The Truth behind Abstinence for Enlightenment
Neale Donald Walsch: “Why do so many teachers espouse complete abstinence from sex?”
God: “Because they do not believe that humans can achieve a balance. They believe the sexual energy—and the energies surrounding other worldly experiences—is too powerful to simply moderate; to bring into balance. They believe abstinence is the only way to spiritual evolution, rather than merely one possible result of it.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Yet isn’t it true that some beings who are highly evolved have “given up sex”?”
God: “Not in the classic sense of the words “to give up.” It is not a forced letting go of something you still want but know is “no good to have.” It’s more of a simple releasing, a movement away from—as one pushes one-self away from the second helping of dessert. Not because the dessert is no good. Not even because it’s no good for you. But simply because, wonderful as it was, you’ve had enough.
When you can drop your involvement with sex for that reason, you may want to do so. Then again, you may not. You may never decide that you’ve “had enough” and may always want this experience, in balance with the other experiences of your Beingness.
That’s okay. That’s all right. The sexually active are no less qualified for enlightenment, no less spiritually evolved, than the sexually inactive.
What enlightenment and evolution do cause you to drop is your addiction to sex, your deep need to have the experience, your compulsive behaviors.
So, too, your preoccupation with money, power, security, possessions, and other experiences of the body will vanish. Yet your genuine appreciation for them will not and should not. Appreciation for all of life is what honors the Process I have created.
Disdain for life or any of its joys—even the most basic, physical ones—is disdain for Me, the Creator.
For when you call My creation unholy, what do you call Me? Yet when you call My creation sacred, you sanctify your experience of it, and Me as well.
I tell you this: I have created nothing disdainful—and, as your Shakespeare said, nothing is “evil” lest thinking make it so.”
- Conversations with God, Book 2
“It is not a requirement of the “highly evolved” that all sexual expression be muted, and all sexual energy be elevated. If that were true, then there would be no “highly evolved” beings anywhere, because all evolution would have stopped.
And so anyone who says that the very holiest people never have sex, and that this is a sign of their holiness, does not understand how life was meant to work.
Let Me put this in very clear terms. If you want a yardstick with which to judge whether a thing is good for the human race or not, ask yourself a simple question: What would happen if everyone did it?
This is a very easy measure, and a very accurate one. If everyone did a thing, and the result was of ultimate benefit to the human race, then that is “evolved.” If everyone did it and it brought disaster to the human race, then that is not a very “elevated” thing to recommend.
No real master will ever say that sexual celibacy is the path to mastery. Yet it is this idea that sexual abstinence is somehow the “higher way,” and that sexual expression is a “lower desire,” that has shamed the sexual experience, and caused all manner of guilt and dysfunction to develop around it.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“One does not engage in sex because one realizes one’s responsibility to the human race to procreate. One engages in sex because it is the natural thing to do. It is built into the genes. You obey a biological imperative.
The biological imperative is not to guarantee the survival of the species, but to experience the Oneness which is the true nature of your being. Creating new life is what happens when Oneness is achieved, but it is not the reason Oneness is sought.
If procreation were the only reason for sexual expression—if it were nothing more than a “delivery system”—you would no longer need to engage in it with one another. You can unite the chemical elements of life in a petri dish. Yet this would not satisfy the most basic urges of the soul, which it turns out, are much larger than mere procreation, but have to do with re-creation of Who and What You Really Are.
The biological imperative is not to create more life, but to experience more life—and to experience that life as it really is: a manifestation of Oneness.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“There is nothing ignoble, or unholy, about having sex. You have got to get that idea out of your mind, and out of your culture. There is nothing base, or gross, or “less than dignified” (much less sanctified), about a passionate, desire- filled sexual experience. Physical urges are not manifestations of “animalistic behavior.” Those physical urges were built into the system—by Me. Who do you suppose created it that way?
Yet physical urges are but one ingredient in a complex mixture of responses that you all have to each other. Remember, you are a three-part being, with seven chakra centers. When you respond to one another from all three parts, and all seven centers, at the same time, then you have the peak experience you are looking for— that you have been created for!
And there is nothing unholy about any of these energies—yet if you choose just one of them, that is “un-whole-y.” It is not being whole! When you are not being whole, you are being less than yourself. That is what is meant by “unholy.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“The admonition against sex for those who choose to be “elevated” was never an admonition from Me. It was an invitation. An invitation is not an admonition, yet you have made it so. And the invitation was not to stop having sex, but to stop being un-whole.
Whatever you are doing—having sex or having breakfast, going to work or walking the beach, jumping rope or reading a good book—whatever you are doing, do it as a whole being; as the whole being you are.
If you are having sex from only your lower chakra center, you are operating from the root chakra alone, and missing by far the most glorious part of the experience. Yet if you are being loving with another person and coming from all seven energy centers while you are being that, now you are having a peak experience. How can this not be holy?”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“The invitation to raise the life energy through your physical being to the top chakra was never meant to be a suggestion or a demand that you disconnect from the bottom.
If you have raised the energy to your heart chakra, or even to your crown chakra, that doesn’t mean it cannot be in your root chakra as well. Indeed, if it is not, you are disconnected.
When you have raised the life energy to your higher centers, you may or may not choose to have what you would call a sexual experience with another. But if you do not, it will not be because to do so would be to violate some cosmic law on holiness. Nor will it make you somehow more “elevated.” And if you do choose to be sexual with another, it will not “lower” you to a root-chakra-only level—unless you do the opposite of disconnecting at the bottom, and disconnect from the top.
So here is the invitation—not an admonition, but an invitation: Raise your energy, your life force, to the highest level possible in every moment, and you will be elevated. This has nothing to do with having sex or not having sex. It has to do with raising your consciousness no matter what you are doing.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
