WIE: I'm curious to know what you think about the practice of celibacy—especially given that many of the greatest spiritual masters throughout history have been celibates or have advocated celibacy.

MA: On the tantric path, you discover the sacred marriage between your inner man and your inner woman. Then you don't need to have sex with another human being because it's happening within yourself. When this happened to me, I was perfectly satisfied, and I became abstinent. But the problem was, there was always a man who seduced me out of my abstinence, so I basically ended up succumbing to the temptation. But I did experience what it could be. It was to dwell in a space where there is no more desire, where there is no more "I have to have this" or "I have to have that." It was very special, I would say.

Celibacy, well . . . I think that it should not be something that is forced. I think the attitude of the Church about celibacy is a big mistake, as are teachings that say you have to be celibate if you want to go on a spiritual path. I think if it happens as the outcome of the fruit being ripe and falling off the tree, then it's the right way because the person has left behind them a full life of having really understood this, and therefore can help other people. But the people who repress sexuality because they are on the spiritual path—that's very dangerous. Osho often mentioned the example of Gandhi who, until the end of his life, was obsessed with sexual thoughts and dreams. He finally tried to sleep between two virgins because he thought that, with their presence behind and in front of him, maybe it would somehow remove the obsession. If sexuality just falls away from you in total contentment and in a total "Yes" from your deepest inner being that this is the right thing for you to do, then abstinence or celibacy is okay. But if not, if it's a forced thing because some outer authority or religious teaching told you that this is the way to go, forget it. You're never going to get rid of sexuality. It's always going to be somehow or other knocking at your door.

But also I do see that there is a great advantage to celibacy because you can remove yourself from the preoccupation with all the mundane things that have to do with sex and that tend to keep you attached, needy, jealous and so on. If you, once and for all, don't bother with it and remove yourself from it, you probably have a much better chance to focus your energies on spiritual matters. So I see that as a great possibility, but as I said, it has to happen at the right time, with maturity.

WIE: Osho taught that the moment of sexual orgasm is an "energy event" that can be equated with mystical experience. And a number of traditions equate or relate sexual ecstasy with spiritual bliss. But another way of looking at it is that this is a false parallel, and that equating these two conditions is, on the one hand, a sanctification of something that is actually a physical, biochemical experience, and on the other, a materialization and reduction of something that really is ineffable. From this point of view, there may be a danger, on both counts, of not seeing these experiences clearly for what they are. When you try to bring them together and say they're the same thing—

MA: I agree . . . well, I would say it's a matter of degree. The level of sexual enlightenment that a person is going to experience is no different from the level of their personal evolution, their spiritual evolution, you know. It's always all linked. Nothing is separate. For instance, if a person is a first chakra person, they're concerned with survival, with how much money they're going to earn and all that kind of stuff, and they're going to have a kind of sexuality that is going to reflect that. They're going to have a sexuality where they're just going to take and not give. There are as many orgasms as there are stars in the sky!

The keys are, one, clear the wounds and the shame and the difficulties around sexuality. Two, learn the skills of blissful loving, which I explain in depth, and learn how to communicate about your sensations clearly and objectively without shame or guilt. This in itself is a tremendous learning in intimate sharing. So I can have my legs spread open and my partner looking at me and learning how to touch exactly the right part of my clitoris under my own loving guidance until he does it as well to me as I do it to myself. So I can have complete trust and let myself go in his hands for an hour or two hours; it becomes a total meditation and I'm completely relaxed and yet I'm completely aroused at the same time. This is just such a wonderful way of sharing love. What better can we give each other?

So this is already a skill in itself, but we're not yet at the spiritual level. We're approaching. We've learned how to clear the wounds. We've learned the skills of love. In the process we've learned how to become deeply intimate, more deeply loving with each other. We've learned how to prolong orgasms. The next step would be to begin the lovemaking process as a ritual, as a prayer in which you meditate and honor the Divine in your partner. You project the divinity in your partner and you dedicate your moment of bliss together to the divinity in whatever form, whatever shape—to the healing of the planet, for instance. In sexual tantric practice, as I said earlier, you can dedicate your orgasm to the enlightenment of all beings or to the healing of a person who is sick. It's your contribution to the transformation of the planet because we're all interlinked. And as more people have orgasms and are cleared sexually, we will reach at some point a critical mass where more and more people are doing it. And every time one person is doing it, they heal themselves, and they contribute to the healing of the whole planet.

