from before puberty to maintain celibacy, at least for their youth, for a few years while studying. This helped the student focus on the lessons, and it prepared the future adult with the skill of self- discipline and impulse control - the symptoms of a mature adult.
Once the student years were competed, the young adult could them marry and have sex in order to have children in a healthy family unit, something crucial for proper childhood development. Now these concepts are lost upon us because of a gradual degradation of culture with time.
Then, after a life as a business person and parent raising a family, one could retire from married life, from parenting and from running a business, and return to a life focused on the real goal, namely liberation and Transcendence.
Because of the initial training in youth, which included self-discipline and the philosophy of why to be disciplined, the retiring adult then finds it easier to sacrifice the pleasures of married life and resume the path of yoga or liberation.
Without this systematic social order and training, grounded in wisdom and consciousness, the youth of today are unaware of the techniques of yoga, self-realization or liberation. They have no idea what sex is about, how celibacy is a power strategy for developing your best self.
This is because modern business does not want you to know that you're not this body, that you're consciousness independent on this body. If you focus on that, then you won't buy their products and will be a bad consumer. And because capitalism has taken over as the dominant philosophy of our era, with profit as king, then all else is pushed aside.
So they use advertising to appeal to our physical desires, like sex and all it's subtle secondary expressions like ego, and thus groom is to stay obsessed with the physical body and is desires. They keep us in illusion so that we'll remain consumers of their products.
Your well-being and state of consciousness is of less importance to the elite than their profit margin. You're the exit liquidity for their trade.
As a result humanity is kept in the dark, their bad habits are encouraged and they live a life little better than a polished animal. Only a rare few are self-reflective and inquire into consciousness and how to understand their true identity or how to best utilize this body to attain liberation.
And that is the tragedy of modern civilization. We are being fed better ways to make a fire, yet we are robbed of the knowledge of our own internal fire.
By all means, chase your sex desires, if that's all you know, but realize that the pursuit of short term gratification is depleting you of your very life force that can empower you like a champion fighter or yoga master.
If you can't make the sacrifice, then you'll be the sacrifice on the altar of profit for the big corporations who make money off you and your lust for whatever takes your fancy.
If you can't practice celibacy, then get married to a partner. This is the way of all time. Humans mate for life, like eagles. It takes 18 years to raise a child to maturity. That requires a long term commitment- if you care at all about your child. It requires sacrifice too. So one way or another sacrifice is required.
Whether it's marriage or celibacy, you succeed in the goal of life by choosing one or the other of those two paths of sacrifice. If it's done with proper knowledge and with the higher goal in mind, then it will have meaning and show results in your quality of life and quality of consciousness, as well as the mental health of you and your children.
Anything other than those two options will result in damage or loss, to you and all concerned, either in health or in consciousness. So harness your chi if you really want to be free.
Bhagavad Gita ch4:26
śrotrādīnīndriyāṇy anye
saṁyamāgniṣu juhvati
śabdādīn viṣayān anya
indriyāgniṣu juhvati
SYNONYMS
śrotra ādīni—hearing process; indriyāṇi—senses; anye—others; saṁyama—of restraint; agniṣu—in the fire; juhvati—offers; śabda-ādīn—sound vibration, etc.; viṣayān—objects of sense gratification; anye—others: indriya—of sense organs; agniṣu—in the fire; juhvati—sacrifice
TRANSLATION
Some of them sacrifice the hearing process and the senses in the fire of the controlled mind, and others sacrifice the objects of the senses, such as sound, in the fire of sacrifice.
PURPORT
The four divisions of human life, namely the brahmacārī, the gṛhastha, the vānaprastha, and the sannyāsī, are all meant to help men become perfect yogīs or transcendentalists. Since human life is not meant for our enjoying sense gratification like the animals, the four orders of human life are so arranged that one may become perfect in spiritual life. The brahmacārīs, or students under the care of a bona fide spiritual master, control the mind by abstaining from sense gratification. They are referred to in this verse as sacrificing the hearing process and the senses in the fire of the controlled mind. A brahmacārī hears only words concerning Kṛṣṇa consciousness; hearing is the basic principle for understanding, and therefore the pure brahmacārī engages fully in harer nāmānukīrtanam—chanting and hearing the glories of the Lord. He restrains himself from the vibrations of material sounds, and his hearing is engaged in the transcendental sound vibration of Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa. Similarly, the householders, who have some license for sense gratification, perform such acts with great restraint. Sex life, intoxication and meat eating are general tendencies of human society, but a regulated householder does not indulge in unrestricted sex life and other sense gratifications. Marriage on principles of religious life is therefore current in all civilized human society because that is the way for restricted sex life. This restricted, unattached sex life is also a kind of yajña because the restricted householder sacrifices his general tendency toward sense gratification for higher transcendental life.
Reference: Bhagavad Gita As It Is, translation and commentary by Swami A C Bhaktivedanta, original MacMillan 1972 edition, freely available at prabhupadabooks.com.
Edited and published from my mobile device onto the Hive blockchain for those who aspire for true mastery.Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/silhouette-of-man-standing-on-top-of-mountain-during-sunset-Z1A2U0vo8uY
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