God Bless All Monks and Nuns

There is a certain percentage of people in any given population who don't like sex, or are totally disgusted by their sexual impulses. They don't want to have a sex life. Some of these people just don't have sex and they don't make a big deal about it either. They just do their thing and we only know about them because social scientists do surveys and they anonymously admit to not liking sex.

Then there is this other group, who do make a big deal about not wanting to have sex, ever. They even take a vow to be celibate, and put on special clothes – robes – indicating their status, and go around implying or stating outright that everyone else is degraded because they have sex. They can't stop talking about how they aren't having sex, and you shoudn't either.

We call these people monks or nuns, and consider them spiritual. What defines a monk or nun, swami or whatever, is often that they have taken a vow of celibacy, along with other vows and rules they observe. And they probably meant it when they made the vow. The celibate mood may last a few years or a lifetime. If it lasts long enough for them to join a religious order, they become a nun, monk, yogi, swami, lama, or some other robe-beclad entitiy.

Why Do We Care? If we are interested in meditation at all, we have to deal with the way monks think and feel about things because, for the last 2500 years at least, celibate males in religious orders in Asia have been the custodians of the knowledge of meditation. All the energy they did not put into working a regular job, making babies and raising children, they put into preserving the texts and records of experiences of people exploring states of consciousness with meditation.

Whenever we think about meditation or study meditation techniques, we come into the magnetic field created by monks. Why? Read any book on meditation – the author was most likely trained by monks, or his teacher was trained by monks, or his sources are monks. Many of my most important meditation teachers were monks. Over the past 2500 years, 99% or more of all meditation teachers have been celibate males in Hindu or Buddhist religious orders. So it's a boy's club, and it is primarily made up of men who do not like women.

It is only in the last 30 or 40 years that we in the modern West have been developing our own, non-monastic meditations. So you can be a Christian woman businessperson living in Colorado or Idaho, and want to learn to meditate for your health, happiness and clarity of mind. When you start reading, or go to a class, you will encounter monastic thinking along with the practical techniques. You could be an athiest or agnostic athlete who wants to meditate to improve his baseball, and you find Buddhist religious ideas scattered lightly through the material. Even basic introductory books on how to meditate, published in English, suggest that it is better to be celibate and should act devotional toward Buddhist or Hindu saints. Detachment is advocated as a way to go through life, even though it has nothing to do with meditation – detachment is an attitude that monastics cultivate as part of their vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience.

Meditation is a technology that monks have long worked with and made their own. They bring a great gift to us, in making available the meditation teachings that have been generated by all the various traditions over the past many centuries.

But you have your work cut out for you in unwrapping this gift. You will have to learn to filter out what is not appropriate for you.



Lakulisha, a prominent guru c. 200 B.C