So in a sense, when lovers are doing the higher sexual practices and joining the physical with the spiritual, they eventually end up in shunyata, which is where emptiness and form are merged into each other. To achieve that experience with your beloved, when you join in the physical sense and circulate the orgasmic pleasure up the spine, you transcend ego, you transcend personality, you transcend male/female, you transcend everything. You're exactly in the same place together as you would be when you are in the deepest meditation on your own. So that's it.

WIE: I've been thinking about the common idea in tantra that sexual longing and sexual ecstasy are fundamentally the same as spiritual longing and spiritual ecstasy. My colleagues and I began to question whether these two experiences are really the same thing. What is it that happens in the moment of sexual release that could lead one to the conclusion that it is identical to a spiritual experience? There's bliss, peace, release; there is a quieting of the nagging mind. Then we realized that these experiences occur in both cases—but for completely different reasons. In spiritual experience, the ego is in abeyance; it is silent because it is in submission. But in sexual experience, the ego is temporarily satisfied; the force of "I want" that is the ego temporarily ceases because it has been satiated. Is it possible that these two experiences have been confused—that superficially they may seem similar, but that in fact they are not at all the same?

MA: Well, there's a misunderstanding in the question, and I'd like to talk about it. You see, they're not different, and I would like to say why. Because you can have a sexual experience that is exactly this—just the satiation of your ego. However, if it lasts long enough, you will go beyond that. In other words, you're not going to be in the same state in your connection to God when you've had a fulfilling lovemaking session that lasted five hours in which you've had nine orgasms as you would be if someone ejaculated in you after ten minutes. I mean, let's face it. There are many, many different levels. Just like there are many levels of realization in someone's spiritual practice. They can be blabbering a mantra all their lives, and you could say they're just using a crutch to stay asleep. This is not waking up.

So it's the same thing with sex. It can be used as a crutch, or it can be used as an awakening. The misunderstanding is in the level at which you place the sexual experience. For me, ultimately, if the sexual experience is allowed to move away from the sex, if the energy is allowed to travel through the fluidity of the movement of the bodies, through the empowerment of the sun energy radiating through both beings, through the deep merging, letting go and compassionate melting of two beings who fully see and understand each other at the moment of this orgasmic circulation—and beyond that moment, to the expression of their own truth, to the sound and music of that truth, to seeing their energy as colors and in visions and patterns that actually enlighten their brains, and then through releasing the whole thing to the Divine and receiving the blessings of the Divine in that moment of the tantric practice—then, even though they might be joined sexually, it becomes something else. They have moved beyond sex, in a sense. The genitals themselves are just tools that open the door to other dimensions—just as any other practice or recitation of a mantra or hatha yoga is a tool to open the door to other dimensions. It's just that at that level, it's a very skillful tool that requires the partners to have already mastered hatha yoga, to have already mastered in fact my entire book before they can get there. So it's not a simple tool. Lovemaking can indeed remain something that is just a fulfillment of the egoic personality, but it can be something else.

WIE: You're saying that it can be, but that it isn't necessarily.

MA: It can be if the people have reached the necessary level of understanding, of work, of dedication, of practice. They have to be already in harmony at all these levels so that they can allow the energy to flow through without its being blocked by certain knots that have to be undone first, so that they don't freak out or all of a sudden have a quarrel. I mean, there are zillions of things you have to go through before you can achieve the state of the perfect dimension, the form and the formless merging with each other. I mean, this is like a high practice!

WIE: The way you're speaking about it now, it certainly sounds like a very serious practice.

MA: It is, but I'll tell you sincerely that I don't find the possibility of doing that so often myself. And of the many partners I've had, there have only been certain times, in certain moments, with most of them where we have reached that level. I would say that being able to reach that on a constant basis, in the kali yuga [dark age] that we're going through, is almost impossible. Because it would require two partners who are in a commitment to each other that this is a spiritual path that they walk together, who believe they're doing God's will, and who can integrate their tantric practice and not be very bothered by the demands of the Western world today. I find the idea that you could possibly be so involved in the world of work and run a business and be an active teacher extremely difficult. To be able to fulfill all these multidimensional areas is a tremendous challenge nowadays. It's very difficult to create continuity in the tantric practice at the level that I'm talking about—very difficult. Look around; you won't see many so-called tantric teachers who are able to actually maintain it to a level where they're able to create a kind of stable, rounded, ongoing harmony in the couple life. The harmonization of the tantric practice at the depth of which I speak, with involvement in the world of everyday life is, in this day and age, not supported at all. You would practically have to retire to a monastery to be able to do that. Which is what I do periodically when I'm practicing tantra in my apartment.

WIE: It's interesting to explore this. We're talking about crossing the line between a therapeutic approach and a serious spiritual practice.

MA: The therapy itself works on the level of the ego, on the wounds and the suffering and the difficulties, until you can create a certain level of insertion of the person into normal life. That's how psychology and therapy are understood today. When you get to that place, that's when the spirituality begins.

WIE: Or it can.

MA: It can.

WIE: But the goal of spiritual practice really means something. It means—

MA: It means a lot of letting go, a lot of giving things up. For a person who is dedicated to the high tantric practice at the level I'm talking about, they would have to give up, for instance, concern with money, concern with success, concern with having a lot of possessions, concern with spending their entire time in survival.

WIE: The way you're speaking now makes tantra sound like a renunciate path.

MA: Yeah. I mean, in a way, it is.

WIE: You've been a therapist for many years, and now you also have a role as a spiritual teacher. Do you see a distinction between these two roles?

MA: Well, you see, I've never been a person who likes to repeat herself. I've been a very creative person who always moves into new areas, new cultures, new domains and new explorations. And what the public, the industry, the establishment tends to want is that once you've been successful in one area, you're labeled and people always want you to deliver the same thing. But what I'm trying to do is to move ahead in my own personal evolution. I had a very deep experience last January where everything turned around 180 degrees, and what seemed to be so important to me before all of a sudden took on much lesser importance.

WIE: Can you say more about that?

MA: I can't really, because I'm in the process and it's going to take a little while longer. But I'm moving toward a mystical dimension right now, which is a mystery to me. I have these cycles periodically where something new is born. But I'm not there yet—it's just percolating. There is still a great desire for me to transmit what I've created so far to other people and for other people to teach my work, but I am not considering this work to be the basis of my livelihood from now until the day I die. In my organization now, I'm teaching people to function without me. I'm just a consultant, and I go teach once in a while. I'm the spiritual mother. I'm not attached to all this. I want this work to happen more and more through other people and less and less through me, so that I can be occupied with other levels that have more to do with ecstatic states of consciousness, enlightenment, mysticism. I'm kind of moving with the times. There's a lot of that happening actually.

But that's not to say that I don't have anything to do with sexuality. It's not true. I just spent four months with my boyfriend in the most insane sexual practices that lasted up to five hours every other day if not the whole night. We definitely were totally with God and in God and with the Goddess, and it was the most delightful thing. It was totally empowering. But now, there's peace and quiet. He's gone to Nepal, and I'm happy to be on my own! It's like there is a certain detachment, so if that happens, great. If that doesn't happen, great. I'm not depending on it. I am very, very attracted by the mystical dimension right now.

WIE: There are a lot of therapeutic tools in your books that are very healing and empowering for the individual. And there is also an emphasis, particularly in The Art of Sexual Magic, on the idea that it is our birthright to feel ecstatic and to have everything we want—the house, the car, the boat—we deserve it. Yet I can't help feeling that this is basically a materialistic and narcissistic approach that many people are embracing now and calling a spiritual path. My question is: Isn't there a distinction between this kind of popular-spiritual-therapeutic approach and authentic spiritual practice—in which one is sincerely interested in surrendering to God, in which one seeks to come to the point where one can genuinely say, "Thy will be done"? Where it's not about me and what I want and how I'm going to get what I want?

MA: I agree, I agree. It's a very good point. These books have been a mirror of my own personal evolution. The first one was the fruit of many, many years of research around the world, teaching in India and building this organization. In the second one I came to the realization that when you are in an ecstatic space, you're in the perfect space into which you can plant the seed of a new manifestation or new vision. Deepak Chopra talks about this too. He says you just have to plant a seed when you're in the "gap." At that moment the seed is planted, and then the universe will take care of the details. And the fact is, you attract certain energies to yourself then. But the question is: Is this spiritual?

WIE: Exactly. We all do this in one way or another in our ordinary lives—but is that spiritual?

MA: Yeah, I agree . . . well, it's a very delicate matter. I would say that "Thy will be done" is definitely the next level after that. I say that it all has to do with your degree of personal and spiritual evolution at any given moment. Everything that you were interested in before is going to be in your picture—it's just that you're going to choose and discriminate differently. You're going to be more attracted to "Thy will be done" than to "Won't you send me a Cadillac?" or "I'll have a big orgasm so I can get more money." It's just like all of a sudden your values shift and things that have been important before are not so important anymore; your focus and your attention are on the deeper mysteries, which are what I'm finding myself into right now.

WIE: Profound spiritual experiences are supposed to diminish, or burn, the ego. The significance of a spiritual experience would be determined after the experience subsides and you see what has happened to your pride, your aggression, your selfishness. That's the point. So my question is, Do you believe that the experience of sexual ecstasy produces the same effects? Do experiences of sexual bliss really serve the same function?

MA: Yes and no, yes and no. You can't just say that through sexual ecstasy you're going to reach all these levels. But if you do sexual tantric practice in the context of other spiritual practice—for instance, if you do it in a way that includes the body but also includes the heart, the understanding, the spirit—then you make it complete, you integrate it into a complete practice, and then I would say yes. Because it quickens the whole thing, you know.

WIE: So you're saying that other spiritual practice has to be included, and then it can work. But if it doesn't—

MA: Yes. Yes, if it doesn't, you just get addicted to having great orgasms and you probably become a very radiant and happy person, but it doesn't necessarily take you further.

WIE: This is an emphasis that isn't very clear in your books.

MA: It becomes clear in the practice. I had to find a way of translating what I brought back from India, which was something that was way beyond the understanding that anybody had. When I arrived here from my mountaintop, if it hadn't been for Jeremy Tarcher, who became a kind of publisher-cum-mentor and helped me to translate all that in ways that could reach the American public, I probably would have given up or not found a way to make it accessible for the public, which is, of course, what every publisher wants you to do. And at the same time, to stay clear with it all.

WIE: So you've said that if one is going to take tantra seriously as a spiritual path, and not just as a form of therapy or a kind of recreation, then it is a very serious matter. My feeling is that there's nothing wrong with presenting modern tantra or sexual magic as a kind of therapy. But when you present it as a spiritual path, that is something else. That requires enormous dedication, commitment and sincerity. But the fact is, not very many people are interested in that. So I keep wanting to clarify what we're really talking about here.

MA: Well, wait. I want to stop you. Because this is one thing that you bring forth a lot, and I would say no. There are moments in your life when you have to go through that—sacrifice, celibacy, etcetera. And there are moments when you have to go through the opposite, and one is not better than the other. That's so important to recognize. If you're pursuing your own enlightenment, your own spiritual growth, then you have to go in all the areas. You have to go into the hell of darkness. You have to f__ your brains out. You have to play the dandy. You have to get clothes from Christian Dior. You have to taste the best foods. You have to go into the cave and meditate. You have to do it all. If you do it to wake up, all of it is good. . . . It is possible to be a mystic in celebrative garb. And it's possible to be a fool who seems to be jumping around and doing silly things and yet be a profound spiritual teacher.